Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Garden Tour

While Trust is bubbling around in the subconscious thought percolator, I'm busy brainstorming a new project, possibly a short story or novella. I'm also percolating the long awaited ending to Swan Queen. So many things to think about, I tell you.

This morning I went over feedback on a sci-fi short and got that submitted. That makes three shorts out in submissionland at the moment. I like to juggle a few things out there at once so when a rejection comes in, I'm not too bummed. After all, there are still other possible positive outcomes in the works.

Since I'm doing all this percolating, and ironicaly, this post was not on the list, how about I share some of my garden projects I've been bathering about for the past two months.

Previously. this was a solid mass of siberian iris.

And this was a mess of four foot tall orange daylilies that endeavored to choke out everything else.

These edging bricks were all covered in grass and dirt.
I've done a lot of archeological dig gardening so far this summer.

Added a lot of new stuff here, and after four years of neglect, treated this sun beaten patch of sandy garden to some much needed mulch.

Before I attacked this, only to top row of bricks was showing and the japanese iris had taken over. Amazing what a few years of letting things go will do--and not in a good way.


The new pond I put in. Previously this was a little 30 gallon pre-formed pond. Now its three foot deep and four foot by six foot wide. I wanted it bigger, but the waterfall section is sitting right on top the remains of a tree stump and I wasn't energetic enough to rent a stump grinder.


Lots of weeding done here. If I let this go, it would be a oak and pine tree forest.

The other side of the photo above. It's a very wide garden section.

A new section I put in a couple years ago that only needed some mild clean up.
Hands down, the easiest bed I had to tackle.

The roadside garden. This one was also recently redone so it wasn't horribly overgrown, just weedy.

Finally! One I can show you that has nicely filled in since last fall's makeover.
I hope they all look this nice next summer.

The other section of roadside garden. Did a lot of rearranging of perennials here because the bushes have all grown so much since I first put them in.

The iris patch in front of my very neglected garden. Blame my fractured ankle that came at the wrong time of year. (Is there a ever good time of year for that?) Did some major dividing and giving away of plants from this section.



Two years ago our new neighbors put in this fence which offered me the excuse to finally tackle one of the last untamed sections of our yard. Goodbye pricker vines and sassafrass trees! Moved a bunch of divided stuff into here and did a lot of weeding. Those sassafrass trees are like adverbs, they keep popping up everywhere!

Four more non-spectacular gardens are going undocumented for now. They need to fill in a lot before they are at all worthy of a photo.

I hope you enjoyed the tour. :)

3 comments:

  1. Nice going, Jean. Seems you have lots of little corners to deal with too. We've been pecking away at our yard, one bed at a time, over the last 5 years.

    Ooh! A pond! I really miss the pond we had at our old home. Do you have any fish? I'm glad you gave the dimensions, it's difficult to judge scale in a photo like that.

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  2. The photos don't really give a good scale, do they? The majority of the straight beds are fifteen to thirty foot long.

    I put a dollar's worth of feeder goldfish in there to get the pond started. We're down to four of the eight left. Once it gets better established, I'd like to get some nicer fish in there, but not koi. I don't feel like feeding the local raccoons $10 fish, and you know they'd leave the cheapy fish alone and go for the pricey ones. :)

    I have a bad habit of adding a new bed every year or so. This year I just rearranged all of them instead.

    As of 9:30pm tonight, I am officially done. The last bed and play area have been cleaned up. The tools, tarps and wheelbarrow are all put away. Darn that feels good!

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  3. Isn't it wonderful and awful how nature, left unchecked, will reclaim what is hers.

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