sexy_romulan | (no subject)

Awesome idea from the April ish of Canadian Gardening: a circular patio, with garden beds around it divided up by paths like spokes of a wheel. This way there is a nice spot to sit and enjoy the garden, beds of manageable size, access to weed everything, and beds that can be viewed on three of four sides. Dammit, I should have taken masonry instead of carpentry. I could be doing my own hardscaping. Paying to have someone lay something down like that beautiful spiral of cobblestone would probably be insanely expensive.

Further awesome idea: "underplant[ing a tree], in the style of an English cottage garden, with...spring bulbs of every colour." I spy a use for the ground around the white pine out back, yes I do. In fact, sometime this week I am going to march out there and stick my tulips in the ground, since the snow is off the back of the yard. I figure since I did leave them outside over the winter there is the remotest chance they might come up, although I doubt they'd have frozen as hard in the ground as they did sitting in the carport.

Also inspiring from said magazine is that the gardens featured that aren't professionally designed and planted are typically the product of 20-odd years' work. So it's no tragedy that my gardens have not looked like that. My mom has remarked that it takes 10 years for a garden to really "arrive". And the idea of spending 20 years on the same garden is oddly appealing, despite my typical impatience. After all, you do get gratification year after year in between.

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I sometimes wish I had that kind of patience and dedication. Has it been lost with my generation? Not that you're so very much older than I am, it's just that I can't see most of today's teens and tweens planting gardens.

See, my mom always used to dragoon me into helping with the garden when I was a kid, and I had zero patience for it. It never really occurred to me even to want to garden until I came across our last apartment, which had a fairly extensive yard for its size...and then the bug bit hard. There was just something about having my own land to mess with that put me into project mode.

That makes a lot of sense. It's all about ownership!

I'm quite curious to see what comes up from what's left. I do plan to do something easy to manage with the raised beds. I'm a total black thumb and clueless though.

You should have quite a lot of stuff left in the bed in front of the electrical box, plus some tulips next to the hedge across from the kitchen window, and raspberries, rhubarb, and oregano next to the house. Good luck with whatever you decide to do, I know I had a lot of fun with that yard!

Also, the 10 or 20 year garden is taking the very long view - meanwhile, I get massive kicks out of starting seeds and shopping for new plants. And THAT you can do every spring. Yay instant gratification!

Seems like everyone's got gardening fever right about now... here's a clip from

ursulav's latest entry which might entertain you. I know it entertained me. :)

And I am doing something potentially insane, but I'm feelin' crazy.

There is a large section of the property that, as I have mentioned before, is overrun with bindweed. I rip out vast quantities about once a week. This afternoon I discovered a daylily bed under the stuff. It makes no particular dent in the bindweed, and I have yet to locate a place that sells bindweed mites.

But now I'm fighting fire with fire.

I have planted mint.

Native mountain mint, to be sure, a mint beloved of the local pollinators, but a mint nonetheless, and as generations of gardeners will tell you, mint is like the nuclear option among plants. You don't dare put it in a bed, because it will own that bed forever. You can't even put it in a pot NEAR a bed, because it will send roots through the drainage hole and pop up ten feet away, laughing maniacal minty laughter.

By planting mint among the bindweed, I may be resigning myself to a lifetime of yanking out mint seedlings from my bed, despite the gravel driveway in between us, but I don't care. It can fight with the bindweed. If that whole area becomes an uninhabitable tangle of bindweed and mint, at least the mint will make it biologically useful to pollinators, and it'll smell nice.

I don't dare consider what'll happen if the bindweed devours it. A plant that can eat mint may be bigger than any of us.

Maybe THAT's what I should have done about the creeping jenny...hmmmm...

Hey, btw: ZOMG INTERNSHIP??? Dish dish dish!