Plants!

So, my birthday present from my husband was as many plants as I wanted to buy, primarily to fill my front garden beds. So, I put in orders to EdibleLandscaping.com, Richters Herbs, and Indiana Berry last week. Some of them are not ready to ship yet, but most of the plants will be here soon. Here is what I have ordered (or already had, from a seed purchase last fall):

Plants:

• 50 Strawberry Plants (25 Quinault- Everbearing, 25 Sparkle- Junebearing)
• 1 Thornless Blackberry Plant (Apache)
• 5 Rosemary Plants (Arp)
• 2 Tea Camellia Plants
• 2 Rhubarb Plants (Victoria)
• 1 Basil Plant (Pesto Perpetuo)
• 2 Bay Laurel Plants
• 1 Lavender Plant (Provence)
• 1 French Tarragon Plant
• 1 Oregano Plant (Hopley's Purple)
• 1 Gardenia

Seeds:

• Basil ("Sweet", "Large-Leafed Italian", Dark Opal, Siam Queen Thai, Aristotle)
• Catnip
• Chives
• Marigold (Red Gem, "Durango Mix")
• Nasturtium (Dwarf)
• Alpine Strawberry
• Cilantro
• Spinach (Hybrid Tyee, Bloomsdale Long Standing)
• Peas (Sugar Ann, Lincoln)
• Lettuce (Grand Rapids, Royal Oakleaf, Buttercrunch, "Blend")
• Tomato (Beefsteak, Abraham Lincoln, Brandywine)
• Butternut Squash (Waltham)
• Watermelon (Sugar Baby)
• Pole Bean (Blue Lake)
• Cucumber (Straight Eight)
• Oregano
• Carrot ("Rainbow Blend")
• Corn ("Hybrid Northern Xtra-Sweet Bicolor")
• Johnny Jump-Ups

When the weather is consistently warm, I will order some tomato plants or buy them from a local nursery. I have never had much luck with tomatoes from seed. I wanted to try some this year, but I'll also grow some hybrids that I love from plants to make sure we have an excellent tomato harvest. Home grown tomatoes are the produce from gardening that I have missed most.

Goodbye Lawn

When we started digging up the lawn in November, I knew it was going to be a big task. It was a longer-running task for a couple reasons: the weather got cold, I was busy, and there were roots. Or maybe I should say ROOTS, because these were no ordinary roots. These roots were impressive, thick and long and running all over under the lawn. They were like a sea serpent, lurking under what looked like smooth, unaggressive ground. A multiheaded sea serpent, in fact. Every time I dealt with one monstrous root, my shovel would bump against a new one and the fight would begin again. The monster metaphor seemed especially apt when I started hacking away at a particularly large root with an axe.

Some pictures are in order:

 A long root from under the grass

Monster unearthed

Monster defeated

Despite it being a lot of work, I am very glad I dug out the bed by hand. I had considered the popular method of lasagna gardening, where you just cover a bed with cardboard and organic material and hope that the bed will be useable once everything decomposes. I decided against it because I had bermuda grass that I feared could outlive the lasagna gardening method. I don't know if it would have, but those roots would have given me grief for years if I hadn't gotten them out. I also considered renting a rototiller. That would have been a waste of money. I would have had to return it in defeat after hitting root after root that it couldn't get through.

In addition to the grass, I transplanted the small shrubs in the front bed and dug up that bed. In addition to more gigantic roots, I found other surprises hiding in the front bed. These included 6 lengths of old, rusty rebar, 5 stumps, and some bricks and bits of concrete. The stumps, I believe, were from some long-gone bushes that were chopped to the ground then buried by dirt and/or mulch. I found this picture of our house from 2004 that shows big hedges in the front yard. Those didn't exist when we moved in. I believe those are the origin of the stumps I found.

Now a before/after:

Okay, hard to tell the difference. But now I have a nice little garden bed. Hooray. It's not very pretty now, but I've ordered a bunch of plants and we're going to put some nice little paths through it and it is going to be lovely. I'm very excited. After 8 years of living in apartments/dorms/other rentals I finally get a garden again. 

It's Springtime!

It's Springtime, as my toddler happily announced (repeatedly) as we came home from the playground on Saturday. In addition to more playground time, springtime seems to mean her mommy and daddy exhaust themselves working in the yard. Some of the things we worked on this weekend:

• I trimmed the ivy along the driveway

Before/During                                   After    

• Chipped all the clippings from the rosebush I trimmed a week or two ago (pictures of rosebush, not chipped bits, which are less interesting) 

                     Before                                                              After 

   

• And mostly finished digging up the front yard (the subject of my next post).

My husband built his cement mixer and with its hindrance made a nice little cement patio in front of his wood-fired oven:

In the meantime, we had some guys come in and put up a skim coat of drywall mud on our guest bedroom. Now it's all ready to sand and paint. It's going to look very nice. They did a great job with the drywall. Our regular handyman, Fat Guy With A Hammer, brought them in when he decided the job was too big for him.