Another working weekend, both yardwork and the paying kind. Yesterday Georg and I went to town on the yard. I planted things -- not from the farmer's market this week, from Home Depot. The selection isn't as good and you don't get that warm fuzzy feeling of buying from local small businesses, but they did have some nice things. Like salvias for the butterfly garden, coreopsis and gazanias for the orange and yellow bed down by the road, and gerber daisies!
I have a weakness for gerber daisies so I bought a whole bunch of them to plant in the new bed we're creating by the side of the house. Which meant I had to get back to digging! (This is the bed with the concrete slabs, but the gerber daisies went into the other side.) Have I mentioned that the soil in this bed is hard, heavy clay? This digging is one of the hardest things I've done yet in the yard. Prying out stumps may be harder, but there's so much more to do in this bed that it kind of evens out.
We're not quite double digging, but close: dig out the clay about a foot deep, haul it away in the wheelbarrow, use the heavy fork to loosen the clay another foot deep, then fill the bed with compost and mix it in. I spent hours at it and only just got enough dug out to plant my gerber daisies along the edge of where the path will go. Really I should have waited until the whole bed was dug out to plant anything, rather than doing it piecemeal. But that could take weeks and I was afraid Home Depot would run out of the gerber daisies. (Turns out that was not an unreasonable concern: I went back this morning to get a couple more and the big huge display from Wednesday was almost entirely gone!) Besides, this way I have the instant gratification of seeing pretty flowers in the ground right away. I hope that will help me keep going on the rest of the bed.
While I was digging clay, Georg did an amazing amount of work. First he dug up some of the evil bamboo. Then he pruned back this tall bushy thing that grows over the driveway. Finally he dug out a big stump that was growing against the foundation of the house, so it was really hard to get any leverage with the digging bar. And while doing all that, he also helped me wheel the clay around when I loaded the wheelbarrow so full that I couldn't move it. Yay for Georg!
We were so tired after all our work yesterday that we ended up having takeout for dinner and then falling asleep early. Today I worked on paying work almost all day, which kind of sucked. But on the other hand, this is the client who neatly arranges all his copious notes with big brightly colored plastic-coated paper clips. Free paper clips! Nice ones too. I did take a break this morning to go back to Home Depot for a few more plants. Where I ran into someone I knew from high school. I hadn't seen her since we graduated in 1986 and I had no idea she even lived in this part of the country. Small world! We didn't talk long because her kids were getting fussy and obviously wanted to get moving, but I'm going to send her an email as soon as I get my work done.
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