Garden Plotting

Is it too early to be planning my garden? I hope not.
After a slightly disappointing day which involved Gabe being more clingy than usual I found running out of ideas of things to do. I remembered a seed catalogue I had upstairs and decided to flip through it finally. Last year Matt expressed a desire to get a rose bush (he has occassional domestic things that he shows interest in - vines, rose bushes, drapes and paint swatches are the most common) I'm very particular about what kinds of roses I like and typically always look for flowers that are good for cutting. So, when this catalogue had a shortage of pictures I went to the website for a local nursery and saw that they had pictures of every variety of rose they carry. Well, I picked out a dozen varieties that I thought I'd be happy with, mostly double-flowering. I'm quite excited to go in and see some of them in person, particularly the "Salmon Impressionist", "Modern Sunrise" and "J.P. Connell" varieties. I really want a nice double-flowering, white bloomed and deep green foliage variety but I didn't come across one of those. After going over the roses I moved on to the pictures of their vines. I've always wanted a clematis but wanted something unusual - like the "Duchess of Edinburgh" variety. I didn't even go through all the varieties but I looked at that one because of the name and I've never seen anyone like it. It's a white, double-flowering (notice a trend in my tastes?) and so, so pretty! I also noticed that the nursery carries a hardy kiwi variety that's edible and self pollinating and some hardy grape varieties that were good for not only jellies but for eating even. My second favorite type of jelly is grape (next to crabapple) so I'd love to try and make some. We may or may not get my vegetable garden in this year, but with the strawberry plants I put in last year and the off chance that I could get my grapes and kiwis to produce this year I think I would be reasonably entertaining with just my fruit plants. Oh, and I've been meaning to put in some raspberry bushes for a few years but because of Cash I never thought I'd get away with it. This year I hope I can trust him to not dig up my plants (or I'll just break out the chicken wire). I put about 100 tulip bulbs in my front flower bed last fall with staggered blooming times so while I'll still get some bedding plants, I won't need many.
One thing I'm doing for sure this year is putting in a compost in our yard. We'd use it, we always have tonnes of leaves and grass and such and we have lots of spots in our yard that need plumping up. Even if we don't get our garden going this year we're at least going to build it (it'll be a raised garden) and we can dump our excess compost in there.
With the new baby coming I'm planning on spending a lot of time outside but since he is coming I'm going to need my garden more or less completely ready before he comes - or I can't bend over, whichever happens first.

Mrs. Vander Leek ;)