I had a go at the front this afternoon.
When I put the calla lily in at the beginning of the month, I did a little bit of scrabbling with the hand-held claw, just to unseat the weeds starting to take hold. More fool I. What I actually did was loosen up the compacted soil so that lots and lots and lots of weeds, not just the most persistent, could get a foothold. What emerged was a swath of green, each plant needing to be pulled out individually. Ugh.
Every year we try to do something about the front. It needs new soil, it needs less compaction, it needs shade-loving plants. What it really needs is to become a raised bed. More than half of all the problems it has are because people and their pets storm across it a million times each year. It's a chicken and egg problem and I certainly haven't moved any closer to solving it by my labours this afternoon. The front is hard to deal with. It's deep so there are plenty of bits that are hard to reach. It's compacted so it's a lot of hard labour to move the soil at all. It therefore gets neglected, which makes it harder to deal with. There are more weeds, nastier un-dealt-with piles of leaves and mystery detritus , more crap dumped there by passing drunks, too. The soil needs improvement, for which one needs to be able to dig up the soil that's already there but I can't because it's compacted and it's compacted because I have neglected it for months and I have neglected it for months because the side yard is much more rewarding because it has better soil and I do give it regular (-ish, I am the inconsistent gardener, after all) attention.
I have fantasies about getting rid of the whole thing. Given a bottomless budget, I'd make a pretty bay window take over half of the yard and put a front porch over most of the rest. I'd leave a little corner of it as a sunny raised bed/window box for the nice bay window. That's fantasy.
The reality is that I spent two and a half hours this afternoon breaking my back and shoulders to get the weeds moved out in order for the earth to be squishy under the feet of the first 20 passers by and the rest of the patch to be more receptive to the next batch of weeds. It's not like I have a plan for what goes in instead. It's not like I have a stack of shade-loving annuals waiting to be put into the freshly turned (but still nutrient-free) soil. I KNOW that the weeds will win this one, even if I do go back and get the second half turned tomorrow (unlikely, by the way). Umph. That's why the front gets neglected.
There was an elderly lady with a magnificent eastern european accent who slowed down enough to let me know that lily of the valley is her favourite and now the yard would be much better. This is nice but it tells me (what I already knew) that it's been an embarrassment.
There was a very nice young woman who saw me struggling and puffing and cheered me on with an "it's coming along!".
There was a slightly creepy depressive woman who came and sat uninvited on my front step to say that she'd been living next door for 3 years and had been watching us trying to make the garden. She "had to move" because the "competition was just too high" (I take this to be a euphemism for "I can no longer get away with being late on rent"). She said she loved to garden so to make conversation I asked her for advice. None of it was useful. "Plant things that attract friendly insects" (what things? what insects?) "We used to use fish for fertilizer, when I was growing up" (I bet that's really great in the country when you have a supply of fish and a lot of fresh air to mask the stink of the rotting fish carcasses in your garden ... not so great in the city when you have neither). She also said that she'd taken flowers from our garden and tried to grow them in her apartment. I won't be missing our thieving, spying neighbour.
On the other hand, it was when we finally tackled the front a couple of years ago that our lovely neighbour to the south came and introduced herself. She has shared wonderful plants with me (for all my felonious intentions, I haven't actually got the guts to really steal plants from anyone, especially not people whose gardens are visibly struggling), including the iris which is so beautiful (in the side) at the moment.
This is a rambling grumpy post. I'd promise better for tomorrow, but I'm off to a gardening association meeting first thing in the morning and they always leave me wishing they were shorter.
It's some consolation that it's really obvious that something happened to half the yard today. I took a picture at the 1.5h mark and again when I'd had enough. The lush green growth is all stray grass and wandering weeds. Where there's light coloured soil and no green is where people walk. It's where people walk all the time. All the people. All the time. Hard to get motivated to improve it.
Grump harrump.
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