Week of May 21st 2012

I couldn’t tell you how many weeks I’m in with my garden at this point.  The plants are growing well and the few strawberries that came off the vine this weekend were delicious. 

What I have found recently though, again, once you start spending more time in your yard it leads you to think about the other things that you need to take care of out there as well.  In the last few weeks we have:

·         put up another fence – one that had been falling down all winter long, and as soon as the weather get’s a smidge warmer I’ll go out and put a sealer on it. 

·         Dug out the center of the lawn and put gravel in for our above ground pool – much to our dogs’ dismay since it’s reduced their bathroom space.

·         Put up the pool and purchased a saltwater filtration system, all of us have some sort of issue with chlorine and it is more eco friendly in the long run.

·         Planted more bulbs in the front yard – hopefully the gardeners won’t pull them up – yes I have a gardener, although recently I’m wondering why – since I seem to do most of the work anyway

·         Harvested the first batch of lavender and hung them to dry

·         Harvested a batch of basil and cilantro – basil immediately went into the processor for Pesto and the cilantro I froze – I read somewhere that it was better than drying for flavor, I’ll let you know if that’s the case.

Yesterday we spent the afternoon fixing the drip system in the front – again from the gardeners, I guess the weed whacker really does a number on those rubber hoses and they apparently don’t care that they’re there.  Well really Steve worked on the drip system after I gently reminded him of the problem by turning it on while he was out front watching me trim back the roses and attempting to trim the maple – I’ll have to do some research on that one since I don’t really know what I’m doing but it seems that the tree is really trying to make itself into an impenetrable bush and I have to figure out what I can trim back without killing it.

So where does that leave us?  Well waiting for plants to grow, I may be able to harvest some spinach this week and replant to get another few batches before the end of the season.  Lot’s of watering and puttering and if I’m really smart about the whole thing I’ll start with a plan of attack so that my wanderings in the yard actually lead to something productive as opposed to small projects here and there that help but don’t actually look like I’ve done anything at all. 

Until next time.

Week 5

I think that Farmville might have done me a disservice in the area of instant gratification.  I’m realizing as the sprouts are just starting to pop through the ground (all of my transfers except for a single sunflower died), gardening takes a lot of patience.  Unfortunately patience is not something I’m known for, as I wander through my yard day after day, I search for sprouts in empty boxes and am practically begging them to grow at an abomidable rate.  Another small downside of gardening is you tend to spend more time in your yard, and if you’re like me, your not so great looking, untended to yard. So this weekend while I was willing the plants to grow I got out and really looked around, realizing that I wanted to spend time out here and if I was going to spend any number of hours on any given day, I’d really like something nice to look at.

So out came the trimmers to tame down a wayward camellia tree (I know they’re supposed to be bushes, but this one stands almost 10 feet tall with blooms at the top and it’s really pretty) that was encroaching on our gutter and a butterfly bush (I honestly don’t know what it’s called but it blooms 3 times over the summer and is really, really pretty too, thank goodness the woman that owned the house before us had an eye for color and need in the back yard).  Once we filled the green can and tamed the 2 plants, I looked around again for what could be done easily on a Sunday morning.  I spotted a table and set of benches that are well built but look a little worse for wear, to the point that no one wants to sit at them for fear of splinters or staining from the wood, after a few minutes searching for a sander we went to town on the tops and sides of the benches and table, a few coats of polyurethane later we have ourselves a nice seating area on the patio to spend our warmer afternoons and evenings on.

With a little bit of time left in the afternoon and feeling very “Earth Mother Hippie”, I wandered around the yard again thinking about what I could do to keep my green momentum going, as I realized I had no more space in the green can and no real money to start plunking away at the more obvious things I spied my ignored rose bush, for some reason the less I do with it the better it grows, full of blooms that were going to go to waste quickly if I didn’t do something with them, so I trimmed back all of the beautiful blooms and searched for a “rose water” recipe on the internet, found a wonderful blog listed below and got to conjuring up a batch – As my husband calls it.  With a decent batch of rose water in my fridge and a start to a more livable yard I figured, the sprouts can take a little more time to grow, that way when they do start looking like a real garden I’ll have a nice place to sit and look at them – and if things don’t smell so great I’ve got a very nice batch of rosewater in my fridge to help out.

Rosewater Recipe