Gardening
May 25th 2008
I am feeling a bit bleary-eyed at the moment. I was out today scavenging more bricks for my nascent potager garden project, and after I got home from that I made Chris take a nap as he had a long day yesterday and didn’t get home until very late. The only way he would lie down is if I lay on the bed and read, however he didn’t fall asleep and I did! I should never nap – I wake up feeling worse every time.
It was a productive weekend for me, however.
My garden is starting to look good. Yesterday I was out constructing the two beds you see closest to the side of the house. I had my back to the sidewalk, and then I heard “Oh look mummy, it’s a bee-you-tee-ful garden!” I turned to see a woman and two tiny young blonde girls walking along the sidewalk. I thought that was pretty funny. I said hello to them, and as they walked off, the woman said to one of the girls “Maybe you should help her in the garden!”. It was sweet.
Here it is as of this afternoon:
This coming (birthday!) weekend I will be adding two more 4′ x 4′ beds along these rows, to give me a total of 6 beds, 96 square feet. They have tomatoes, radishes, cucumbers, onions, lettuce, chard, carrots, some marigolds and zinnias, freesia, summer squash and beans. I hope it works out, I am pretty excited to start this project and indeed the whole square foot gardening concept. I know it looks a bit rough so far, but it’s going to be most excellent.
It’s such a novelty having grass this year after the desert of last year but now the new fence is in (woohoo!) all I can see are hundreds of feet of gardens that will be mine, precious. The fence is 247 feet long. It cost a lot of money, but I love it. No more kids tobogganning through our back yard or people thinking it is a vacant lot.
I’m tired from all the earth moving and brick scavenging efforts, however. In future years I will start building paths in between each bed, and some other nifty things like climbing roses, hedge roses, a few Sambucus niger shrubs, a Mountain ash tree, some other kind of fruiting tree. I want wildlife in my garden as right now it is just grass, grass, and more grass. I did find two baby toads a couple of weeks ago so I am hoping more will come and stick around.
In just over a week I’m off to London for 9 days, it’s hard to believe.
