Yesterday afternoon I spent 2 hours in the garden doing the very best kind of gardening... The air was mild, the ground, although damp, was bearable to sit down on, it was easy and pleasant to just work my way slowly through the beds, prying out the occasional weed, snipping out the dead winter debris, smoothing out mulch. And best of all, seeing all the first signs of new life in my plants and discovering all over again things I did not know I had. Sometimes I do complain about those hens, scratching everywhere and tossing mulch around. But they do a lot of good: I have no Japanese beetles on the property and the population of stink bugs has plummeted. Iris borers are a minor problem now, where once they were a plague. Slugs? Snails? Don't know what they are any more. But best of all...those little scratching, pecking, pooping machines with feathers spread seeds...I've got tulips popping up all over the place that I know for a fact I never planted. It's always such fun to see what they will turn out to be.
Today is forecast to be sunny and fairly mild, but colder than yesterday (which reached 60F). I may try to get back up to the SB garden and do some more cleanup and weeding. I am seriously considering a run up the mountain for a load of compost...or at any rate, to see if I can actually get a load of compost. For all I know, the pile may still be frozen solid or else a running pile of muck. I'd like to put down a good layer of compost on the newly enlarged rose bed. That will take a full truckload at least. In the next few weeks/months, I'm also going to be enlarging and lifting the bed along the fence rail and I'll need compost for that. I'm also going to incorporate a lot of gravel into sections of that bed so I can grow some of the plants that need much lighter soil and better drainage than my heavy clay soil can provide, namely primroses.
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Minor brainstorm re: stems for concrete mushrooms. I have the hollow base of a birdbath that has a chunk broken out of it. It really is ready for the scrap heap. What if I stuck it upside down in a 5-gallon bucket, filled in around it with clean cat litter to hold it steady, then lined the birdbath base with plastic and poured in the concrete? It is just about perfectly sized and shaped.... Hmm. Time to experiment. (Puts on goggles, big red rubber gloves, and mad-scientist colander hat covered with aluminum foil ...)
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| Watching new growth by Seedfork | Mar 22, 2015 8:15 AM | 0 |
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