Quick updates

I planted swiss chard.

The beans are flowering and growing . . .

Cranberry bush beans are almost ready to be picked . . .

If the weather behaves (come on, indian summer!) there will be tomatoes . . .

This crazy feral monstrosity is a tomatillo plant.  Mmmm, tomatillos . . .

I planted what said radicchio, though it looks like leaf lettuce to me.  Leaf lettuce that wilted in the 92 degree heat . . .

Bleeding hearts will self-seed prodigiously, if given enough water . . .

Since my clematis never took off on The Weird Fence . . . 

Me and my boy planted hop plants that he can use in his homebrewing.

Brussels sprouts are chugging right along . . .

What a difference a couple of months make!

Finally. Jeez.

So. That big pile of soil. Someone drove through part of it last week. It was time to finally get it moved.

I decided to just move it to the backyard, even if I don't exactly have a use for it yet.

Another mound?

Sounds good!

I also filled in some areas on the lawn that were really uneven.  I might put down some grass seed or just wait for winter to do the filling in for me.  It looks awesome, I know. I'm thinking about changing the name of this blog to The Lazy Gardener.  I could include tips for ordering the wrong amount of supplies and neglecting projects. Wouldn't you read that?

Just some photos from the garden

Remember when I planted the lower part of the raised bed and was like, "Woo! I planted these Brussels sprouts too close together! I'll just move them later." 

I never got around to moving them when they were small.

When I moved some of them to the upper bed they made giant sad faces the next day.

They are slowly starting to spring back but BE YE NOT SO DUMB.  Learn from my mistakes and just plant them two feet apart from the get-go.

Things grow.  A lot.  Sometimes I forget that.  Remember this area?

It's really filled in.

I really like it when things start to look a little feral (and apparently birds like it too) so this makes me really happy. My pole beans are starting to climb and flower now that the rain has finally stopped.

This tiny six inch bush bean plant is producing already.  Who's hungry for five beans?

FREAKING PENSTEMON, I want to marry you and have a million of your babies.  How gorgeous are they?

Other things that are making me happy: dahlias!  The Mae West of the garden world. 

My Japanese painted fern.  The Japanese do everything better.  They probably never plant their Brussels sprouts too close together and they never forget their parents' anniversary.

The hot coral bells peeking out from my heuchera.

SWOON.

I'm alive, I promise.

This is just a quick note to say that I haven't been doing much on the house lately.  Life is good and I've been spending time enjoying the yard rather than working in it.  I feel like I've earned a tiny break even if I do start to feel lazy at times.  All of those plans I had to replace the west fence and paint the cement slab . . . well the sun finally came out and there's all this beer to drink and friends to entertain and weekends to spend out of town.  

The last year has been crazy and fun and I've been really happy.  It's been hard sometimes, feeling like I needed to justify doing something that makes me happy (people seemed oddly fixated on the fact that I was single--it's great to buy a house but why not find a HUSBAND first?).  A lot of people hate home improvement so they regard me as a lunatic with no life.  But how often do you get to acquire a whole new skill set at your own pace?  I learned how to do basic plumbing and electrical and how to build a fence and tape drywall corners and I never once worried about getting fired.  I also love hosting and cooking for people; I'd haul out another 1900 pounds of concrete for the simple joy of splitting a bottle of wine and dinner with a friend in my newish backyard. 

Now I just have to deal with people who expect that I'm constantly in the middle of some home improvement project. 

"What are you working on now?  Gutting your kitchen?"

"Um . . . the plants have filled in?"  I also changed the lightbulb in the bathroom.  JEEZ, LAY OFF ME.

Those piles of dirt are still in front of the house . . . I'll get there eventually.

Garden therapy

I've moved to a new schedule for summer term where I work four ten-hour days Monday through Thursday, with Fridays off.  That means I get to play all weekend with my friends but I still get a full day to work in the yard and get my garden therapy.

This section is in between the new hillock and the area where I found the hatch with all that buried concrete.  I wanted to remove the grass and mulch it and put more plants in so I'd have one uninterrupted stretch of landscape along the new fence.

