Best Birthday Gift Ever!

My brother-in-law had to go to Home Depot and he brought me back enough potting soil to handle the planned pot farm! Yay!

The Gas Man Cometh*

*I assume it will be men, though my initial consultations have been with a woman from the pipeline company.

Last Year’s Lilies

The gas company is replacing the gas main down my street and my corner street. They are also replacing the service line into the house, and relocating the meter from inside the house to the outside wall. In the course of doing that, they will bust through my new drywall to remove the old meter and pipes. They will repair it, and I may have leftover paint from two years ago when it was done (I’ve got the record of the paint selection if not). I understand this busting through the wall and replacing sections of drywall is relatively straightforward, and I’ve got no issues with that.

But they have to dig a hole in the middle of my yard!!! Underneath where the lilies are!

Last year, with Rocky

Apparently, my gas service has a complicated history, with a valve installed in the middle of the yard in 1987 and repaired again in 1992. Huh. Who knew their records were that good? And, are they really that good?

So most gas line replacements involve creating a hole in the street where the line starts, and a hole at the house where it ends, and they thread through a plastic replacement liner. But mine is more complicated, and the hole they have to dig is at the most spectacular part of my new garden. It’s inside the fence, protected from deer, and the most sunny part of the front.

Aiming right for the house

When the marking service came out, he tromped on the poor little lilies just poking up their heads. Digging a hole will be a disaster if I don’t do something first. So of course I will.

I once saw a magazine article about a short-term garden rescue. It involved digging up plants and tossing them on a tarp with plenty of their dirt around the roots. The tarp was dragged into the shade, and sprinkled several times throughout a three day period. Afterwards, everything went back. That is my plan for this. It might work. It might not.

I’ll also dig up the hellebores at the house. They are hardy, spread easily, and a bit invasive, so I don’t want to plant them in a place where they would seed themselves around freely. This inside corner has kept them nicely under control. I know the new meter will be big and ugly hanging on that wall. I may need a new bush to put there. But there isn’t much of another option for the hellebores that would keep them from spreading, so we’ll see. The good news is they are likely to do well.

The hellebores in front of the house
The meter will be here

This is scheduled for Friday, April 3. I picked the first available date, because the earlier it is, the smaller will be all the plants when I dig. I figure if they plan to grow more, that gives them more resources for recovery. If I had stopped to think, I would have picked the following Monday, in case the job spreads into more than one day. If they have problems, I may need to hold the plants over a weekend, which will add stress.

But who knows what the world will be like by then, two weeks from now? I’m assuming I’ll be strong enough to dig all the plants the day before they are scheduled to come. Because the hellebores are hardier than the lilies, I could dig them a day earlier, spreading some of the work.

And if I’m sick, either I hire someone by phone or else just let it happen. The world is ending, people are dying, and I am worried about my flowers. Sigh.

More Garden Progress

Blood root. I planted some over a decade ago, and the ants 

move the seeds around to make new colonies. 

My records show this is the normal date for it to appear.

It’s usually the first of my wildflowers.

This is my happy place, my reminder that life goes on. I have been out there every day, grubbing in the dirt. This year is odd in my yard, and not just because everything else in the world is off kilter. It’s this screwy year of no winter that  upsets the balance. Unseasonably warm, some plants are sprouting early, while others remain dormant. The difference is driven because plants’ annual cycle can be driven by different factors - temperature, certainly, but also day length and rainfall. So those plants driven out of dormancy by warm weather are sprouting, and those keyed to the light are stubbornly sticking to the schedule they evolved for eons ago. My roses leafed out early, but my wildflowers lag behind. It’s interesting to watch. But it’s also daunting to think about how climate change will affect this - those plants that can adapt to the temperature will do better in the long run.

I’ve done a great deal of garden cleanup. Some of this should have been done last fall, but I leave perennial plants standing over the winter, to provide cover and seeds for critters. Leaf bags are filling up now, though I also have a vacuum mode on my leaf blower, which shreds (dry) leaves into a bag. It can then be used as mulch. I’m also weeding - most of what has sprouted so far are weeds. There are a lot in the garden spaces, because I have only mulched sparsely and the plants are not yet big enough to crowd them out.

