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.