Hello, yellow!

There have been hints of things growing once again in the side and front yards. Little tiny bud-noses poke out of the ground here and there.

Some are silly optimists who spring out of the earth in the fall and then spend the winter getting abused.

Some are just starting, like the not-bent-over stalks in the photo above.

Since today is the compost collection day around here and I had seen snowdrop buds elsewhere in town yesterday, I thought I might lift a few of the xmas tree boughs and see if anyone was, y'know, maybe about to flower.

I found a lovely pale green hyacinth starting beneath the piles.

The sweary one and I have been discussing what my requirements are for the garden starting on March 4. I say: yellow showing by that day and I'm a happy lady. The wonderful early Zwanenburg Bronze don't have to be open by then but showing yellow and I'm a happy lady.

Well, I am a happy lady. It's only March 2! They've got 2 free days to frolic in what hopefully will be sunshine. It was snowing ever so lightly as I took these photos, but it's supposed to improve as the week wears on.

Welcome back, garden! I'm looking forward to a good season with you this time around.

One year on

It's not a blogiversary, but on March 4 2008, we had our first blooms in the garden.  

That's not going to repeat today.  We have been having properly nasty spring weather: Ice, snow, rain, sleet, icy-sleet, ice-rain, snow-ice, snow-sleet and a number of other things coming out of the sky.  After a huge amount of rain over the weekend much of the built-up winter snow has gone.  There are still the depressing blackened snowbanks lurking with their dog-mess surprises yet to melt, but for the most part our snowcover has gone.  This means that the garden, covered with pine boughs as it is, can be now seen for the first time after its winter nap.  

I pulled up a few of the pine branches yesterday and found many tulip and daffodil starts.  There are some quite far advanced crocus sprouts, but I think they're so far along because they started in the fall.  They didn't enjoy the boughs and they certainly didn't enjoy being encased in ice.  The ice is still substantial enough in the front (which gets less sun) that I couldn't pull the boughs up to look underneath.  I'm surprised by how green the oregano and grape hyacinth leaves are.  

When the meteorologists were predicting sunshine for the rest of the week, I thought the bulbs would love that and come up to bloom in a couple of weeks.  However, we must again banish all thoughts of sunshine from our thoughts because the predictions have reverted to their usual snow, sleet, ice, rain, etc.  I guess I'll have to wait until April this year.  

Actual gardening activity

This afternoon while the sweary one struggled with the lawn and a large, unwieldy pile of dirt (score: 2 rakes down; lawn better-looking than before; pile of dirt only marginally improved) , I actually weeded and neatened the side yard.  I hadn't the heart to touch it since the painters had been through.  It has been looking very bad.  

It wasn't so bad to tidy it up.  I had to do a few things I don't like to do (admit something is dead) and a few things I don't mind so much but I'm still not crazy about (deal with big spider webs).  The weeds were plentiful, but they hadn't taken over.  The plants I meant to be there were still winning.  That's nice.  

The front yard hasn't had any attention since my first attempt long ago.  It's not beautiful.  I MUST put a raised bed in when the chance arrives.  It can't go on as it has.  

The side on the front is dreadful.  I pulled up the horrible weed barrier last fall and since then it's run amok.  It, too, needs some serious attention.  Heaven only knows who will grant it.  Not me, I think.  In happier news, the yellow-flower bush is still flowering.  

My difficulty has been entirely to do with lack of inspiration.  There isn't anything new going in.  I don't have to prep the ground for something wonderful that I want to have a nice life.  It's just maintenance now.  And with the side yard, maintenance is easy, except when I go away for a month and monsters come and trample and im-blue everything while I'm gone.  Oh, and it rains continually for a month after that.  It turns out that I'm not a good gardener then.  I need something nice.  I need a reward.  

Today my reward is dual.  I spent some pleasant minutes in the sunshine AND the side yard is no longer a disaster.  There are a few other good bits of news, too.  I'll write more about them in the expanded posts.  I think one long post is easier for me to write, but harder for me to find the relevant note in later, so I'm going to write many posts.  

Anyway, I hope I can find inspiration to deal with the front before the cold comes in the autumn.  So far, the only thing I can think of is shame. I can't bear that our house looks trashy with all those weeds surrounding it.  Unfortunately, I'm not quite embarrassed enough. 

Gone to Ground

The first batch of peas have officially kicked off the plot season.  This morning, I put four of the pea plants (including the two who intertwined yesterday) into a bag and brought it to work.  The bag and the pea plants sat in a sunless and grim spot in the corner of my office for several long hours, but when the day was done their imprisonment was over!  Hooray!

We dug up the soil and raked it around a bit.

We checked on the onions and garlic.  The garlic bears no resemblance to the stuff we put into the ground last spring.  They are rather like spring onions which are buried too deep.  Hopefully, this fall the garlic will bear some resemblance to the stuff we want to eat.  The onions are still crazy and marginal.

We dug little pits and tapped the peas out of their pots.  

We then put the peas into the ground, staking them as we did so.  

I think maybe we'll put some more in tomorrow.  

Vertebrate Softie

I went out today and scrabbled about in the side yard until I had filled two buckets with organic junk and my fingers were numb.  I don't know what I'll do with or about all of those rocks that were heaved to the top.  It's clear it will have to be something.  Perhaps there is a ... riddler? ... is that what the soil sieves are called? Anyway, perhaps there is a soil sieve in my future. I had some positive reinforcement after all the work, though:  I saw someone walking by admiring the flowers.  

And how could they not, when they're looking so fine?  And when the hyacinths are so gamely giving blooming a try?

