The past week has made all the difference in the garden. We've clearly crossed a quantum threshhold for green-ness. :-> Probably helps that last weekend was supposed to be constant rain (except when it was snow), and instead was bright and sunny and 50degF or higher.

Two weeks ago, the front yard was mostly hard-packed clay (and moss, near the house), the violets were alien-looking green masses of rooty tuber, and all the bushes and woody plants were bundles of sticks awkwardly standing around in sheepish clusters. This morning, the violets all have leaves bigger than loonies (and we have a LOT of violets!), the bushes are budding out or leafing (the spicebush up front looks like it's been flocked chartreuse; the nannyberries and elderberries out back are quite respectably leafed already -- in a week flat!), and even the new fruit trees I just planted are showing signs of wanting to make themselves to home and settle in. The columbines, even the ones that were just babies last year, all have at least three leaves out, and the older ones are knee-high mounds of foliage. The beans I've been sprouting inside have two creditable leaves each, and are almost ready to go out. And we have our first purple tulip bloom!

I need to go around and take pictures when I get home, document how it's boinging, and maybe even make a 'Welcome to my garden! Here, have a virtual tour' lj post. We'll see.

My in-laws were in town, so as usual, I'm underslept and have had no time to myself for days, but I enjoyed it. :-> This weekend, we:

• Ate at Nueva Leone, which is yummy cheap Mexican food, and highly approved by John's mum.
  
• Went to the Field Museum, where I saw the Mythical Creatures exhibit and the George Washington Carver exhibit. In that latter, they have a piece of netted embroidery mislabeled as 'crochet'. Arghhh! And this from a major research museum with a textile department. Sigh. Whatever. The rest of the visit to the museum was great. :->
  
• Ate dinner at Barcelona Tapas/Tapas Barcelona in Evanston, with my aunt-in-law MJ added to the pre-existing party of five.
  
• Went back to MJ's to fix her computer, examine her sewing machine, and, as it turned out, watch most of an episode of 'ShakespeaRe-Told,' a nifty BBC series that I think I need to own.
  
• Planted my mailorder fruit trees yesterday morning before getting Out and About.
  
• Saw "Under the Same Moon" up at Old Orchard in our party-of-six. OMG good movie. Funnier than I expected, and less sad; I was thinking I'd come out dripping tears and wrist-slittingly depressed, but it was really uplifting, as well as emotionally intense. Highly recommended.
  
• Bought me a new cellphone ... because, aside from already considering replacing the one I had, it, um, took an unauthorised swim. So. The new one's black, sexy, and has nicer menu software than the old one. Win! :->
  
• Ate dinner at Addis Abeba -- first time I've had Ethiopian. It was yummy. The in-laws look at me funny when I said it was "Kind of like Middle-Eastern food, only the bread is different," but that's how my head files it. The bread WAS very different than anything else I've ever had, rather like edible thin sheets of foam rubber.
  
• Went back to MJ's for more computerfixing, and then home.
  

Brief footnote, in re the fruit trees: I mailordered apples (and an accidental cherry) from Trees of Antiquity. A highly recommended buying experience, if any of you are in the market for fruitbearing woody plants; they have a whole range of really neat, really old varieties, on modern dwarfing and semi-dwarfing rootstock.

And now I've blogged it so I don't forget to, whew.

Today's tasks: water all the trees, the strawberries, and the back lawn. Run the dishwasher at least once. Help John get all the sheets into the wash and back out and folded. Eat something. Practice my piano homework. Write up my concert report for class ...

Well, it's not spring YET (because there are still slabs of ice in my front yard), but it's been over 50degF for two days now and the plants are starting to insist that spring is COMING. There is, for example, a cluster of crocus foliage determinedly poking out of a snowbank.

Also, the birds agree; the redwings have arrived, and they're seasonal migrators. Over the fall and winter, juncoes and downy woodpeckers have firmly moved from 'rarely seen' to 'feeder regulars.' The downies have even gotten so bold as to refuse to fly away until I get within five feet, which is especially impressive given how skittish they were last spring.

Soon the ground will thaw and it will be time to start digging frantically, and time to put all my mail-order garden plants in the ground for the season. I should probably get a head-start on all that by ripping down the old dead morning glories, and generally tidying up fall's leavings, but I think I'll just sit on my porch in the sunshine with my dogs and eat breakfast, first. :->

Horticulturally, that is.

Strawberries are like many new-world edible crops (tomatoes, for example), in that they have three often contradictory growing needs:

1. They want their soil constantly moist and cool.
2. They utterly detest standing water, or soil that is TOO wet -- good drainage is a must or they will curl up their leaves and sulk.
3. They adore sun, and want as much of it as they can get.

In addition, strawberries are a sprawling runnery plant, and their fruit quite annoyingly tries as hard as it can to lie directly on the dirt and rot just as soon as it's ripe. Annoying to humans trying to cultivate them, at least; box turtles and other wildlife find it wonderfully convenient.

