“Brecks is the one I really like,” she says of companies that sell flowers.

Belzer carefully maps out a diagram of where she has planted what. If something doesn’t come up the following year, she can contact the company and ask for replacements.

“If I see one of them isn’t coming up, I contact the company and they send me a new plant,” she says. “Once I called and told them one hadn’t come up and they sent me two new plants.”

She recently told the Courier, “I’m anxious to get started gardening this year, but it is still too wet.”

Belzer will start by cleaning up the flower beds, which are still filled with lots of little twigs from this winter’s ice storms. She prefers to clean up the flower beds in the spring. That way little birds can feed on the seeds from last year’s garden throughout the winter.

She has a plan to add to her many flower beds this year. She has laid full bags of mulch on top of the ground to kill the grass to prepare an area to receive new plants. She hopes to connect a smaller bed to the largest one with a little stream of flowers.

Belzer doesn’t just grow flowers. She also puts in vegetables. The challenge to a vegetable garden, she says, “is finding enough people to share all the produce with.

“One thing I can tell you, I won’t have my potatoes in by Good Friday this year. You are supposed to plant them by then, but Easter is too early this year and it just won’t be dry enough yet.

“It seems like every year my flower beds get bigger and my vegetable garden gets smaller,” Belzer says.