So garden areas I’ve cleaned up so far (notes to myself, cleanup means remove debris and weed):

• My back vegetable raised bed
• My back-of-the-house flower bed
• The three little raised beds on the street side
• Both “down” and “up” on the rounded corner
• The sunny slope, from the street and stairs up to the bushes
• Only some of the front garden inside the fence
• Along the fence by the back patio

My Home Depot garden: Daffs, Hostas, Daylilies, and
Three invisible Blueberries that will leaf out later

The plants I mail-ordered are starting to arrive, plus I picked up a few tidbits at Home Depot. I’ve also got seeds to start, both vegetables and flowers. I planted lettuce seeds in a pot on the patio where later I will do annual herbs (protected from deer by the Big Fence, but it requires protecting from The Very Hungry Labrador, who likes to eat potting soil).  I transplanted six broccoli plants into the back vegetable bed.  I bought a dwarf Alberta spruce and put it in a pot. I put in three hostas from Home Depot along the fence by the back patio. I planted a (jarringly hot pink) moss phlox by the front steps. This last is blooming right now because of forcing by the grower; in subsequent years I believe it will settle down and bloom with other things, and thus be less jarring.

Much work still to do! Because of my previously placed orders, I’m set for a while with projects and planting without needing to venture out to a store. I’m going to order mulch from the high school sale, where it will be delivered in bags at the end of the month. I do consider garden supplies to be essential, and I’m still full of unwarranted bravado in my risk calculations. But I won’t go to the nursery for a while, hoping it remains open so I can go later. I have plans to do a pot farm, because I own a lot of large pots and filling them fits my longer term strategies for less weeding. I’ll need big bags of potting soil, which my local hardware store will load into the car for me. That can wait a bit, because I’ve got an unopened box of plants to tend sitting on my porch right now.

Getting Things Done

After the pruning and cleanup.

We’ve had a great stretch of good weather, and I’m making the best of it. On Sunday, I had a date with my neighbor, a chain saw, and a ladder. We finally trimmed the bottom tier of branches on four big trees, which will make a real difference in both light and air beneath them. We got to the redbud and the red oak along the front, and to the pin oak and the redbud on the other street. Not done (we got tired - my neighbor is even older than me!) are the trees in the back.

After a rest,  I spent the first daylight savings evening doing some light weeding while enjoying the late light. I noticed that at least two of the three chrysanthemums I planted last fall are sprouting now. I wasn’t sure they would come back. There are garden mums for landscaping and florist mums for decorating pots in fall, and the three I bought from a big box store were not labeled as perennial. Perhaps it’s just the mild winter, but I’ll consider it a win.

Monday, I finished cleaning up the smaller trim from the branches. I took a pass along the corner, both down by the street and up behind the wall. There were standing stems throughout, and a few weeds to root out. Now the sprouting foliage is all visible along it.

Still working...

I also have been doing a fair amount of planning and on-line shopping. I have a much more clear vision of where I’m going overall. I’m making sure I know what I’m going to do with everything I buy. I’m thinking a separate post for plans and purchases.

Today I did a pass through Home Depot, where things were buzzing from the sudden burst of warm weather. I was there for light bulbs, but I picked up some plants and supplies, again with a clear plan in my mind of where they are to go.

Tomorrow, I’m busy elsewhere much of the day, but I’ve got bite-sized chunks of work to squeeze into the afternoon.

I LOVE this time of year, and it is such a luxury to have the time to do things. I’m not as strong, and I don’t have the stamina I would wish, but I’m getting things done and I assume also building fitness along the way.

Spring Has Started Springing

Daffs, hellebores, and liriope in the right foreground.