The best solution I've found to painless strawberry culture is that ancient invention, the strawberry pot. Nowadays they're mostly sold for putting hens-and-chicks or cascading annuals in, but they're named what they are for a reason; if you pot 'em right and treat 'em right, they are precisely the Right Tool for the job.

First, some definition, in case you haven't seen one -- a strawberry pot (or strawberry jar) is a big-bellied clay pot, roughly amphora-shaped, with slits or gaping pockets in the sides so it's effectively a bunch of pots stacked together with a common soil reservoir. They look like this (another option for the crafty: someone made a really neat strawberry tower out of wood that's basically a big strawberry jar). Some have lots of holes in multiple tiers; some have only two or four. Any will work, though of course more pockets in one pot means you only have to find space to PUT that one pot. :-> It is very important that it has a nice big drainage hole in the bottom, or if it's more than a four-holer pot, SEVERAL holes. It is possible to make drainage holes bigger with a drill-bit intended for use on 'glass', if you're handy.

Now, to how to plant them. The soil you use is, of course, important; you want something that retains a lot of moisture but drains freely. Storebought potting mixes with a lot of milled peat in them are a good choice, or you can mix peat with garden soil; in either case, before potting you have to put the soil in a bucket and wet it thoroughly, massaging it between your fingers, until the peat accepts the water and stops clinging together in dry pale balls. While you're doing this, put your sphagnum moss in water to soak so it has a chance to get sodden.

Next, you have to make sure the soil won't fall out. A piece of windowscreen big enough to cover the holes, or fine-mesh hardware cloth, works well. Some people swear by broken crockery bits; use that if it's what you're familiar with. In either case, you'll also need a quantity of pea gravel (rinse it first; it's usually dusty). Once you've guarded your holes -- without blocking water flow through them! -- put a thin layer of pea gravel over your retention system. It should be just one or two rocks thick at this point, giving the water somewhere to run once it falls to the bottom.

Now you need perhaps the strangest gardening tool you've ever heard of -- an empty paper-towel roll, or similar cardboard tube. If your strawberry pot is very big (knee-high, etc), you'll need a tube with a 2"-4" diameter, and tall enough to go from the bottom of the pot to its top. Insert the tube in your pot, centered, and fill it with pea gravel. The gravel should stop about 2" short of the rim of the pot.

Here's the tricky part, which is easier with assistance (it's a perfect task to get a kid to help with). You have to hold the tube-o-gravel upright while planting the rest of the pot in a layer cake of soil, strawberries, and time-release fertilizer granules (if you use such a thing, which I do).

The process goes like this: fill with soil to the level of the first holes' lower lip. Insert strawberry crowns in each hole, spreading the roots out linearly on the soil layer. Add more soil to cover; press down lightly. Sprinkle on fertilizer granules. Pack the remainder of the hole opening with sphagnum, both to retain the soil, and as moisture-keeping mulch.

Repeat. When you've planted the top layer of holes, fill the rest of the pot (save for the top 1/4"-1/2") with soil; you can plant 1-3 more crowns up there, just as if you were putting them in the ground. When the soil passes the height of the gravel column in the paper towel roll, gently remove the roll, leaving a cylinder of gravel down the core of the pot, and continue putting soil on top as you go. To discourage squirrels, I mulch the top with sphagnum and then add a sparse layer of larger-than-pea-gravel pebbles to hold the mulch down. For some reason, if the top of the pot is rocky, the squirrels don't dig them up nearly as much.

When watering, it is very important to make sure the whole thing is soaked. I run the hose (on 'shower') in the top until water is streaming out the bottom hole, then wet down each hole on the sides individually. Here's the trick: if you planted them right (the gravel and the soil mix are key, here), you CANNOT overwater, because any extra just runs out the bottom. You'll be wetting your patio or porch, but not harming the strawberries at all.

You can stick your finger under the sphagnum mulch to see if the soil is still moist (that is, cool to the touch); if not, soak that baby till it streams. You can also watch the leaves; they'll droop if they're thirsty. I live in Chicago; on our hottest weeks (daily highs well over 85degF, sometimes as high as 98degF), I sometimes have to water them every day. In sub-85 weeks, I only need to water twice a week or so. On the very hottest days I'll give their leaves a brief cooling 'shower' when I get home, but that's more to help their spiracles cope than to wet the soil itself.

To reiterate, for this project You Will Need:

• A strawberry pot with nice big drainage holes
  
• Well-draining soil mix
  
• A cardboard tube
  
• Gravel
  
• Mesh for the bottom of the pot, or sherds
  
• Strawberry crowns -- hopefully not more than you can plant in your pots!
  
• Fibrous sphagnum moss - it should look like stringy pieces of weed
  
• Time-release 'bloom food' fertilizer granules (optional)

Partway through the season, your plants will start throwing out runners like they want to re-enact Invasion of the Triffids. If some of your initially-planted crowns failed to take, feel free to guide a runner-baby into the appropriate empty hole and pack it down with sphagnum; otherwise, prune them off. They distract the plant's energy from fruiting. If you do give a runner a hole to grow in, cut its umbilicus once it's well-established, and never let a runner-from-a-runner develop.

