A Bit of a Break

Me, showing off

Today was my birthday, but I had no time to celebrate in the usual way.  No cake, no ice cream, no kicking up of the heels.

For that matter, except for some dirt-shifting late in the afternoon, I didn't really get any work done, either.

On the house or garden, I mean.

This is because I had the annual recertification training for substitute teaching in the morning, work at the Big Blue Box Store in the late afternoon and evening, and errands in between.

But that doesn't mean I can't be festive here on the houseblog.  And frivolous, too.

"Frivolous" is exactly the way to describe one of my errands this afternoon.  For I have an Idea of what I want to do with the paving in my new front garden bed, though I don't have the cash to do it and won't have it for the foreseeable future.  Nevertheless, being in the neighborhood I stopped at a local stoneyard and checked out the flagstones.

This is Colonial wall stone.  It matches my bluestone windowsills and some other flagstone paving I have on the property.  Nevertheless, I don't like it as much as I do this:

It's called West Mountain stone, and it comes from over by Scranton.  I really love the colors.  Wouldn't it be great if I came across someone who had some stone similar to this on their property that they wanted to get rid of?  Barring that, for this while I can only dream.

There's that.  But I can also treat you to some pretty flower shots from my garden, of what's currently in bloom and blossoms from earlier this spring.

Flowering quince, backyard west border, April 21st

Columbines, backyard, east border, May 12th

Kerria japonica pleniflora, backyard, north fence; also from May 12th

Lilac; "Miss Kim," I think.  Side door, May 18th

"Brother Cadfael" rose, front border, June 2nd

"Don Juan" rose, west side of house, June 8th

"Clio" rose, back porch steps, June 11th

There are a lot more I didn't get decent pictures of this year.  But I hope you enjoy these.  I only regret not being able to depict how wonderful the lilacs and roses have smelled, too.  Maybe I can convey a little of it in a haiku I wrote about three weeks ago:

Through open window

Scent of lilac breathes rapture

Soft sultry May night

The Sound of Crickets in the Night

You know what happens when you put out a call like this on Facebook?

Help! I have some garden soil I need to get out of my yard and some friends who live seven miles away who need it in theirs. Anybody have a pickup truck I can borrow to load it onto?

Nothing, that's what.  Crickets.  Because you have sensible friends who know that it's not just their pickup you want to borrow, but their shovels as well, and also probably (ok, certainly) their muscles and time to wield them.  And that's assuming that any friends who might have pickup trucks even see your post, given Facebook's arbitrary practice as to whose news appears in whose newsfeed.

I posted that plaintive appeal last night around midnight, after an afternoon of fun in the south vegetable garden bed, the one where the tomatoes are to go.  Spent about an hour and fifteen minutes weeding it (though it seemed a lot longer),

then started sieving the dirt into the garden cart.  I have too much and some friends up above New Brighton need some yard fill, but I didn't want to give it to them complete with roots and weeds.

And when I considered how much dirt is involved (and they can't help me, because the wife is older and the husband has a bad back), I was feeling very discouraged.  Like existential-angst discouraged.  Why don't I have some nice, useful, significant-other type guy attached to me who could help me do this?  Why am I not making enough money so I could hire it done?  How could I ever bag up all this and load it into my car?  I'm pretty strong, but that would take forever!

Thus the idea to appeal for a pickup truck.  Finished filling up the cart with cleaned dirt-- and slow work it was-- parked it over to the side with a yard bag over it in case of rain, and focussed on transplanting the volunteer lettuces.

(If they want to pop up without my having to plant them, the least I can do is give them a safe home for the season.)

But as I say, nobody (at least not so far) has risen up to be a hero and champion in the way of pickup trucks.  Not even after I pleaded for mercy for the tomatoes:

This is kind of urgent-- I can't plant my tomatoes until I remove the mound that's built up in the garden bed.

So this afternoon I took stopgap measures and potted them all up in gallon pots using the soil from the bed where they'll eventually grow.  Sunk them deep in the bigger pots to give them more support and encourage them to develop roots from the leaf nodes.  Should give the "Red Brandywine" a chance at survival, if anything can.

Other than that, dumping yesterday's cartload of dirt in the new planting bed in the front, and digging out a few more trowels full of nutsedge-infested soil from the lawn, I've let things sit today.  Let's give it awhile longer.  Maybe there is somebody out there I know who's dying to haul a few loads of dirt for gas money and free pop.  Maybe my friends in New Brighton know somebody who has a truck.  Can't hurt to ask.

