What to do w/ so much time…

I’m sure this is not a problem I’ll encounter very often, and should consider myself lucky to have so much free time in my hands. With Manish gone I am left talking to myself most of the time and finding projects to stay busy.

We laid some brick tiles as a patio extension for our picnic bench, and I also put in a garden in the backyard with some perennials. Just creating the bed was such labor intensive process. The sod had to be pulled out first… I felt pretty strong just ripping it up, and at that point very excited visualizing the future garden. Manish helped out in the ripping process too, which made it go by faster. Then I learned the hard way that we have really hard clay soil which is not very easy to work with. Plants need soil that is not compacted and has enough fluff to it so the roots can spread easily. So of course, the next logical step for me was to do some tilling to break up and loosen up the soil. I had seen commercials on TV for the type of tiller that looks like a giant twisted fork – they show old women use it with ease. Ok, so off I go to Lowes and invested $25 towards the garden. Back to the garden site w/ my nice new shiny tiller, and let me tell you, those old women must be some mighty tough cookies or they were doing the digging on the beach. I had to thrust the fork into the ground, stand on it, put my whole weight into, wiggle it as much as I could, step down, and put my whole weight into it to do the twisting motion. Two weekends and plenty of sore muscles later, I had tilled up my little patch, added top soil, tilled that in, and made it somewhat workable. Now that I look back, I think I should have added more topsoil, guess I’ll just have to wait and see how the plants perform. And of course, as I was telling M about my tilling woes he says “I have an automatic tiller at home that you can borrow”… a little too late for this time around, but there will be more gardens in the future in my little yard.

On memorial day weekend I went out to Country Arbors and picked up some perennials. I identified plants that will thrive even with very low care – four lavender bushes, four silver mounds, two purple coneflowersand two brown eyed susies. I worked in quite a bit of perlite for the lavenders and silver mounds since they like very well drained soil and not much water. I am a little worried that the clay soil in the bed would still hold too much water and kill the root – we’ll just have to wait and see I guess. I put stones around the lavenders and silver mounds as it was recommended on some website – they’re supposed to reflect the sunlight and reduce moisture. The lavenders are close to the patio, so hopefully we’ll be able to enjoy the fragrance from our picnic bench. I used the silver mounds as a border on the rest of the bed, and filled it in with the coneflowers and susies , both native prairie plants. I also picked up a fuchsia which is supposed to attract hummingbirds for the back of the bed where there is more shade. The fuchsia is supposed to get up to 6′, so it’ll add nice height to the garden. I also have a pole w/bird-feeder and bird bath… I don’t think birds know about it yet. I did spot a hummingbird last week drinking out of the feeder.

So far the lavenders and fuchsia have bloomed and there are lot of buds on the prairie plants. I’m hoping to be able to enjoy the garden pretty soon. Vegetable garden will be a project for next year… and a raised bed is sounding more and more attractive than a tilled bed.