I hit Green Thumbers nice and early yesterday morning. I wanted to get in and get out before the crush of people started. I bought a flat of vincas and a flat of impatiens in various shades of white, pink, red, and lavender. I also got 3 cubic feet of good dirt and my first pair of official gardening gloves. They are blue and very pretty. Or at least they were very pretty, now they are covered in dirt and grub residue. I was in and out and back home within half an hour.
When I got home, Tim and I headed straight off to the gym. We haven’t been there in almost two weeks because Tim was sick and then I was sick. We did leg weights and cardio. It felt good to get back into the routine.
When we got home I started working on the yard. Boy o boy, does it ever need a lot of work. I did the easy stuff first and planted the vincas in a pots for the front steps. Then I raked the old mulch off the bed in the back of the house, tried to pull the chives out by the roots (I mostly just got the tops), and then started spading out clumps of dirt, making holes for the impatients. Our dirt cannot really be called “dirt.” The soil, especially by the front of the house, is more clay than anything. To plant the flowers, I dug out a hole, filled it with potting soil, planted the flower, and then topped it off with some more potting soil. I did this a couple of years ago, and the plants seemed to do just fine. Of course when I pulled them out at the end of the summer, they were completely root-bound within their original clump of first.
Mom says I need to add some compost to the soil, but at this point it’s so clay-ey that I don’t see how I could actually MIX it. She also said I could do some raised beds – put good soil on top of the clay. One of these years, I’ll have to do something like that, but for now I’ll just have to address it one spadeful at a time.
I still have about 3/4ths of a flat to plant. It’s cloudy today, but hopefully the rain will hold off until I can finish up.
Over the years, the lawn has crept over the sidewalk, so I also spent an hour pulling up lawn carpet from our sidewalk. I could just roll it back and the tear it right off. I ran across tons of disgusting grubs and weird red, um larvae maybe?. I don’t know what they are. I should have taken a picture of them, but they creeped me out, so I didn’t want to spend any more time with them than necessary. After rolling back the lawn, we now have a 2 inch ledge where the sidewalk meets the lawn. It looks odd, but better than it did before.
I also cleaned off our back patio. It was covered with helicopters, and the lawn has started to overgrow that too. I raked it off and then swept it. It looks way better. Once the impatiens start to fill out, it’s going to be beautiful back there. Right now it looks a little meloncholy:
Obviously, we still have tons of work to do to the yard. I better stop typing and get to work.