A lot has changed since last winter in our yard, and I don't remember the last time I posted about the yard, so. :->

First off, we've finally accepted in our hearts that we're not going to be parking our car on the concrete pad in our backyard, so we're going to stop calling it 'the garage'[1] and have begun calling it 'the patio'. Partly this is because it is now so full of my container-gardening containers (and benches to support the smaller versions of same) that we couldn't get a car ON there without a lot of work and rearrangement.

The Crops

Container gardening, I hear you ask? Why, yes. It sort of started with bonsai, but I also decided I wanted to get into actual crops this year. John insists our soil is too potentially dangerous [2] to grow food in, so anything we're going to eat has to go in pots with storebought soil. Some are big, and sit on the ground; some are small, and sit on waist-high benches. The tomatoes go in big pots, the strawberries in small.

We mail-ordered six varieties of heirloom tomatoes from Seeds of Change, and despite some incompetence on my part in their initial planting and some later maintenance, they all survived, and are now growing with varying degrees of enthusiasm. We have received at least one ripe tomato fruit off each plant now, and there are a lot more hanging green waiting to ripen. Luckily, we have a chest freezer, if worse comes to worst. :->

The strawberries are also from Seeds of Change, and are the 'Seascape' variety; they only sell them in packs of twenty crowns, so I bought four four-hole strawberry pots (plus planting in the top, of course), because OMG even if John trusted our soil did I learn YEARS ago that it's utterly stupid and far too much work to plant strawberries in the ground. Strawberry pots, properly planted, make them effortless. And explaining that statement would probably take a whole how-to post talking about strawberries and their propensities, which I'll make later if there's interest.

The 'Seascape' variety is supposed to be a two-cropper, not an everbearing variety; in theory this means that they give you a spurt of fruit in late spring and another spurt in early fall. Well, our plants decided about a week and a half ago that, clearly, it is now fall, because they put out clouds of flowers and are starting to fruit again. Not that I'm complaining, mind you, I just think their timers are a bit off. :->

I also have a variety of Small Trees, which are on the way towards maybe becoming bonsai someday, once I've learned more, and probably killed a lot of trees. :->

Drainage

When it rains heavily, certain weaknesses in the construction and maintenance of our property come into sharp view. The sidewalks have heaved and torqued a bit, and were probably not pitched properly to start with, meaning that the entire back yard, our eastern neighbors' entire back yard, and half of our breezeway [3] all drain to a point just at the bottom of our back-porch stairs, and puddles there. Lots of fun in winter, of course, when it turns to black ice ...

This spring, John and I finally got sick enough of it to Do Something. In retrospect, we could have taken more extreme measures, but we do tend to take a Small Step and then another later if it seems warranted. Even this 'small' project ended up entailing four separate trips to home centers, so perhaps it was just as ambitious as we could handle. :->

We dug a sump. Specifically, we took the odd-shaped corner of lawn [4] adjacent to our porch stairs and dug it out to a depth of about 30 inches [5], then filled it in with medium-sized smooth stones, what home centers call 'pond pebbles'. They range in size from 'big strawberry' to 'child's fist'. In fact, we filled it with SIX BAGS of pond pebbles -- this is why we had to keep going to home centers, because we underbought repeatedly. Man, but that hole ate rock and greedily asked for more.

However, the work is all worth it, because in Torrential Downpour (better than an inch an hour), the foot of the stairs does still lake up, but it takes quite some time for the water level to get high enough to slop over the top of the basement stairs and cascade down towards the drain down there [6]. Also, as soon as it stops raining, the lake drains away to nothing in about ten minutes, which is impressive.

I have a few pipedream plans about what I might do to continue to improve the drainage situation, but most of them involve a LOT of digging, so it has to wait till the weather cools off. A serious vaporware that nonetheless might happen sometime before hell freezes over involves prying off the bottom several stair-treads of the back-porch stairs, and digging out the area UNDER the stairs themselves to widen the sump. I'm more likely to try digging out the dirt-beside-the-breezeway-sidewalk to put in several inches of gravel first, though. I doubt, because of the proximity of our neighbors' chain link fence, that I'll be able to make it more than 4-6 inches deep, but even that might help a bit. It'd be less work than ripping up the porch and digging out a 2ft-by-3ft area as deep as the sump. :->

Landscaping

Aside from the native bushes (nannyberry, elderberry, spicebush, bittersweet) I've probably talked about putting in, I've also been installing a whole flat of columbines all over the place, and in spring planted a six-perennial 'hummingbird' assortment. Hopefully they'll come back next year with enthusiasm. I certainly don't intend to put up and clean hummingbird feeders until I've SEEN a hummingbird in my lab -- too much work. :-> So I'll get the plants to do my work for me. I still have to figure out a nice shady-but-convenient-to-water place to put a windowbox of fuschias; tough, in our yard. Sun, we got. Shade, not so much, despite Grandmama Cottonwood's thorough effort.

