Despite there being much to do at work, I took one day off to weed my own garden. Allan’s little garden looks perfect:
After that pleasant interlude admiring Allan’s tidy garden, I moved on to the three big weedy beds in the backyard. I want to see if a before and after set of photos even shows the results of six hours of almost-steady weeding.
My reward for getting middle garden weeded, I decided when I began, would be to put out my birthday present from Judy.
I completely filled our large wheelie bin with weeds, with one bucket and one wheelbarrow left over, and dumped at least another wheelbarrow full of compostable items (that is, thinned perennials rather than invasive weeds) onto the debris pile. I wish I had tomorrow off as well; without any rain, we have to check on watering at several places and we have plants to plant. I did not get time to plant any in my own garden, but I think I would rather wait for some rain. (The soil is moisty underneath here at home, I am glad to say.) My friend Kathleen S stopped by to visit but my dedication to weeding trumped my true desire to just sit down with her on the patio.
Some good things I saw along the way:
Some not so good things:
The pond between us and the port parking lot is drying up but there are still little tadpoles in it.
I am losing my tunnel through the salmonberries:
One side of the middle bed has lots of reseeded California poppies. The other side has none!
If we ever get rain again, I’ll transplant some to the empty side.
I need to find time to trim him, AND to chop the Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ by half so it won’t flop open.
The Bright Lights chard that bolted to taller than me is sadly representative of how I rarely get around to harvesting and eating any edible thing that I grow.
The patio still needs weeding:
My Rosa pteracantha is still dead.
And the real heartbreaker: There are hardly any sweet peas along here. I think it might be because I got too busy to regularly apply Sluggo, so maybe they got eaten.
Next year, instead of planting all of them at once, I will make two plantings, one on the outside and one on the inside, a week apart. And I will not go on a trip in April. And I will put out Sluggo every day.
I will have to find an alternative, perhaps an annual vine that I can acquire in pots…or maybe the few remaining sweet peas will surprise me.
Meanwhile, Allan worked up at Discovery Heights, deadheading hundreds of narcissi:
and saw a coyote, but it moved fast so he just got a blurry photo:
[…] « one day off […]
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Before and after shots of weeding the beds is a great idea which I intend to borrow! A weeded bed really does have more definition.
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It does. At first I thought that without a close up of a patch of thick horsetail gone from the inside of the bed, the difference did not show much, but there is more defined shape to each clump of perennials so the after shot is encouraging.
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What hard work.
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