Plugging Away-- and Getting Plugged

Just a little progress report.  All garden related, of course.

My friend brought the tomatoes he promised to give me to church this morning.  One "Italian Goliath,"

one "Red Brandywine,"

one "Brandymaster,"

and one miscellaneous cherry.  Just now they're all leggy seedlings in 8 oz. yogurt cups.  The "Red Brandywine" broke on the way home, which is too bad, since I like me a Brandywine tomato.  But maybe it can be nursed and recover.

They won't get planted for awhile, though:  Over the years the garden bed that I'm rotating the tomatoes to has gotten so mounded up with soil amendments that it's more than a foot higher at the center than at the edges.  And the beds in the round vegetable garden aren't that big.  It needs to be levelled off before anything goes into it.  Oh, yeah, and it needs weeded before that.

Which didn't happen this afternoon or evening.  What did happen is more digging and spading of dirt off the bare places in the front lawn, where the nutsedge is emerging where I dug it out before.  Not as thickly yet as before, but still there.  It's very depressing having to deal with this, such a waste of time and topsoil, too, but what can you do?

Finished cutting up sticks and shifting leaves from the part of the open compost pile I began cleaning off yesterday.

There was a little finished compost at the bottom of it, which I spread on the new planting bed in the front garden.

At least, I think it was compost.  May have just been a mounded bit of topsoil.

Whether or no, after that it was time to make a new compost pile where that bit had been.  Didn't have a lot of "green" material, unless you count the Virginia creeper I pulled off the fence.

Organic parfait

Instead I made layers of grassy sod and leftover unmulched leaves.  Yeah, I know you're not supposed to put dirt in the compost heap. But what else am I supposed to do with all those turves?

A lot of the leaves I was using for that I shook off the branches and sticks that came off the limb that fell down last year.  There weren't too many large ones left on the pile to cut up for kindling today, so I just took the leaf rake and drew the leaf residue off the old pile to use it on the new.

Where things got left, in a hurry

Or I did until some apparent residents of the old pile took exception to this disturbance. First I knew of it was when something  tried to fly up my right nostril.  I sniffed out violently and tried to bat it away, whereupon it stung me twice on my nose right above the lip, on the septum.  Ow!

Quick but careful removal of self into the house-- don't want to be precipitous and trip on the porch stairs-- all the time hoping it wasn't a honeybee, since their stingers remain in and you have to tweeze them out.  Quick, find the baking soda and make a poultice with water.  Dab it on the affected area . . .  know one looks like an idiot, but never mind.  It kept the swelling down where the creature plugged me, and within five minutes the pain was gone too.

Returned to the scene of the incident, though not to do any more raking.  Yellowjackets, it was.  There were still three or four hovering around.  Not going to mess with that pile again until I've consulted the exterminator.

So as much as I wanted to get that pile turned for the first time in three years, it was time to drop it and do something else instead.

Like plant the Berberis thunbergii "Crimson Pygmy" barberry I bought Thursday night from the Outside Lawn & Garden department at work.  I was thinking I needed a reddish specimen in front of the right-hand Alberta spruce . . . but one will do, since my neighbor to the east has four or five or these.

She was out in her front yard, too, while I was planting this.  I told her about the yellowjacket sting.  I mean, I didn't expect to go into anaphylactic shock from it, never have before, but I know some people develop that reaction when they get older.  So in case I suddenly quit breathing and keeled over . . .

I didn't.  I finished getting the red barberry into the ground and went on to transplant a few volunteer Blackeyed Susans into the little strip next to the Siberian iris at the toe of the slope to the sidewalk.

Still so much to do, but the light ran out.  It'll all get done-- eventually-- if I keep plugging away at it.  At this rate I should be able to go back to working on the inside of the house by, oh, late September or so.

Visions-- and Realities

Even before early 2008 when I laid out the crape myrtle bed beside the two steps down to the front sidewalk I've had an idea.  A dream.  If I wanted to be grandiose, I'd say I've had a Vision.  It was to pull up a third to a half of the front lawn in a great curvaceous triangle and convert it to a landscaping bed.  With a footpath winding through it for the lawn mower, the postman, and the neighborhood kids.  And a little paved seating area just big enough for a bistro table and and chair or two, to make up the lack of a front porch to sit out on on summer evenings.

But I had such nice grass it would be a pain and a shame to pull it up, and besides, I didn't have the money.  So a dream it remained.