None of the bushes I put in this year really had much of a growth spurt, though the elderberry did put out flowers and is developing fruit; I think mid-May is probably, in hindsight, a little late to be putting in bushes. :-> Hopefully they've gotten their roots nicely established this season, though, and will therefore go PAVOOM in spring.

( The footnotes, if you care. )

Or, rather, sometimes plants are perverse.

Exhibit One: My Elderberries

Elderberries are, in theory, wonderful plants. They give great cover and nice winter food (in the form of their quite-decorative berries). They're even pretty. However, I think the ones I happened to get are either masochists or have a death wish.

New growth on elderberries, I can now state with assurance, is vulnerable to heat and drought. I have solid experimental evidence of the fact. Older growth, mature leaves, don't care, but the baby new pale green stuff, and the flower bracts, shrivel and twist and are permanently deformed by the heat and dryness.

So when do my elderberries, invariably, sprout forests of new baby growth? When it's hot out, of course. They're really starting to piss me off. :->

Exhibit Two: The Mystery Tomato Blight

I don't know what this is, exactly, but about 2/3 of the developing tomatoes on my Burbank-variety bush are getting it. Just this week, the Brandywine started doing it, too -- and on tomatoes that were starting to blush orange! Man, unfair ... I have yet to get a finished, ripe, done tomato out of these silly plants, but I've gotten eighteen rotted ones.

So far it's just those two bushes, but as I don't know what it is, I'm a little worried it'll spread. I've cut open the victims, and see no sign of insect involvement -- this is either a 'birth defect' or some kind of pathogen. I know some of you garden (or have gardened); does this look familiar to you? It always starts at the blossom end, the bottom as it hangs on the plant. You can click on that photo for a bigger version.

I've had to explain my yard to a couple neighbors lately, so the thinking is fresh in my mind, and I thought I might as well make an LJ post. :->

I was raised to garden not so much as a formal style of architectural adornment, but as a variety of ecosystems management. Comes of having a geeky mom who's involved in a lot of natural-areas work, probably.

Gardening (as I do it -- your yard may vary) is really a four-dimensional undertaking, involving as it does both three-dimensional arrangement of appropriate plants [1] in space, and a temporal component: when things bloom, how big they'll get in a few years, how all the growth habits in that bed will interact.

Which isn't to say it's rocket science. :-> Especially in its initial phases, gardening involves a lot of incremental changes, followed by 'settling-in' periods where you live with it that way for a while and see how you like it. In my case, I didn't really start changing things until the second year we lived in the house. The first spring, I waited to see what would come up, and gradually instituted The Weeding Protocol.

The Weeding Protocol

• What is this plant? (Identify to scientific name, which sometimes takes months; also identify its growth habit and seeding/spreading tendencies. Plants that spread aggressively are more likely to be put on the 'eradicate' list than calmer, less evangelical flora)
  
• Do I like it? (For example, if it's prickly it GETS PULLED, regardless. I dislike my garden prickling at me)
  
• Do I like it growing there? (If it's a much-wanted plant in an inappropriate place, I might move it. Otherwise, just pull and compost)

The Weeding Protocol is implemented iteratively, for twenty minutes or so at a time, as I have urge and available material to pull. Certain plants are pull-on-sight; others I pull when I feel like doing a thorough job in a given bed.

Starting last year, and more thoroughly this spring, I've actually started putting in new plants that I want to grow there, with an eye towards final 'plans' for the various areas. I have two guiding principles of design, if you will, plus a third modifier:

1. Green is good. I would much rather have a verdant bed of something plain and nonaggressive than bare dirt or mulch.
2. Low-maintenance is the order of the day. When something's first being put in, I'll accord it a certain amount of mollycoddling and special treatment, but once it's firmly established it better not expect me to take care of it intensively. This means no special watering or feeding, but it also means I favor dense plantings that need little weeding. I'm not a big fan of "specimen showy plant in an expanse of nothing so you can appreciate it better," at least in my own yard, however pretty it can be when someone else has to pay the gardeners to maintain it.
3. Native beats non-native, all else being equal. I've been trying very hard not to purchase and put in the ground anything that isn't plausibly native to northeastern Illinois. For this purpose I'm not counting my food crops, since they're in containers anyhow and not part of the 'general ecosystem'.

I've put in three species of native bush, am encouraging my (came-with-the-house) native violets [2] to seed and spread, and have put in columbines to interplant with the violets for self-mulching no-maintenance 'pretty' beds. I did relax the natives rule slightly for the sake of my bulb bed, which is full of crocuses, hyacinths, a few tulips, and so on. The bulb bed (see previous comment about four-dimensionality) is also, in season, the morning-glory bed -- another showy non-native, but they came with the house. :-> Also, they cover my front fences with gorgeous flower 'hedges' by the end of the summer, so I'll forgive them a lot.

