Filed under: living while not working, nature | Tags: asters, dianthus, gardening, perennial favorites, perennials, planting, plants, salvia, smiles
Having my mother around is beneficial in a lot of ways, but the most enjoyable benefit right now is that she inspired me to start the garden, and helped me with some perennial beds as well. She also takes pictures of EVERYTHING and so has provided me with a visual record to go along with this written one.
This yew was deathly ill, and the view from the back deck, the screen porch and the steps into the yard. Cris pulled it out and now it is my favorite spot in the yard.
There are white and purple Salvia in the back, with some asters and red dianthus in front of them. The floppy pink are more dianthus, and then there are purple, floppy daisy-like things in the front.
Big fuzzy bumblebees hang out at the Salvia and the big cocklebells (? see below). While I was planting there were three or four butterflies in the flowers too!
Cris worked hard getting gravel out of some of the rock garden beds, and putting good dirt in them. You can see the front gravel border, and the giant “bathtub” area – this is basically just rock, so he filled some of it with loam. The front gravel border now has lots of ajuga and black mulch that looks beautiful, and the ajuga should spread and flower next spring. This is a before, arial-shot taken from the deck:
Here is a shot from ground-level, showing the tops of the Salvia, Coreopsis and I-have-no-idea what the fairy-tale flowers are – cocklebells? I really don’t know and SOMEONE threw out all the tags… but I love them.
Filed under: living while not working, nature | Tags: garden, vegetable garden, veggies
I spent last weekend putting in a garden. My first garden, to be exact.
Our home is essentially set in a hole that was blown out of a big rock, so the garden space took a bit of planning. It is a very small, raised bed with stacked stone walls. I think it is beautiful. 
It is very small because I didn’t want to be overwhelmed with too much blank space.
So the bed was built, loam delivered and spread, fertilizer mixed in… and seeds and vegetables bought. My eyes were bigger than my bed, so now we have two beds… The raised bed has two rows of pea seeds with optimistic trellises, four tomato plants cages, beets, six broccoli plants and two eggplant plants.
The old compost bed has been turned into a second garden – this has asparagus (I can’t imagine anything will come of these weird roots), brussels sprouts, pumpkins and zucchini.
By Monday night we were sunburned, cramped, pulled, sore, bug-bitten, but satisfied.
So all week we’ve been watering and watching and trying not to get overly hopeful (Brussels Sprouts!).
So the update as of this afternoon: someone has eaten two eggplant plants and four broccoli plants down to stubs.
