Updates to the Garden

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We finished the inside of the house. After getting done with the remodel, I tidied up everywhere. And now we’ve turned our sights outside to the garden. My goal right now is to get all the hardscape, edges, and mulch or groundcover in. Plants will come next.
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We have a lot of projects out there that have been ignored. This path needed a couple of hours to get installed. It has been like that for about two years. Now it is a path, not random stones.

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Here’s another project that didn’t take that long. We had grass here when we moved in. It hadn’t been watered for two years. It looked pretty bad. Now it is a beautiful clean slate, I want to fill it up with plants soon.

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The tramp just off this picture was leveled out. I attempted to seed more clover back here this spring, but it failed. The weeds outcompeted it. I’ve done it before successfully, and I will try again next year, this time with a little more work beforehand to get rid of the weeds. And I really want to get rid of that huge pile of sticks!

 

Play

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Sometimes I rediscover play.

My son and I were outside playing. We used some old boards to make bridges for the swales (irrigation ditches really, but “swales” sound much more interesting).

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After, I was looking around the yard and what looked to my adult mind like a pile of garbage had transformed itself into an opportunity. It became a fort. I was out there for almost an hour building a hokey, horrible fort. It was the best part of the day.

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Play isn’t about results or achieving something. It’s just having fun.

Harvest Advice

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Here’s a glory shot of one late afternoon’s work. If you notice, I prefer to freeze things and not can. It seems to be much easier and I’m also not worried as much about food poisoning. Shredded zucchini, salsa, tomatoes, refrigerator pickles, and peach jam. Oh, and if you want to make jam, this product makes it super easy.

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When I was in college, I did some research on strawberry varieties. I was pretty well informed when I went to buy some. I have two patches of strawberries. One patch I don’t even check, it doesn’t produce. I’m not sure on the variety, I got them from a friend. This is just one day’s pick from the other patch, and my variety that beats all others is Evie 2. It might be harder to find and more expensive but double or more production is worth it!

First Day

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first-day

How big of deal was the first day of first grade? It was so uneventful that I forgot to post about it. He went back to school, said it was pretty much like kindergarten and that was that.

Cut Back After Flowering

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I had yarrow growing in the front, and it started to get a bit overgrown and scraggly. So I employed one very good tip for perennials: Cut back after flowering. Not all perennials need this but it makes a huge difference for the ones that do. (If you want to know what perennials need what, read The Well-Tended Perennial Garden.)

It’s a simple matter of hacking back the perennial to withing a few inches of the ground. It feels a bit like you are trying to kill the plant. But don’t worry. Within a few weeks, the plant regrows. Instead of a scraggly eyesore, you will have a nicely tended perennial. In addition, it helps prevent the plant from reseeding, if that’s a problem.

flowering.jpg In this picture, the yarrow in the foreground was cut back two weeks ago. The one behind that was cut back minutes before the picture was taken.

Now I also have my lettuce, which I purposely did not cut back, even though it is a common practice to rip it out after it starts bolting. Lettuce will usually re-seed if it is allowed to mature. I quite enjoy free lettuce. lettuce.jpg

 

New House Stuff

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This chest was a thrift store find. The boys call it a treasure chest. Joe called it a mini-tardis (we’ve been watching a lot of Doctor Who). I’m loving all the storage inside. It’s been a great place to store the blanket, pillows and stuffed animals that tend to get scattered in the living room.

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The middle school replaced their desks and were giving away the old ones for free. I stopped by and found a couple of the oldest desks there. It’s actually been a great place for me to sit and work in the living room.

Now, we also went to the appliance store for some extra cardboard to use in the landscaping. We ended up buying a fridge and microwave. The microwave was on purpose, ours had been having issues. The fridge, not so much. It was my favorite fridge I’ve seen, and instead of being $1300, it was $700. I couldn’t pass up the good deal.

 

End of Summer

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The County Fair is the week before school starts. We went on the first night (because it happens to be a discount night for the carnival rides). See if you can spot the two youngest in this train ride:fair.jpg

There was a lot of animals after the rides. We like to compare our chickens, and our rooster is huge. Which is awesome, because it is the freezer now and will be dinner soon.

The boys and I went and visited the Church History Museum in Salt Lake, and also visited cousins there. The only complaint the whole time was having to leave.

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Later in the week, we went and found a fun Geocache. It was a multi-cache with four different stops. It was full of dead sticks and thorny plants, so we really had to work together to do it. Even the little kids were a benefit as they could fit into the tight spaces. Joe found the first, Peter the second, Liz the third, and Curtis the final large one. It was a great experience for everyone except for Henry. He was tired.IMG_20160827_113716274_HDR.jpg

Inspiration vs Ideas

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I had a half-formed idea in my head. I couldn’t quite articulate it for awhile. I was watching a youtube video, and in the video he mentioned something that helped me finish the idea. That idea was the contrast of ideas vs inspiration.

Ideas: a thought or suggestion as to a possible course of action. Going to the internet for ideas is draining. There are so many ideas out there: people to copy, projects to do, paths to take, ways to think. Many are good ideas, others just strange, and some are completely false. Ideas encourage us to copy a specific course of action. The ideas I often find often just leave me feeling discouraged, because my implementation will never quite measure up. It doesn’t lead me to be creative: copying others is never creativity.

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Inspiration: the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative. I can get inspired from the Internet. The things I read or watch often inspire me to develop my own ideas. Inspiration doesn’t lead to copying. It helps me clarify and form my own unique ideas. I usually find inspiration in strange places, often from sources that are doing things drastically different from what I want to do. (Like getting inspiration for writing a gardening book from someone building a marble machine.)

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So when I’m on the Internet, am I looking at ideas or am I gaining inspiration?

Bindweed

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I planted a patch of strawberries a few years ago. The ground was mostly bare when I planted them. But the next year, I had not only strawberries, but a bunch of bindweed as well.

Bindweed is one of the most hated weeds around for good reason. It is a noxious perennial, with deep roots and a long seed source. It is nearly impossible to eradicate and climbs up and around the plants until it takes over.

I despaired over the strawberry/bindweed combo. I had two perennial vines competing with each other, and one was more adapted to the situation than the other. But not the one I wanted. It seemed like a losing situation.

The work started. I mulched, fertilized and irrigated the strawberries, encouraging their growth. Once a week, never more and never less, I went through and pulled up all the bindweed. It was always there, aggressively growing. I didn’t always get all of it, but I kept trying and pulling.

It’s been three years. My maintenance in that time frame hasn’t changed: once a week weeding, and keeping up with the mulching and irrigation of the strawberries. This is what it looks like:

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I’m not pulling that much bindweed anymore. It was a hopeless situation. But I set maintenance plan and I worked consistently at the problem. It succeeded beyond my hopes.

If I would have at any point skipped weeding for more than a week or so, the bindweed would have overtaken my strawberries and I probably would have given up. It took years of effort to get rid of it. If I would have tried to work really hard at one point, pulled out as much bindweed as I could at one go: mulched it, sprayed it, etc; and then just left it, the bindweed would have come back and overtaken my strawberries.

It is still there: I haven’t eradicated the bindweed. But I put into action the habits that would limit it to an acceptable level, and would let my strawberries thrive instead.

I think there are a lot of parallels to life, if you want to find them. Or if nothing else, here’s some hope about bindweed: it is a horrible noxious weed, but it is not impossible to overcome it.