---

Footnotes

1. Appropriate plants are chosen for a combination of aesthetic (color, height, leaf shape, do I like them) and practical (what water/sun conditions does it like, does it make food for birds or butterflies, is it annoying) considerations.
   
2. My violets, Viola sororia (formerly Viola papilionacea, just to throw more Latin at you), are native to the local woodlands, and very hard to acquire more seeds or plants of, for some reason. The prairie form, Viola pedata, everybody and their brother seems to sell.
   

A lot's been going on in our garden since the last time I wrote. A full accounting of species, with pictures, is going to have to wait; however, here are a few jottings.

( Click for more. Or don't, if you don't want to. )

In other words, for a day in which I spent hours and hours sacked out half-asleep in various positions all over my house (thank you, female reproductive biology. Grr), there were actually a surprisingly large number of things I've been meaning to do for weeks that were done at the end of the day. Most thanks are due to John, for facilitating my productivity (as well as tearing through chores on his own recognizance!).

We bought a shrub (Spirea japonica) and put it in at the corner of the 'garage' [1] in the spot that's been BEGGING for a shrub, in my design-mind, since we first started clearing out the trash and looking at the 'shape' of the garden, in spring 2004. I may not want a spirea there, ultimately, but it was what was on sale at the garden center's "please take these plants off our hands before snow flies" sale, and there's (just barely) time for it to establish before frost, so if I later decide I want a different shrub there, I can move it to the front yard next summer.

We put up the bird feeder again. Finally. We'd had it with its pole in a bucket of gravel, and that worked for a while, but then it got tipped over repeatedly (I now blame the squirrels), and finally we quit putting it back up until we could do it more permanently. Weeks ago. Now we've pounded the end of a 12-foot piece of electrical conduit at least 3 feet into the ground, then trimmed to where we want it, and the bird feeder is sitting on an oak dowel jammed firmly into the top of the piece of conduit, just about my head-height when I stand in the garage, so I can fill it easily. Now to see if we can get something besides sparrows to visit it! [2]

John lopped a good number of twiggy limbs off the (enormous, ancient) cottonwood over our yard, getting our electrical and phone lines out of danger. Again. It says something that he has to put our 20-foot ladder in the garage to be able to reach even the low branches -- the tree's taller than our house by a good safety margin. And, unfortunately, has several dead limbs that the woodpeckers just love to snack from. Unfortunately, it is just barely entirely in our neighbors' yard, so we have no say over it, and no right to call an arborist on its behalf.

I put anchors in the wall for, but did not finish mounting, my new delicates hamper.

I changed my guitar's strings, which needed them so badly that when I went to slack my high E string, *it broke*. New record for 'needing changed,' for me. Probably over a year and a half since the last change, though I don't play it much. My dearling guitar should stay in tune better now, at least once they stretch in. :->

We went to the fabric store for bias tape to repair the edge of one of our comforters and some buttons for the seatcushion slipcovers I made a few weeks ago.

Saturday, we did groceries and hit the pet supply for a couple of clickers -- we're going to try to click-train the dogs, given Ajax's continuing anxiety. I'm just going to have to study like heck to stay at least two lessons ahead of the dogs. :-> While we were there we topped up on flea treatment, replaced Ajax's muzzle, bought a coupling attachment for our leash, and some other oddments. We discovered that while Ajax adores pig ears, Boston doesn't seem to see the point -- he'll nibble once or twice, and then drop it. Carrots, on the other hand, both dogs adore.

We played about ten minutes of the 'Come' Game with each dog on Saturday. They did fairly well for being tossed in the deep end of a new game and an entirely new training method, and much crunchy cereal fiber-treat was consumed, which is often a win on its own merits.

In other news, whatever it was I planted near the southeast corner of the garage is coming up like gangbusters -- it's either cardinalflower or a blue lobelia, but I forget which I put where. Regardless, it's sprouting all over, so I'll have some next year. :->

Today, we're going to go spend the afternoon at the Chicago Botanical Gardens with one of my sisters and maybe my dad. Of course, all their bestest special cool stuff happened YESTERDAY, but we'd scheduled this fun-day quite some time ago, so oh well. It'll be neat anyway. Turns out John's never been! We'll fix that. There will likely be pictures.

---

1. Our garage is in fact a bare concrete pad -- we joke, "instant garage, just add walls and roof."
   
2. Birds on our feeder Mostly we have sparrows on our feeder, no matter what we fill it with. There are cardinals, jays, mourning doves, hairy woodpeckers (!), and a possible gray catbird in our neighborhood, as well as the sparrows and grackles, but we've never seen them on our feeder. I'm trying a 'woodpecker mix' now, which includes peanuts and corn and dog only knows what-all, and supplementing it with raisins to hopefully lure the cardinals, and we'll see. I want to try suet, but not if the squirrels are just going to eat it all, so the mounting method requires thought. :->

I'm working on (a) putting stuff on my Flickr account and (b) working up text and pictures to do a comprehensive '"species I've seen in my yard" post/series of posts.

