Monday, May 12, 2014

Ow.

Instead of borrowing my neighbor's rototiller, we tilled a 10 foot veggie garden row with a broadfork and hoe.  I've now got a good full body ache from my shoulders to my knees.

Aleve is doing very little to help, I suppose I've just got to wait for my muscles to repair and grow stronger.

Thursday, May 8, 2014

Time and effort

Q:  Why do I spend so much time and effort in the garden now, as I creep up on my 40th birthday? 

A:  So that I won't have to spend so much time and effort in the garden later, as I creep up on later birthdays.

I'm working on layering my beds with enough foliage to keep out all but the most stalwart weeds, and I look forward to the time when a weekend can be spent idly looking at what I have wrought, rather than working.  Work in progress.  This is only year 5, and some of the beds I am working in were not beds when we moved in.

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Everything's a little late

Irises, which were opening on May 1 a year or two ago, are still just starting to bud.  I may get some blooms in a week, we'll see.  I do have to make sure I mark which color is which since I have some freebies that folks have given me over the years - right now the only ones I can share are the blue ones because I know which ones they are.

Monday, May 5, 2014

Opuntia humifusa redux

So last year I got these Eastern prickly pear pads which I stuck in a pot and Voila! they sprouted roots and grew.  The pot looked like cactus Stonehenge.  They went totally floppy over the winter, sagging over the edge of their pot.  But, as the days grew warmer and warmer, they perked up again.

I decided that I wanted to repot them with some other succulents into some more artistic arrangements, so I trucked up my long planters from the curbside, put nice new potting soil (Espoma brand, even though it's more expensive than Miracle Gro.  The Scotts/Miracle Gro company can suck it http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2012/September/12-enrd-1088.html) amended with extra perlite.  I dug up the sempervivums (hens & chicks) I'd overwintered between two of the rose bushes, and pulled up some sedum (angelina) from the bed where it's growing like wildfire, and made some pretty arrangements to brighten up the curbside.

The gloves I was wearing were totally inadequate to protect me from the nasty little barbed glochids on the edges of the firm green pads, and I spent quite a bit of time in the bathroom with tweezers and duct tape pulling the damn things out after finishing my repotting.  Even with that, I missed some.  So much fun - NOT.  At least the roses warn me ahead of time with showy 1/2" long thorns.