In truth of fact, the zwanenburg bronzes are starting to fade.  They didn't much like me pulling the leaf pile away.  Apparently it was a load-bearing leaf pile.  

I had a bit of a quandary when I was doing the clearing.  There is a plant that is taking over the patch and I'm pretty sure that it's a weed.  Basically, if it grows like that, it has to be a weed.  The thing is that I have put a few things in the earth that I know to be "aggressive".  I thought a patch of thyme would be more welcome than an empty rockpile.  I was sure some mint might be welcome, if only to do battle with the thyme.  I genuinely want some lavender to take hold.

Unfortunately, I haven't been the most meticulous record-keeper and I can't for the life of me remember what was deliberate.  

At any rate, I yanked up a fair amount of the stuff that looked like this:

I left in the ones that looked like these:

I didn't do much to improve the front, but these lovely little pale purple guys (nameless because I am clueless) are now poking through.  What heroes they are!  They are battling against seriously bad odds.  

Dirty Dirt.

There's this thing about the outside garden at the moment.  I haven't yet worked out an approach to dealing with it.  

The soil is full of crap.  It is positively brimming with junk of all descriptions which detracts from the lovely lovely blooms.  

The trouble is that it's really not yet warm enough to spend long chunks of time outside mucking about in the dirt.  Especially for someone who is usually only home in the mornings and evenings (ie not the hottest part of the day) except on weekends, when it is a) snowy, b) rainy or c) both.  I can't remember what I did (if anything) last year.  It's worse this year, anyway.

There is the usual spring clean-up to be done.  I put leaves down to help insulate the soil and the bulbs therein.  It's time to clear those out.  These poor daffodils are struggling through a hole in the leaves that can no longer accommodate their growth.

There could be stuff growing under the mess (it kind of looks like there might be grape hyacinths in the picture below).  I have no idea what/if there is, though because of the mound o' mess.

There is the frost-heave problem that I've been writing about already.  I've shown onions in our plot that are struggling to survive with nothing underground and surrounded by bits of plastic gears.  The earth at the surface is rough and pebbly.  Any crud that got worked in last year has worked its way out.

There's the combination of the frost heave and the leftovers from last year.  It's not a welcoming sight.

But worst of all, there is the detritus left by the guys who insulated our house last November.  It was way too cold to clean up after them at the time, and it's basically still too cold to be out gardening, but the whole bed is filled with chips of paint and chunks of wall.  

Plug after plug reveals itself.  It's going to take a lot of time, and unless I leave it for, honestly, months, it's going to take a lot of dextrous time in the cold.  

It's not only an aesthetic problem.  People see the yard in its current state of disarray and they do unpleasant things to it, like walk on it.  

Last year, I put bulbs in a part of the yard I have never used or treated as anything other than wasteland before.  It's a bit that sits between my front door and the driveway of the neighbours and it gets the snow dump from their plough.  This means that, basically, the earth has been salted.  I have not got much confidence that things will grow, but I had a large number of bulbs sitting out for a while after I'd dug them up accidentally, and I wanted to put them somewhere.  I also like the idea of reclaiming bits of land for flowers and nice things.  

I tore up the anti-weed barrier (which was coated in weeds, by the way) as far as I could.  I put in whatever black earth and compost I had available, and turned the soil until I was good and tired.  It looks like this now:

This spring, things are growing in that little patch.  The letter-carrier mercilessly marches over the patch.  No one discourages their dogs from exploring it.  And I can't really blame them, because it hardly looks like sacred ground.

But there are things that I planted growing in it!! Little, delicate things.  Things that might some day spring open to reveal colourful flowers.  

What am I going to do?  

Writing it down makes the answer obvious:  SUCK IT UP, BABY.  Am I a gardener, or a spineless softie not worthy of blossoms? 

I guess that is the point of having a blog.  It does help put things into perspective.  As for the answer to the question re: spineless softie vs. gardener, watch this space.  

 

Slow news day

The mint continues to be only one tiny plant, although it requires less squinting to see.  The marigolds are just starting to get their first true leaves.  The (surviving) beets are looking a bit bigger, and the potted-up peas are doing very well.  I think that probably the basil wasn't planted deep enough and the white hairy thing was a root.  There is, at any rate, a green stem-like thing above it in every case.  

Outdoors, the zwanenburgs look like they're still hanging on, the pickwicks are still looking fresh and new and a purple nameless bunch of crocuses are starting.  The snowdrops are struggling, but a few more are coming out to bolster the morale of the first ones.

Plotting

This lunch hour we visited our plot to see what our starting point will be.  The gardening association had its AGM last night (to the tune of 1.5h) and that inspired us to check out the state of affairs.

The plot is looking fairly rough, as one might expect for springtime.  However, it's not dreadfully rough.  Most of the mess is our leftover beanstalks from last year.  There is some blown-in rubbish that we'll have to clear when the time comes.

There is also a fair number of stones and bits of flotsam.  Last winter was warm and then cold and then warm and then cold again, which I think brings the rocks to the surface.  The heaving plucked some bulbs out of the earth, for sure.  In the garden at home some of the bulbs have been forced out and the potato I put in made its way, nastily, to the surface.

The bulbs in the earth at the plot are of course not daffodils, but onions and garlic.  The garlic is looking well.  Mike tried to pull one out but it would seem that only the surface of the soil has thawed so far.  The garlic wasn't budging.  

The onions had a bad run of it.  They were planted in the late fall and so therefore presumably didn't get a chance to root in before the freeze/thaw cycle started.  They're still very much alive, though.  It's amazing how well they are thriving.  

The onion below is still very much alive with roots digging into the ground, despite being completely uprooted by the frost heave.