Pursuant to that, I'm starting with the ones that I have not yet identified. I mean, I know it's a distinct species, but I don't know what it's CALLED. Suggestions welcome, from those of you fluent in backyard botany/weed names. :->

I tried to take careful shots showing the important-for-taxonomy features, but if I missed something lemme know, and I can probably go shoot to order some more specific pictures. Some of these have minor focus issues, because I'm still getting used to the macro on my new digicam.

( Pictures within. )

Or you can go right to my Garden Census page on Flickr, if you want.

Wow, over a week since my last entry. And no time to write a real one now ... Sorry. :->

Some topics that may get covered over the next week as I write catch-ups:

• Book recommendations/discussion from my recent reading
• Beagles R Cuuuuuuuute, with photographic evidence
• Ramblings on music and participation and born_to_me's last music-and-games night
• Discussion and photographs on the subjects 'Why the Milwaukee Public Museum is VERY COOL and I simply must go back when I have 7 solid hours to spend there' and 'Wow, I really like what they did with the Museum of Science and Industry in the remodel', since we went to both of them when John's folks were in town for his birthday
• An illustrated census/yearbook/rogue's-gallery of my garden's current inhabitants, both intentionally planted by me and otherwise. I must say, urbpan is doing a wonderful job with his 365 Urban Species project: I only managed to identify one of my weeds for certain before he featured it, though of late he's merely been confirming my moderately-vague but researched suspicions.
  
• How Suburban-Jewish Mah-Jongg is like Dragon Poker ... though at least it's not Calvinball, thank God.

Or it might be something completely different that occurs to me between now and then. :-> For now, it is enough (in a very 'dayenu' kind of way) that I have done almost all the extant laundry today, and folded and put away not only most of what I laundered today, but the backlog from previous laundry weekends. Also made two slipcover pillowcases for couch cushions. And beat several levels of Railroad Tycoon II.

I feel strangely competent today, though I know it's just a local high in a morass of overlooked tasks and general inadequacy. Nonetheless, conscious Pollyanna that I am, I'm enjoying it while I have it.

Also I splurged $15 on four packets of (organic, mostly-native) perennial seed to plant in late summer and let get bushy before first frost, so it'll flower next year. Theoretically. Step 1 of (many) in the 'trying to get the garden more organized and less whatever-came-up-this-year' plan.

When the dirt pudding showed up, I should have known it was an omen. A Sign of Things to Come. An intimation that this weekend, far from being relaxed, productive, and fun, was instead going to be a sidelong trudge through skeery places and sudden swerving changes of life-plan.

( I cut because I love. )

So, everyone's still alive, and mayyyybe on the horizon there might be a hopeful shape of new-plans-to-come, but right now we're still neck-deep in the Big Muddy, and the dam'fool is shouting, "Press On."

Though there's a midwest-native species of honeysuckle I'm considering mail-ordering to put on the new fence making up the west edge of our yard ... ahem. But *aside* from that, I think it's time to just call it done for the year and focus on weeding and nurturing. I did find a nursery/garden center of which I approve pretty seriously (esp. compared to Home Depot), though I do dearly wish it had more midwest-native flora available for sale. They do better than most, and none of what I bought was potbound. Not even a little. *gasp*

Today I got (some kind of hybrid) salvias, (some kind of hybrid, low-growing) lobelias, a lovely tall wispy columbine, some acorn squash to grow in a planter, and a big basket of fuschias.

I've never grown fuschias before, though they have a wondrous fantastical look I approve of; hints from more experienced readers would be welcome. Currently I'm planning to leave them in the hanging basket they came in (until after the blooming season), and water them when the soil feels dry.

I got them to lure me some hummingbirds. :-> Once they know my yard holds food, I can put up a feeder and supercharge them with sugar-water, but it's a pain to wash it out twice a week when it's not getting any customers.

I'm a little worried about the hardiness/zone tolerance of the salvias and lobelias, but they were $1.10 each for a four-pack plastic pot, so I was weak and bought them anyway. They look showy, so I should at least get one year of nice bloom out of them, even if they end up being 'annuals' here in Zone 5.

I'm presuming I should bring the fuschias inside for the winter, but that's another bridge I'll burn when I get to it ... along with figuring out what to do about the lack of proper draining in the squash's planter. It has holes, it has sherds over the holes, but the dirt seems to want to turn to pudding instead of, y'know, DRAINING. However, since the planter is currently full of pudding despite my attempts to amend-and-mix-in other stuff, I think I'm going to wait till it dries out, dump it, and repot. Or something. Tomorrow. 'Cause right now, phooo, tired.

Oh, several reasons. You get out of feeling guilty for not slaving away in the hot sun pulling weeds, for one. Or I do. Plus it makes things GROW. But the #1 reason I'm glad it rained today is that it means I don't have to go out there and water in the new plants I bought and put in the ground Tuesday.

