Garden 24 Apr 2006 05:15 pm
Garden update
I’m drawn to the look of this garden bed lined with bottles. It makes me wonder if I really want to buy a ton of rocks after all. Maybe I should go with wine bottles instead. I wonder if and how they’d affect soil temperature.
We’re going to rebuild and reorient the raised beds any month now, which means that somebody’s got to get the five inches of pebbles out of the path between them. I’ve been working on that very slowly, trying not to be an idiot about it. This has certainly taught me to rough out the paths with something light and compostable first and then maybe put the heavier stuff down later.
The side path is pretty much in. I hope the drainage works out. I probably should have dug the whole side yard out and regraded it so it didn’t trickle water into the bed next to the house, but that wasn’t going to happen this year.
In the very big picture, the garden is moving slowly toward a more permaculture-influenced arrangement. “Low till, low labor” is about my speed, especially when cultivating so much yard. The original landscape was very high-maintenance, especially given our daily use of the side yard: lots of very aggressive growers, several badly placed shrubs, and a cottage garden in front crammed overfull of the sort of plants that look great for a week and then look like somebody sat on them. That won’t do.
Plus, it was a garden designed for somebody very visually oriented, I think; except for some rosemary and lavender, it had little in the way of scent, and it had even less in the way of inviting textures (like fuzzy lady’s mantle or pebbly hardy geranium) or beautiful sounds (like rustling bamboo or the thrum of bees). I’m not like that. Vision is, to me, the least interesting and most impersonal of the senses. Maybe I do get a little ancy for bright color after a long gray winter, but most of the time I’d cheerfully jettison any odorless colorful flower in favor of something more humble-looking that smells or tastes delicious. I do not, in what passes for my soul, understand the popularity of unfragranced roses. No accounting for taste, I guess. I’m fixing the place to reflect mine.
And some plant notes:
Peas are sprouting (I got them in very late), lettuce starts are sprouting. Potatoes — Caribe and All-Blue — are in their garbage can planters, presumably doing their thing under the soil, and I wish they would sprout already. Josh and I keep trying to encourage them, but shouting “Sprout!” at a potato doesn’t seem to do much. The Walls-o-Water are up and warming the ground where the pepper seedlings will go. Generally I’ve been pretty slow getting seeds in the ground this spring, but I have some plans to sow a few today.
The garlic chives do not seem particularly interested in germinating, so I bit the bullet and bought some starts at Skye yesterday. (I wasn’t quite sure I’d gotten the variety I wanted anyway.) Also got some thyme, dill, and a few varieties of scented geranium — attar of rose, spice, and ginger. With any luck, these geraniums will flourish enough for me to take cuttings. I grew some indoors in college, and their cuttings rooted like crazy. I couldn’t bear to throw away any trimmings that rooted so well, and eventually it was a sort of Sorcerer’s Apprentice situation — geraniums everywhere. Perhaps in a few months I’ll have some geraniums to offer to friends.
The pink clematis is starting to bloom. I’d worried a little that I might have overpruned it last year. It’s way too much clematis for its trellis, and if I don’t chop the living tweedle out of it, it smothers itself and gets aphidy. The alder tree drops stuff into it, too, further blocking the airflow. Every year I get a little more aggressive when cutting it back, and I have yet to be sorry.
Speaking of aggressive vines with a history of undermanagement, the wisteria will be blooming soon; the spikes are bigger than my thumb and the flowerlets are beginning to lift. I’d sort of hoped to have folks over for tea when they bloomed — I think this every year — but there’s nowhere to sit out there yet and won’t be for a while. It’s still a big construction zone, full of fence panels and 2×4s and tools and so on, and it’s going to stay that way for a while. Goddamn it, next year there will be a tea party to celebrate the wisteria bloom. I’ll make a cake, even.
I think the lilies of the valley will start to bloom next week. I’m pretty sure they’re volunteers from next door. It breaks my heart that the contractors who bought the house next door mowed down almost all the lilies-of-the-valley that I’d tended for the elderly lady who used to live there. I was so eagerly anticipating the scent of five square yards of lilies-of-the-valley in bloom. If I’d known they were going to mow them down, I would have offered to move the plants to my own yard.
The plum is about bloomed out; the apple bloom is going full bore. I hope this year we’ve had enough warm weather for good pollination of the plum tree.
Traded some snowdrop bulbs with Josh’s mom for a couple of healthy-looking potted geraniums. She always admires the snowdrops in early spring, but I can’t say I really care for them. They’re in a primo garden spot, and they multiply like crazy. Apparently this is the time to move them, oddly enough, so I’m going to try to get the rest of them moved soon.