We had two totally lovely days this week where I was at home and in the mood to get out there and garden. It made me remember how annoyed I was last year that I was persuaded by loyalty to stay longer at my all-consuming job, so instead of retiring by March, I was there through June. The only real difference it made - but a difference I can tell now - is that I missed most of the spring gardening season. Some things have to be done now and others are best done now.  If not done before the growing season is fully underway, some things have to wait for months or a full year, and overall it's a game of catch-up all year.

But the sun was shining, the birds were singing, daffodils and crocuses were blooming, and I could get out there and do things, not just think about it. In danger of putting myself in a bad mood from useless, old, resentment, I was able to instead celebrate the freedom I am enjoying. (Phew! Borrowing bad moods from circumstances in the past or future is a habit I'm trying to break. Also working on thoughts about the present, but that is a longer process.)

I'm a fan of fall, but early spring is actually my favorite. It's all hope and ambition. It's not too late to catch-up on neglected winter chores, but new beginnings are the theme. My body opens and expands to the sun, and I can feel my vitamin D being manufactured everywhere inside me. As I weed or brush aside old leaves, I see tiny little leaves poking up.

One day this week, I weeded by the front steps, down to the corner where liriope has over-expanded. I laboriously dug a lot of it out, from the edges in, and severely trimmed the rest. This is an ornamental, easy-care groundcover, that I am slowly, slowly, trying to eliminate entirely from my property. It has no wildlife value, and it spreads both by root and seeds, so it just appears in places I never planted it, like above. But, it also is great at holding ground and slowing erosion, so I don't want to rip it out wholesale before I'm ready to put something in its place- especially on the steep slope parts of my yard.

I also took a pass at weeding along the street outside the fence. At the low end, the neighbors have a patch of english ivy, myrtle, euonymus, and japanese honeysuckle, spiced with some poison ivy. Nasty stuff, especially together, and it requires pulling back a couple of times a year to beyond the property line. I hadn't done it at all last year, and I filled a bag and a half of vines I pulled out from my side. Here, there is a lot of good stuff that has taken hold under the vines, so I think just giving them room to breathe and eat will be enough to bring them back.

The hydrangea doesn't have leaves, so the transplants are invisible sticks here.
You can also see the rhododendron, which just might bloom this year since,

for the first time ever, it's gone a year with no deer bites.

I got ambitious and I did the first of several thrifty transplants I have planned. I dug up some suckers from the big-as-a-smartcar oak leaf hydrangea and put them inside the fence, on the lower corner. This is deep shade, so I don't expect the exuberance I see in the sun, but I think it will do ok. My intent in planting here is for the roots to hold the ground together and reduce erosion. 

A task undone last fall (lack of energy reinforced with uncertainty of how bad it would be) is cleaning up last year's leaves from the two ancient oaks that blanket this corner. I had the thought they might just decompose in place, but oak leaves really take at least a couple of years. I allowed the leaves to drift down from the slope above and fill the corner deeply, piling up against the fence. Upon close inspection this year, I think it's a mistake to allow the ground inside the fence to build up too much higher than right outside the fence. It can't be helped at this corner, but it can be prevented from piling up ever higher. So before I could plant, I had to clean up the leaves. I have an electric blower/vac, and I vacuumed up many of the leaves - they get shredded in the process. As a result, the bulk goes way down, and they will decompose much faster. Some of the shredded leaves go into my compost pile, but the consistency is such that they actually become acceptable mulch for purely bare areas. I like to re-use it on my own property, rather than send it away to be processed in the county compost factory and later buy it back in bags at Home Depot.

Outside the fence on the same corner.
This badly needs roots to stabilize it.

My next plan is to dig up some suckers from other big bushes on the property and plant them outside the fence. There is a great need to stabilize the slope there, and I'd rather not have to deal with expensive stone or wood engineering. First I'll do sprigs of bushes, and then I'll transplant some of the many thriving ground-covers I have elsewhere - but not the invasive thugs I've been pulling out! I'm thinking of my happy spring flowering natives and some fairly aggressive grasses. This is deep shade from oaks, so only certain things will thrive.   

Yay, spring!