Tuesday, 6 April 2021
at home
I think what gave me a taste for half retirement and being more at home was last year’s lockdown, when we were non-essential from mid March to the beginning of May and I had the first springtime at home in my own garden ever in my adult life. This may have been what led to the perhaps financially foolish early half-retirement. Springtime at home is wonderful.
Today, knowing that Allan would be mowing in the late afternoon, I decided to pull a lot of sword ferns back out of compost bin one so that they could be mower-chopped. Lesson learned: Unchopped, they took up half the bin. I had made a lot of extra work for myself by not storing them on a tarp till mowing season began.
I couldn’t even figure out where all these sword ferns came from…and there are more buried in bin two.
It looks like I may have gotten down to some siftable compost in bin one. If I can get it emptied, I’ll be able to start turning the bins. The trick will be to hold off till I finish an acceptable level of weeding in the garden.
Meanwhile, Patti had given us a lot of bell peppers and tomatoes. We hadn’t been eating them fast enough, so Allan prepared them for the dehydrator. Since we didn’t have to use our new generator during winter storm power outages, I’d say the dehydrator was our most useful purchase last year.
When he emerged to mow, he found a sea of ferns to chop. He filled five lawn mower bags and put them in the food waste composter for now.
I had gone on to a Bogsy Wood project, preparing a place to plant two large Siberian Iris divisions that I had realized I did not want to divide and pot up. I’ve been removing scraggly salmonberries to make room for a greater variety of plants on the west side of the alder grove.
Before and after:
Allan helped me move a big barbecue stand planter over to the wayback sit spot.
That is too much clutter on one side of the sit spot. I will hack out a level spot on the other side, opposite the bench, and we will move the barbecue planter there. Too much clutter is not restful. In fact, I had better stop moving things back to this corner right about now, except for perhaps some more subtle wooden box planters for some ferns and such.
The Siberian irises got planted next to the new Bogsy path, after digging out some salmonberry runners. I very much liked the advice in one of Julie Moir Messervy’s garden design books, to accentuate natural features by making low spots lower and high spots higher, so I’m trying to lower the path. It’s a rainwater ditch in winter.
This also provides soil to make the side bed, behind the hydrangeas, higher. I have some new shade plants being delivered by a friend next week.
In the background, a forklift had spent the the afternoon putting the crab pot wall, which I love so much, in place.
some springtime glory:
I even achieved a barrow full of weeds, which I am using to fill in a dip in a path next door. I saw that Alicia’s portion of the meander line still has a lot of water, a good home for tadpoles if the frogs are still there.
By now, it was six PM and getting windy and chilly. I went indoors to watch some Beechgrove.
I have found two delightful Beechgrove specials:
…and…
The Beechgrove Garden 40th anniversary special
…which was well worth watching even though it has frequent breaks for commercials.
Oh, how I love those little steps leading to the girl and the wee door! I have so many place where I could set up a similar vignette. Your garden is a delight. No wonder you like being there.
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Allan got three distinctive dairy doors, some kind of ceramic, from a now defunct garden art store in Seattle. I love them. I’m telling you, if he could make ones that cute out of wood, we could set up a booth at the Saturday market and support ourselves with fairy doors. Then he found the action figure, although she is very ghostly white now that her pinkish tone has bleached out, and her hair was dark blonde like mine but now white like mine will be. 🙂
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Yes, yes!
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Oops, fairy doors 🙂
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I’ve caught up now. I too like little steps, figure and wee door! Too bad celandines are an invasive species. There are several areas I wouldn’t mind if they took over.
If we get enough tomatoes this year, I will try running them through the fruit drier. Normally, whatever we can’t eat gets made into sauce, and the green ones all get pickled, just like the cucumbers.
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The dried ones are yummy like sun dried tomatoes. Those and zucchini chips, which never even made it into a jar, they were so good, were my favorite of the dried foods.
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I am very impressed by Allan’s compost mowing skills.
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Your garden is showing a lot of springtime glory. So pretty!
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