Ruining More Gloves

Today, I went to the gardening store and bought:

• Organic citrus fertilizer
• Organic rose fertilizer
• Worm castings
• Cedar mulch (small bark chips)
• A dahlia plant (yellow flowers, very pretty)

Then I came home and finished transplanting the bulbs from the front bed (for a value of finished that ignores some stragglers at the edge of the bed that may end up as compost). I hope that most of them survive the move. I'm not exactly the world's most patient person, even when I'm not in the blazing hot sun with dust in my eyes and dirt under my fingernails. So I didn't exactly use great precision and care in placing the plants. I sort of stuffed them into the dirt where I could find room, then threw handfuls of leaf mulch over them, then dumped a bunch of water over that. (I was a little more careful with the bark mulch.) Now I'll just have to wait and see how much dies back and how much keeps growing.

Out in the front, I took a couple of wheelbarrow loads of dirt out of the nearly empty bed. On the positive side, Mother Nature took care of one problem for me: one of the big stumps out front turned out to be well rotted through. I pretty much just had to pick up the pieces and throw them in the yard waste bin. On the negative side:

• The dirt was packed tight against the bottom of the stucco (a big no-no, since it gives subterranean termites easy access to the walls).
• Roots were stretch just under the dirt, snug up against the foundation, for the length of the bed.
• There are slugs and spiders, but I didn't see a single earthworm in all the dirt I dug out (meaning it's probably not worth saving the dirt to use elsewhere, but I don't have anywhere to get rid of it).
• There are rocks, rocks, and more rocks. (The white rocks brought in for decorative purposes, the local rocks that proliferate in the area, and the rocks that the local kids like to throw at houses and at each other. Since I know which house has the green rocks and which house has the rose-colored rocks, I can at least take those back.)
• The dirt the plants were in is only about 5" deep. Under that, it's clay. Hard clay. Very, very hard clay. And rocks. Did I mention the rocks? (I need to take the bed down about 9".)

And then I took a shower and made lemonade. The lemonade was delicious. I might drink the whole 3/4 gallon this evening. The end.

Dirt Under My Nails

My attempts to transform bits of my backyard into actual growing space are coming along. Over the past couple of months, I've put in some experimental plants here and there, and most of them are doing just fine. I did have one daffodil die, and my lavender isn't entirely happy, and I'm not sure the columbine is supposed to look like that, but the gladiolas that I transplanted a couple of months back are blooming, and my strawberry plant is fruiting for the second time (and fruiting, and fruiting, and fruiting), and all of my succulents and drought-resistant experiment plants are growing faster than I'd thought possible.

I've been working for at least a month now on one patch of dirt next to my patio. At some point, someone decided to put in plastic as a weed barrier, and then covered the plastic with gravel. I discovered this as I was pulling out the thick-packed crabgrass. (Turns out, a weed barrier doesn't do much good when the pine tree from next door and the crabgrass from under the fence keep poking holes in it.) So I got the weeds out, and the plastic out, and most of the gravel out. And then I put some decent soil in. And then I decided that decent soil might not be enough, and put some fertilizer in.

Today, I decided that the fertilizer was probably cured enough, and I started transplanting bulbs from the bed along the side of my garage. (This is the bed I have to take out because it's too high, and drains into the foundation.) I have about a third of the bulbs moved to their new home. They've been drenched, and mulched, and given a pep talk. Here's hoping that they like it in the back. I'm very much looking forward to finding out what they all are. (I know the gladiolas, because the ones from the front yard are just ending their blooming season, and I remember there being daffodils last year. Mostly, I've just been making sure the pointy end of the bulb is up, and hoping they dig in and start growing.)

Now that I've finally had the tree service out to take out the unfortunate cypress trees in the back (they'd been mangled by someone before my time), my back yard is opened up, and I'm trying to figure out how to turn the hard-packed sandy clay (contradiction? apparently not) and yellow, drying weeds into an actual garden. A friend's husband has been passing along old copies of Organic Gardening magazine, and another friend loaned me a copy of J. I. Rodale's How to Grow Vegetables and Fruits by the Organic Method, plus I saw these raised bed kits at Home Despot...

All I can say for now is that I have a good mix of grass and leaf mulch cooking in a can out back, and a bunch of pencil sketches. We'll see what comes of it.