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The weather was beautiful today, perfect for yardwork. I didn't get the last of the daffodils into the ground, but I did make some good headway on preparing the soil for the vegetable garden next year. It's the bed along the driveway, which seems like a weird place to put your vegetable garden, but it's good for two reasons: first, it gets the most sun of any place in the yard, and second, it's outside the fence where the dogs can't dig it up, chew on the plants or poop in the soil.

Speaking of dogs messing up garden beds, yesterday we put a new fence around the hydrangea bed. It's hideous. A 3 foot high green plastic monstrosity. Thank you Lina! We also saw a dog and cat repellant spray called "Pet B Gone" or something. I looked it up online and it's reportedly effective, but contains capsicum (the active ingredient in chili peppers). It's the same stuff they give mailmen to spray in the faces of attack dogs. I even read that it's so powerful it can be used to ward off bears. I'm not comfortable spraying that in my garden. I want to stop Lina from digging up the flowerbeds, but not if I have to torture her. Other recommended dog repellants include vinegar, which is unfortunately toxic to plants, and moth balls. Which I think I will try.

Anyway, back to the vegetable garden. I thought about it last night and decided that I like the idea I had yesterday, to add organic material by burying dead leaves under a layer of soil. It seems like the leaves should rot under the soil and make a nice layer of compost. We have tons of leaves, so why not? Even if it doesn't work like I hope it will, it certainly won't hurt anything.

The bed is 45 feet long and 7 feet wide. Which seems pretty daunting: every time I think about trying to clear that whole bed, I end up panicking and doing something else instead. So today I just did a little area about 5 feet wide. I pulled back the black plastic, which by the way, seemed to work better at killing weeds than over by the blueberries. Maybe because it gets more sun, so the soil got hotter underneath the plastic. Anyway I pulled back about 5 feet of plastic, then dug up the few weeds with deep enough roots to survive 2 months under black plastic. Luckily my friend Pete had lent me a small mattock, so I didn't miss my broken one. I even dug up a stump about 3 inches in diameter. Which sounds more impressive than it was, because the soil was so dry and crumbly. It wasn't too hard to clear the soil away from the base of the stump with the mattock, then chop it out with an axe. I hope I got it deep enough that it won't come back.

Clearing the ground was the hard part. Then I raked up a wheelbarrow full of leaves and piled them up on the ground, then covered that with a thin layer of compost and peat. Covered it with newspaper to keep weeds down over the winter, and then straw over the whole thing. Then I hosed it down, to wet the straw and keep it from blowing away. Next spring I hope I'll have a nice layer of organic material to turn into the ground. Even if I'm totally wrong about this, and end up with nasty wet leaves and straw sitting on top of clay, it won't be any worse than if I'd left the plastic all winter.

While I was doing all that, Georg cleaned up the front porch, got rid of all the trash, then organized the gardening tools, art car supplies and toolbox. Because he is amazing.

This afternoon I spent an Amazon gift certificate from my folks. I bought 2 gardening books, one about vegetable gardening and one about organic gardening. I don't have a huge moral investment in organic gardening; I don't object to artificial fertilizers and pesticides on general principles, if they're safe and do the job. But having pets makes me reluctant to use chemicals in the yard unless absolutely necessary. Besides, an unintended result of our total yardwork negligance is that we're starting with a clean slate in terms of organic methods. I don't think we've used a single chemical in the garden or yard in the seven years we've lived here. Well, I may have used some fertilizer on the vegetable garden that first year, I can't remember. But that's in a totally different part of the yard, and nothing since then.

Also I ordered a DVD I'm very excited about: The Man With a Movie Camera with the Cinematic Orchestra score! I didn't know it existed, but I was checking to see if Cinematic Orchestra had a new album out and it came up. Amazon was out of stock, but they had someone else selling a copy of it. Yay! Playing the DVD on mute and then simultaneously playing my CD of the score was my best approximation. But it wasn't great because some of the tracks had been shortened, so it was difficult to sync the two. I can't wait to see the movie with the soundtrack as it's meant to be heard.