Garden Work

This post is a few months late, but I'm trying to do some catch up on blog posts (plus, I can use writing them as an excuse to procrastinate working on the walls in the bedroom).

Chris' mom and dad were here in May and first they plucked all of the dandelions and generally cleaned up the front yard while I watched from the porch while sipping a bloody mary. Then we transplanted some plants and shrubs from the backyard to the front because the dogs will apparently eat anything that they can tell we paid for. I think the results are really beautiful:

It's especially incredible considering this is what the front gardens looked like when we moved in: P1000050.JPG

Old House Confessions

I have finally decided to come clean. I hate landscaping. I don't like being hot and I sunburn easily and the thing that I really hate about it is that you can work for hours in the garden and a month later, it doesn't look like you did anything... oh, also there's the spiders. Terrified of spiders. The whole nurturing and growing thing is lost on me and if a concrete slab looked as good as a perennial garden, the cement mixer would be backing up to the house as I type.

I didn't even know where to begin with the existing perennial gardens in our yard. Looking out the kitchen window made me feel sick. We have kind of a snarky neighbor and I was imagining how she must complain to her husband about our disgusting jungle of weeds. There were three major planting beds, one that was roughly 17' square, one long narrow one 10'x 30' and then along the back side of the house there was a bed the width of the house and about 6 feet deep. Each of these beds was chock full of overgrown junk that stood about 4 feet high. Imagine how many spiders could hide in there, I get the heebeejeebees thinking about it.

Enter Mike and Judy M:

Chris' lovely parents LOVE landscaping! They love it in all of it's phases. Local Legend Mike M. seems to especially love the clearing of the land. He spent whole days (90 degrees, 95% humidity) tearing out the overgrown gardens and filling up yard waste bags, 22 in all. Mostly I pushed the wheelbarrow and moved rocks from one pile to another, then, when it was nearing time to plant, so I spent two separate half days with Judy M at the nursery picking things out. All the while LLMM was still slaving away, preparing for planting. Then it actually was time to plant and I pointed to spots on the ground where the holes should be and then I carried buckets of mulch from our chipper-palooza down to the beds. Basically, I only enabled the work, I didn't actually participate. Oh oh, I did sprinkle the grass seed around, that was really hard work, and I was bitten by a bug and it still is itchy, so there's that.

All of the credit for the amazing transformation belongs to LLMM and JM . Here are some in progress photos. This weekend I'll post some photos of the end result.

Our first attempt at fruit growing.

We are attempting to grow edible things for the first time. We chose Black Currants for two reasons: 1. Grapes need more sun than we get, and 2. Currants are in tons of fancy recipes and I can never find them. I read an article from the University of Minnesota that talked about how much satisfaction I would get from growing currants, so I ordered some straight away. I also ordered some grapes for the only part of our yard that gets any sun. When they arrived, they were sad little twigs and Chris was skeptical. Then we dug the holes and fertilized and mulched and watered just like the instructions said and the little twigs stuck sadly out of the ground and now we were skeptical, and resentful of digging tons of holes in the rocky soil. Finally this week, SUCCESS!! OK, a few tiny buds probably doesn't mean we will have bushels of currants any minute, but it's encouraging.

Chipper Fest 2007

So this used to be the scene in our backyard:


Dilapidated garage, small pile of brush in front, HUGE pile of brush on the side. Unfortunately I didn't have the foresight to take a photo of the huge pile of brush, so you'll have to imagine it. I am guessing it was between 4 and 6 times larger than this small pile. When we moved into the house the perennial beds were very overgrown and there were rosebushes that a man could become entangled in and die. There were also horrible bayberry hedges with terrifying thorns everywhere in the front yard. Sometime last summer my lovely, but tough as nails mother in law Judy M. went to town with the nippers and wrought havoc on all that was thorny and bad in the yard and piled it in the back so that we could chip it and have all of this wonderful and free mulch. Chipping was fun, right?

Finally last weekend we got around to renting the chipper. It was going to be a fun and beautiful day outdoors. It turned out to be anything but.
This is a photo of the chipper, we'll call it The Mangler . If you look closely you can see the strained face that Chris is making. It turns out that when you put wood in TM it does one of two things. 1. It will wrench the branch (probably thorny thing) out of your hand practically dragging you in the hopper too, or 2. it will reject the branch entirely and it will rocket back out of the hopper and hit you in the eye. During both of the scenarios your hands are being vibrated so violently that you quickly lose sensation. This is good so that it doesn't hurt when a large branch kicks back into your hand. I don't mean to get bogged down, this is a story of courage and triumph. After 5 hours of deafening grinding and bodily harm, all of the brush was gone. Here is a photo of the spot where the brush pile was:
Inge is proudly surveying the good job we did. Of course she and the other wild dogs had to be in the house for safety purposes. And here is a photo of TM finally at rest and the pile of "free and fun" mulch that we made:
I would give this advice to would-be chippers. Take the brush to the landfill and on the way home buy some mulch.