But this past summer of 2012, that dry summer of 2012, I stinted on watering the lawn.  Economizing.  My sprinkler attachment wasn't working right anyway, and I didn't want to spring for a new one.  But the Scott's guy were still coming round to do the treatments, and at the height of the dryness he applied fertilizer or weed killer or both and over half the yard fried out and turned yellow.

No, I didn't call up Scott's to gripe about it.  Never got around to it.  But eventually, I knew, I'd have to get around to deciding what to do about my largely-dead lawn.  Happily, most of the brown places were where I wanted the shrubs and perennials and things.  Was it time to landscape on some scale, or should I just reseed the lawn?

Whatever I determined, I figured it wouldn't hurt to get rid of the dead grass.  Started the process last November.

Pretty pathetic.  I used to have grass.

That was all for 2012

Was hoping to get it all stripped and amend the soil and maybe overseed it, last winter.  But it was too cold and dark in the evenings and I had other things I could do inside.

So come this spring when the lawn didn't revive on its own, I figured it was now or never.  High time to do the landscaping, though very much on the cheap.  Still, I didn't do anything tangible about it for several weeks.  I had the idea I wanted to design it all out in AutoCAD.  Theoretically could have.  My student-edition AutoCAD license expired in December 2008, but I've got a free download drawing program, DraftSight, on my computer.  But, gulp! it's been so long that I can't remember the blinking commands.  And my computer is so slow it's hard to load the program, let alone use it.  In fact, I haven't done any machine drawing these past few years with anything but SketchUp.  Nothing wrong with SketchUp per se; it'd be cool to lay out my front garden in 3D.   But that'd mean measuring and reckoning elevations and slopes, which I simply have no time to do.  Nevertheless, three or four weeks ago I got out there with the tape and documented some of the existing conditions in the front border  I even pulled out my AutoCAD course textbook to refresh my skills.

But a couple Saturdays ago, as I mentioned in the previous post, I came across a good deal on eggplant and broccoli plants at an area grocer.  Why not put them in the front yard, where it's sunny and the dog won't get them?  The day after, Sunday the 19th, something switched on in my pea brain and I thought, why bother with a drawing?  Why not just get out there and do it?  Or maybe I didn't think.  I just gathered up my steel tape measure, a couple of garden spikes, and a roll of string and started scribing arcs in the dead-and-alive grass of my pathetic front lawn.

Came off the existing border towards the west end

As I went I took the hoe and made the arcs good and obvious.

Note tape measure and string

Petered out before I hit the sidewalk.  Hit a tough clump of grass and left it till later.

Just for fun, pulled out the first few bricks and  set them on the ground to mark the new line.

The following Saturday the 25th I took the hoe and started hacking out divots along the scribed line.  Only got so far before the dryness of the soil, the stubbornness of some of the grass, and a weird hitch in my right hip got the better of my persistence.  I quit digging till it would rain again.

Carts and carts full of divots.  It only gets worse.

Cut the grass in the new bed short.  Maybe it'll die and be easier to remove.

Still, I didn't see any harm in beginning the edging.  A line of bricks has defined the front border for years before I got here.  They look perfectly fine, so why not reuse them?  And why not just sink them flush in the earth the way the previous owners did?  True, they do tend to let the grass stolons into the flower beds, but it's not like they heave or anything.  Why make a big deal of it?

So I pried more bricks out of the old border and laid them along to make the new one, until it got too dark to continue.

The next day, Sunday the 26th, I laid in more bricks for the new border, till all the ones in the former border were used.

Last one!

Almost there.

And then I borrowed my neighbor's edger.  Why?  Because until I had a clean line between the lawn and the sidewalk I couldn't possibly know how to bring the curve of my new planting bed down to the pavement.

Once that big hank of overgrown grass was hacked off, I could finish the brick border, just as dusk fell.  Had to supplement them with some I collected for the borders in the back.  Not quite the same, but close enough.

In for a landing.

By the 29th it had rained, and I didn't get called in to sub.  But I only finished the edging in the back yard.

Before, with two or three years of overgrowth

During

After.  

Nothing got accomplished in the front until today-- And the ground has dried out again.

Never mind.  It took over three hours, but the front sidewalk is edged and swept.  Ditto the grass along the curb.

The edger gives me a line for my dad's old grass knife to follow.  LOL

Hacking through the jungle.

Took it to my neighbor's roof drain outfall, a little past the property line.

Sidewalk done, both sides

The curb line gets it now.

Can I leave that dirt in the gutter for the street sweeper to pick up?

No, clean it up.  They don't come by half the time anyway.

Tomorrow, if I can get to it, God willing, the real work begins.