Yes, I finally caved and spent money for plants. Only $17 (including tax), and mostly perennials, so it's a good bargain. Plus, now I'm actually GARDENING instead of just performing ecosystem management! Or something. Go me.

Yes, yes, I know, enough insecure babbling, you all want to hear about the LOOT! And how do I tell people about loot? In bullet points, but of course. Why? Because it's easier than trying to structure what I'm about to say into a non-rambly, non-parenthetical, coherent essay. And I'm all about the easy. Or something. :->

( That said, some of y'all are wimps about scroll. And some just don't care about gardening. So I'm'a lj-cut this; click if you want details. There are even footnotes! )

We've really not so much been 'gardening' yet, so much as performing assisted selection on the existing species install-base. This year is really the first for us to be, y'know, amending soil, transplanting, etc. I might work up to actually buying plants to put in the ground; I might not. But it occurred to me that some of you folks might be amused to see what our list looks like.

( Eradicate, Discourage, Encourage, Ignore? )

I'd say not much is happening around here, but the same amount of everything is going on; I just don't seem to have much to say about it. I've been spending an awful lot of time half-asleep on the couch. Man, I wish I had time, money, and emotional capital to (a) get back into therapy and (b) get medicated again ...

Failing that, I figured I'd let people know I'm at least not dead. :->

Last night we did a lot of hanging out with John's aunt, who is nifty, and whose house is BEYOND nifty.

The raspberry canes (5 survivors out of 6 planted) are sprouting vigorously; one of the first cohort has even gone the extra mile and popped out about twenty flower-buds, so OMG we might actually have fruit this season. I guess that plant forgot to read the outside of the packaging, where it says 'Only one-year-old canes will produce fruit.' Not that I'm complaining.

Ajax thinks I'm boooooooooring for being so sleepy. Instead of, I presume, chasing him around and doing other Useful, Fun things. Plus, in his view we're starving him. So! Cruel! Also, his butt-glands are filling up freakishly fast, despite our new high-fiber regimen. Stupid glands.

However, we currently have three garments-worth of Dirty Laundry Pile. Yes, total! Mind you, there's also three hampers of clean laundry (two folded, one loose) waiting to be properly put away, so I'm not totally a rockin' housework chick, but I still feel kind of good about it.

I started a variant on the 'Checking' sweater from the latest Knitters' Magazine in plain dark blue acrylic from Midwest Discount Yarns, and *gasp* I'm about 70% done with it (halfway up the sleeves). So of course now I have these horrid urges to buy more yarn, and to initiate new projects. Silly crafter. FINISH. Grr. I did get to help John's aunt troubleshoot HER knitting last night, though, which was satisfying to my 'new knitting project systems analysis' urges.

I also keep getting urges to Do Something Serious with the yard (latest pie-in-the-sky: plant a lilac hedge under the edge of our porch in the back), even though I know it'd take two or three days of solid yardwork to get everything properly Done and Amended, even after the trip to the home center to buy fixins.

I wish we had the money to get the floor properly jacked up and reinforced, dammit. I hate living in a house with structural problems (even if it's not likely to Cave In And Kill Us All anytime soon). I'm desperately envious of John's aunt for being able to just buy and move into a house with only cosmetic flaws. With a big yard. And a REALLY COOL roomful of built-in bookshelves. Mind you, it cost about three times what ours did, so it's to be expected, but I keep getting these dissatisfied little MEH feelings about it.

Also, I desperately miss my digicam, but can't justify the splurge at the moment. Sigh.

But hey, not dead!

Ayup, it's that time of year. I get congested and coughy [1], and suddenly there's much more green around.

Which brings me to our yard. This year, I realized that what I've been doing in the yard up to this point doesn't really qualify as 'gardening' by my personal standards. I've weeded, which in this case meant pulling plants that either (a) I didn't want that species growing THERE, or (b) I didn't want that species growing in my yard at all. I performed what I could call botanical surveying, in the interests of figuring out what I had and where I wanted it growing. I scattered a few seeds last year, but few of them came up. I mowed the bits that were mostly grass, to keep it looking kind of tidy.

But I didn't actually *GARDEN*. So what's Real Gardening by my brain's standards? Soil amendments. Planting either seeds or bedding plants, and afterwards coddling said plants to encourage them to thrive. Tying plants up to sticks or fences in order to help them grow better. Harvesting something from the plants in question. Trimming them for cosmetic reasons.

So this year, we've taken two rather 'gardeny' steps: we planted raspberries, and we're filling in various low spots with storebought bagged dirt-and-manure. Mind you, since we're not entirely insane [2], the raspberries are in a planter on the porch. I still need to wrap the planter in wire mesh, both to protect the baby canes from inquisitive doggy teeth and to be a sort of basic trellis for holding them verticalish in the sun. We know it only fruits on year-old cane, so we don't really expect to get anything out of it this year, but it's a step in the direction of Permanence, which I think is a good thing.

