I don't have time to say much today, which is sometimes how things go in the garden: you don't have time to do very much but need to make it look like you did.
Sometimes when I'm working in the garden I look up and think "wow, this really looks great!". At other times I look up and think "wow, I have a lot more work to do!". I suppose this difference in feeling toward what is the same garden can partially be explained by mood -- some days I'm just crabbier.
I was searching for some older photos this morning, and decided that it would be a good day to take a look back, just to put things into perspective.
Today I finish up the walkway project. In part one I dug it and laid most of the stones. In part two I finished the details and filled the cracks. So what's left?
It's been a while since I took a look at my small veggie garden, but I've mentioned it briefly in a few other posts recently. Things are going well with the edibles, but before we look at its current state, here's what it looked like 5 weeks ago:
I received a surprise the other day: a request from a reader and fellow gardener to show what this planting bed that I reworked back in June looks like now. If you're not going to click that link to see what that earlier post was about, let me summarize by saying it was once a lovely bed of thyme (in theory), turned into a weedy mess, and I then turned it into this:
I'm getting tired of the jungle of potted plants on my driveway. Last weekend I finally got about 20 percent of them moved into better positions in the garden. Okay, maybe 25%. It's a start, and it gave me a nice fresh garden "room" to look at.
Each year I seem to have a new plant obsession. This year it is elephant ears and sempervivum. A few years ago it was thymes, and I prepared a then-new planting bed that I imagined blanketed in soft, fragrant thymes. Their different colors, textures, and growing habits would create a beautiful, low-growing bed -- a small lawn of thymes that required very little maintenance once the plants were established and had "choked out" all of the weeds.
I'm a gardener who makes his own potting mix. It's not that I'm really fussy about the mix I use (I'm not), or that I don't think there are good bagged mixes available, because there are. I usually make my own mix for a few reasons, including being able to customize it for special needs, but usually to save money. I use a lot of potting mix during the course of a year, and mixing my own saves me some money. When I make the mix, the ingredients are typically bagged topsoil, Perlite, compost (leaf and stick mold), and peat moss.
I've always bought the cheapest work gloves I could find, which usually means getting something canvas, or combination thin suede/canvas. The type of gloves that are $3 a pair, or 2 pair for $5. There are three problems with those cheap gloves: they're very uncomfortable, they don't last very long, and they get dirty fast in the garden. Last March I decided to buy a pair of more expensive work gloves:
Things change and progress in a garden -- that's what they tend to do, whether or not you do anything. Here's an update on pretty much everything going on in my garden right now. Starting with the catcus seedlings:
A little less than a week ago I started a little test to see if the corn gluten I had purchased as a pre-emergent herbicide would have any effect -- there have been some studies done that produced conflicting results. I made up a little tray of soil, applied the corn gluten product to half of it, then sprinkled grass seed over the whole thing.
A while back I wrote about my new work boots, what I'll be wearing when digging, mowing, essentially doing anything other than strolling around the garden. When I am just walking around though I wear something more casual. Actually they're not that casual, as they're shoes made of leather, not the colored spongy plastic that is so popular in the garden and everywhere else these days (for good reason).
Yesterday I posted about a lawn care task, specifically applying corn gluten as a pre-emergent herbicide. It's organic, safe, prevents weeds from growing, smells like corn-based snacks -- what more could a gardener ask for? Well, maybe that it actually works. You see, it was pointed out in the comments that another study was done, and its results questioned the utility of corn gluten as a pre-emergent. In fact, that study concluded that it had no herbicidal properties at all.
Although I feel like I could work in the garden every day, all year long, it's probably good that there are a few months during the winter when there's not much I can do. It's a great time to inspect all of the tools that I'm too busy using during the growing season too even think about, let alone inspect or replace.
In the history of my yard's transformation into a garden, I stopped at late summer 2008, hinting about a storm. On September 14, the storm that was the remnants of Hurricane Ike moved over St. Louis and hit my garden pretty hard.
After the projects of 2006 that gave my garden "purpose" and the excitement of 2007 in buying lots of new plants to fill in around the patio, the spring of 2008 was eagerly awaited. I bought more plants and did a few little projects that I barely documented with photos. But if I had to summarize 2008 with a single word, it would be "bamboo".
After the huge projects of 2006, 2007 was relatively quiet. I didn't need to excavate any giant holes, move any rocks or build any structures. There was some digging involved though, because I planted a few more trees and prepared a few new planting beds.
Today I finish up 2006 (in the history of my garden) with three projects and lots of photos. I've already talked about clearing the space by having trees removed, then building the patio. The first project I'll talk about today is the main staircase to the patio.
If you've been following along the last few days as I chronicle the changes in my yard over the past few years, you'll know that we've just had (in 2006) all of the remaining locust trees removed from our yard, leaving a pretty uninteresting space with no vertical elements. You saw how I laid out my garden hose to designate an area that would be turned into "something", but I wasn't sure what yet. That was in March 2006. For the next few weeks I thought about it and planned, and also bought several large plants and small trees. This was the first time I had ever purchased trees, and it was exciting!
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