digging digging

Another wonderfully productive weekend. We started out by emptying the shed of paint cans and old cleaning products, and taking them all to the hazardous waste collection place out by the dump. Which is free! I had no idea. I guess they make it free to encourage people to do it. If they charged, people might hide their old antifreeze cans in the regular trash or something awful like that.

Next we went to the dump. Where they had free compost! They called it "leaf mulch" though I wouldn't call it mulch. Really more of a light compost made of leaves and sticks. It did have chunks of stick in it, but very few bits of plastic trash. Which the regular compost is unfortunately rife with.

Back home we spent the afternoon planting the gardenia by friend Joe had given us. It doesn't sound like that much, but we had to start from scratch and create a new bed for it. The soil was horrible solid clay. With a scruffy old rose growing there, that had to be dug out. And the location is right under the electrical meter and breaker box, so we had to be very careful not to dig too deep and cut a line. And just in case the job wasn't enough of a pain, at some point in the past we had piled up a bunch of old bricks and concrete blocks there to get them out of the way.

So basically, we had to move a big pile of concrete, then dig a big hole in heavy clay, but carefully, carefully, then remove the clay, and then finally we could plant the gardenia. I hope it likes its new home! It's a nice sheltered location against the southwest wall of the house.

After that I took a rest during the hottest part of the day, then went back out and planted a flat of marigolds that I had bought a couple of weeks ago. We also watered, which was a good opportunity to walk around and see how everything is doing. We were pleased to see that the potatoes are starting to come up, sunflower seedlings are starting to emerge, and best of all, two sugar snaps and two tomatoes have flowers! Woo!

On the downside, the spinach is bolting. I knew it would happen when it got hot, I just hoped it wouldn't happen quite so soon. Oh well, we've had several good meals from the spinach and it looks like we'll have several more before it all goes. It creates a slight dilemma though. We had planned to plant pumpkins in that spot after the spinach was done. But we don't want to plant the pumpkins until early-mid July. I hate for that spot to go unused for two months, but what can we plant there for such a short time?

We might try greens and put a row cover over them. Shaded from full sun they might do okay. Any other suggestions?