Catching Up with Photos

So, I took some photos before the freeze to catch up on what the yard has been doing all summer. Here's the stepping stones down the center of my vegetable garden.

Next we have a video of popping balsam seed pods (yes, the plants have nice flowers, but the fall-popping of seeds is the real reason we keep growing them)

We added bricks to our side path this summer. People were avoiding walking on it, I guess thinking it was a flower bed before. Now it looks official, and the purplish/gray bricks have determined a color scheme, with red shiso and purple alyssum. The bricks were a gift from my husband while I was gone visiting my folks down south. My husband knows the way to my heart is through my garden!

I also grew goya/nigaauori/bitter cucumber this year from the seeds an Okinawan neighbor/friend gave me. We didn't eat it, I just grew it for the novelty. It didn't really get big enough to eat. Okay, I feel guilty, next year I'll eat one (it's the kind of food that you eat because you know it's good for you, not because you crave it).

That's all for the moment! Be back later...

Tiller or Pitchfork?

I love my pitchfork.

Seriously, I can loosen up dirt around plants and pull out just the weeds, instead of shoveling out the good stuff as well. I can double spade a garden. I could aerate too, I suppose, if I had a whole lot of time on my hands and Littlest wasn't trying to stand under my next steps...

Tillers are Amazing!

I was able to borrow a tiller from a neighbor friend (thank you, thank you!), and think tillers are amazing! Granted, they don't go as deep as shovel and pitchfork, but they are FAST!! I've buried some sod and cardboard from last years' sod killing, covered it, and made mounds for planting. It'll be a few years before it's really established as a fully full flower bed (annuals this year, perennials as the serendipity of sales and clippings allow)...if I do annuals first, and the grass comes back, I can hack at it again without having to negotiate around perennials...hmmm. Okay, so it snowed a couple of days ago, so no pressure on planting! Next project is fixing all the broken sprinklers, anyway...

Things I've done rather than things left to do...

I've decided that instead of thinking about all those things I still want to do (and having anxiety about not getting things done), I'm going to post what I've done, and when I feel anxious, I'll go back and look at my previous posts and enjoy the fruits of my labors. Because there will always, always, be more things I could do, if I had the time...

Sprinklers

I've put in permanent sprinklers in my vegetable garden, my neighbors are planting...the clock is ticking!

The rain keeps me out of the garden, but not out of the library gardening books. According to the BBC gardening by the month book, now is the time to do cuttings. There's a hedge nearby that has a golden fuzz on it. I've seen it in catalogs...I wonder if they'd let me get some cuttings off it. I'll have to wait until littlest is a bit more cold-hardy though. He's been coughing all week. Sigh.

It's also time to collect seeds along the sidewalks. I got some seeds off the local school's bushes last Fall, and they're flowering in pots this year in my garden--a blue flower bush.

I've been adding on to the sprinklers for my side garden. I've been sod-killing all summer, so hopefully I can plant next year. Some areas need more amendment though--it's all Geneva slag and sand.

I want to add roses to the back corner where foot traffic likes to come through, but it needs some nourishing and turning over. It's sandy and under some pines, and probably has slag buried below as well, and even if I borrow my neighbor's pickax again, I don't really want to hack through slag. I'll work on building it up.

And then there's the flower bed I'm starting in front of the pine trees where the grass always dies in the heat of the summer. I'm putting all my sod from around the hedges and the paths there, but it still isn't shapely enough or deep enough yet. I did put sprinklers in already there though, so it's a matter of depth, not of water. I'll put that flowering bush there once I get it healthy enough, soil-wise.

And I have to redesign the sprinkling system for the vegetable garden.

So I guess it's okay that it's been raining all week. With a list that long, it's nice to have a break.

Sunflowers

We're growing sunflowers for a science project--measuring it's growth week-by-week. A nearby house had a circle of sunflowers in their flower spot in the front yard last year. It was so artistic and dramatic compared to all the tame and repeated flower beds in other yards. Of course, ours will look a bit like a farm rather than a city lot, but I think that's a bit of the flavor I crave--the wildness as well as the cottage garden.