As to the low-spot-filling, that was initially undertaken because it's a PITA mowing a lawn that undulates as severely as ours does -- we tend to end up mowing off pieces of SOIL if the wheel goes into a low spot. So I roughly mixed two bags of topsoil with one of manure and started doing the 'scatter, rake, stomp, wet' routine to fill in the worst of them. We got about half the back done before we ran out of soil. Then we decided we'd just leave it like that for a while, until we had time to put into yard chores ... and MAN is the grass in the areas we filled expressing its extreme pleasure with the additional nitrogen. I guess before we did that, it was largely exhausted grey-clay dirt. So now, once we've actually finished with all the low bits, we're strongly considering taking an extra bag of manure or so and doing a light scatter-and-rake over the whole area, just to fertilize a little. God help me, I may even rise to a bag or two of seed -- and this from someone who thinks lawns [3] are both fiddly and unecological!

I've also started eyeing the bedding plants and perennials lustfully whenever we pass a gardening section (or, God help me, Home Depot/Menards). I guess I actually AM a gardener at heart, despite my years-long dormancy in that area.

---

1. congested and coughy Tree sperm disagrees with my immune system. So far I think it's just the maples out front; when the Big Grandfather Cottonwood in our back yard starts in, I fully expect to look like I have bruises under my eyes from the violence of my sinus congestion. All hail pseudoephedrine ... even if I do have to let them xerox my ID to buy it now.
   
2. raspberry insanity Actually, there's three reasons:
   • Raspberries take over explosively, and are hard to kill. They're in the planter so they won't eat the whole yard.
   • John is worried that our yard's soil is so irrevocably tainted (with lead and other suchlike) as to render it unsafe for creating food.
   • I'm told they don't like frost, so up to this point we've been hauling the planter inside on nights likely to get that cold; this winter, after it leafdrops and we give it its final prune of the year, we'll likely wrap it in burlap and stick it in the basement.
   
   
3. anti-lawn Lawns suck down lots of water and LOTS of effort, while not being so helpful (in water retention, being habitat, biodiversity, or even beauty) as many other ways of using the same area of land. Also they tend to be chemical-hungry, at least when people are aiming for that completely unrealistic Perfect Emerald Golf-Course Lawn.

Out in the yard. Where everyone could see us. So dirty, we used up FOUR BAGS of dirt.

... From the home center. Or, rather, three bags of well-rotted manure, one of topsoil, and half a bag of potting mix. Why, what did you THINK I meant? :->

That said, we now have a (modified) cedar planter with four neatly potted raspberry canes in it, which is going to spend its nights in the kitchen (atop Ajax's kennel to get it near the window, which lets my beloved dog enjoy smelling the cedary goodness of the bottom), and the sunnier of recent days on the back porch, until we're safely past Last Frost -- that fabled moment of magic in our northern clime -- when it shall begin to reside permanently outside. Until the fall, when we'll likely stick it in the basement For The Duration after cutting back its canes and all the other whatnot you do to winterize a berry bramble.

The modifications are four pieces of furring strip neatly bolted in the corners that will, shortly, have moderately heavy-duty metal mesh installed so that Ajax won't decide to chew on the interesting new dirt-rooted sticks (before they grow their spines and become self-protecting. After that the mesh will serve to (a) keep me from killing myself on the spines when I take it in and out, and (b) hold up the canes in a trellislike manner, to maximize sun).

Then we used the remaining most-of-the-dirt and started filling in the divotty low bits allllll over our back lawn that have, for the past two summers, made mowing an exciting bumpitty slicing-off-pieces-of-dirt adventure. If we really cared about Lawn Care (in the religious way that creed is followed in, say, most suburbs), we would have seeded. As it is, we figure the built-in fertilizer of what we were using to fill the dips is likely to supercharge the underlying grass sufficiently as to not cause a problem.

I feel so ... domestic. This is actually the first Really Gardening-Like thing I've done with the yard since we moved in. The rest was more along the lines of biological survey, or ... ecological management. Thinning, selection of desired/undesired plants, watering now and then, mowing to keep it Not Insanely Unkempt. But now I've Gardened. Somehow I have this idea that some morning John's going to wake up to find me already out there, madly double-digging manure and lime into all the beds. :->

Also, Ajax likes to eat bagged dirt.

When we moved in and cleaned up the yard the first time, I made a wreath with some of the suppler pruned branches off several of our trees. It has dried nicely for a year hidden in a corner; I'd like to hang it on the inner front door. John suggested it'd work better if it were more like 'a real wreath' (right now it's 'a circle of tree bits'). So I need to wire more dried stuff onto it till it's decorative. Unfortunately, little that grows in our yard dries pretty.

Suggestions welcomed for readily-available stuff to use (purchasing is fair), with a bias on my part towards plants with protective/guardian symbolism (as it IS going to be hanging on the inner airlock door, where currently there is a warding-mask that came with the place). Holly comes to mind, but I don't know if holly dries well, and/or is available for purchase. I can dry stuff myself if necessary, I have lots of pillowcases and ventilation.