But there was basically a field of dock (Rumex) which looks like this:

They're sort of pretty.  Except that they spread like crazy and their roots look like this.

You have to dig them out with a shovel because they're HUGE.  It sucks.  Short of rototilling that area, I didn't see any way to eradicate it without using herbicides.  My last ditch effort was to put down an insanely thick layer of newspaper under the mulch in an attempt to choke out the dock.

A side note: Newspaper is awesome for weed suppression until the neighborhood cats cruise into your yard and think, "Phenomenal. She built a gigantic litter box for us."  Their digging exposes the underlying newspaper and the bark dust gets flung around.  I love animals but outdoor cats can suck it.

Lelo had recommended that I goth up my garden by adding some dark dramatic plants to break up the green.  Black lace elderberry, dark purple euphorbia, and black tulips should do the trick. The fact that you can make wine from elderberries had nothing to do with this decision, I swear.

Despite all the hillocks and topography I'm building, that mountain of dirt out front isn't shrinking.  I'm starting to suspect it's multiplying at night.  I found a bottle of scotch lying next to the dirt pile the other morning.  I can only assume that the dirt pile is getting drunk and amoral while I sleep.

I'm apparently worse at math than I thought.

Filling the smaller, lower section of the vegetable bed took about two cubic yards of soil.

I assumed it would take about four yards to fill the larger, taller part.  I also wanted to build a hillock in a section of the yard, so I estimated about five yards of soil.

Oh man, that's a LOT of soil.  Like, a crazy amount of soil.

It's way way way too much soil.

I got the second part of the bed filled and had barely made a dent in the pile.  So I started digging out the grass from the area where I wanted the hillock.  My neighbors were concurrently using a sod cutter to do the exact same thing in their yard.  I felt like a sucker, doing it by hand, until they encountered problems five minutes in and spent half the day trying to get the machine to work.

I had it all cleared before they finally gave up on the machine.

Then I started piling soil where the yard sloped dramatically back toward the fence.  I decided to embrace this dip and just designate the dipping area as a mulch zone.  Trying to mow the lawn in this area caused the lawnmower to accelerate dramatically down the hill toward the fence.  It looked bad and it was frankly dangerous.  I'm accident prone and I was probably close to losing a toe.

I grabbed some extra ferns and bleeding hearts I had lying around and put them in, along with the flowering currant and ocean spray I bought for this spot.

I picked up a hosta and a Little Honey oakleaf hydrangea for this dry, shady area.  I think I'm going to move the hydrangea over to the right a bit and plant some foxglove, wild ginger, and maybe an akebia (a vining plant that smells like chocolate!) to twine up the fence. 

I need to get some color over here, yes?  And then I want to put in a bench so people can canoodle in this corner of the yard.  And then I think I'm going to replace the no-privacy fence.  Because I have the fever.  The fever for spending more time and money on my yard.

New bedroom light fixture

The weather has been awful here.  I'm starting to feel like those children in the Ray Bradbury story where they live on Venus and only see the sun for two hours every seven years.  I obsessively check the weather widget on my iPod and expend more emotional energy than is necessary fretting about rain.  A friend has taken to calling it Junuary.

You know who doesn't care about the rain?  Lupine.  Lupine is the big dumb hippie at the festival, high on mescaline, STOKED that it's raining again.  We're having a party!

My penstemon is also doing well.  I'd read that they don't usually bloom the first year after being transplanted but, lo and behold, the start I put in two months ago is blooming!  I think it's because I bought this plant from the Master Gardener sale.  

 

Heather, this has nothing to do with light fixtures, you're thinking.  I know!

Rain was forecast so I had written off yard work for the weekend.  I decided I should clean the house, which meant I ran around doing anything I could to avoid vacuuming.  I recently ran across a fixture I bought at Ikea last summer in the basement.  I have no idea where I was planning on putting it.  Why not put it in the bedroom?  Not that the existing fixture wasn't awesome:

The glass part that should hide the bulb was missing, so I had a bare bulb hanging from a very dirty ceiling fan that wasn't properly anchored so it heaved and chugged if you tried to use it.

That's just a little bit better, right?  WHY DIDN'T I DO THIS A MILLION YEARS AGO?