The past couple of days have been all about having the right tools: how nice that is and how they make life easier. First, the camera. I didn't realize how much I enjoyed having a camera with me all the time, until I was without one. It seemed like everywhere I went last weekend, I saw something I wanted to photograph. I still miss my old camera, but I think I'm really going to like the new one.
Now that I have a camera again, I can write up our gardening progress from the weekend with photos. We were really busy and got a lot done. On Saturday we got up early and went to the farmer's market. I had seen a beautiful plant called goblet flowers last weekend. The leaves look like an iris but the flower looks like an orchid. I didn't want to buy it until I had looked it up to see if it would grow well here. Turns out it's from South America and we're on the northern edge of where it will grow. It's so beautiful that I'm going to give it a try. They were out of it unfortunately, but they said they'd bring two for me next Saturday.
We also bought a couple of butterfly weed, a bush with pretty blue flowers called Mexican petunia, and another plant that feeds butterfly larvae which I can't remember the name of. Which is bumming me out, because I wanted to check on the size it will get before I decide where to plant it. I really like the plant sellers at the farmer's market. They have a much nicer variety than Home Depot or Lowe's, not as expensive as the chichi nurseries, and the people are nice and know a lot about the plants.
Georg had to work, so I went home and spread the mulch. I stopped at Home Depot on the way home to get a pitchfork, which made the job a lot easier than it would have been with a shovel. Plus I feel so "American Gothic" with a big old pitchfork in my possession. The newspaper thing seemed to work great. You put a thick layer (20 sheets or more) under the mulch. The newspaper helps to kill the weeds underneath, but eventually it decomposes so there's nothing to pull up, you can add more mulch right on top of it. I didn't put newspaper on the slopey part of the bank because it might make the mulch slide down in the rain, but I used it all over the flat part at the bottom. Thanks to Shayne and Niku for giving me old newspaper!
The mulch covered much less of that bank along the driveway than I thought it would: only about a third. But that's okay, because on Sunday we covered the bare part with black plastic. Strangely I feel even happier about the plastic than about the mulch. Because the weeds were starting to spring back up along that bank. Which as you may have noticed, is fairly long. Every day as I walked down to the road to do my morning gardening, I would look at the weeds getting taller and thicker, and get a sinking feeling that things were going to get out of control again. At an hour a day there's no possible way I could have cultivated that entire bank before the weeds took control again. But the black plastic takes care of that! It will kill everything underneath it, then we can take it up and start planting when we're ready. Now we have room to breathe & figure out what we want to work on, rather than racing to try and prevent the weeds from getting out of hand again.
Up at the top of the bank, near the house, I also planted a few annual herbs. Which brings me to the next wonderful tool: a pickaxe. It made breaking up that clay about a thousand times easier. I don't know if it's because of the shape, or because swinging the axe provides more force, or what, but it works great. I wish I had known that before I dug all those holes with a shovel! But as Georg said, "don't think of it as harder work, think of it as better exercise." Still, I'm glad to have a better tool to make the digging go easier from now on. The herbs were nothing fancy, just basil and cilantro. I know it's the wrong season to plant annuals, but they were cheap and I think we'll get a couple of months out of them before it gets too cold for them. I used the last of the mulch to put a big thick layer around them & I hope that keeps the weeds down.
Today I did no gardening because I was too excited about the camera. But I did hang another bird feeder in the front, so we can watch the birds from our front window. I hope it doesn't take them too long to find it. I might also hang a finch feeder because we have seen goldfinches occasionally over the years, and I'd love to have them as regular visitors.
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American Gothic: I recently learned that the portrait is not of a farmer and wife, but rather of a farmer and his daughter. The article presumed a certain humor about a farmer carefully guarding his plain-faced daughter.
I had no idea.
Anyway, I mostly associate the painting with my childhood dentist, who had a version where the pitchfork was a toothbrush.