Planting
On Saturday, I spent much of the day mowing the front lawn, then clearing out much of mess on the other side of our driveway. After the winter’s rains, lots of winter grass had grown quite tall and was looking very untidy. I cleared out almost everything and cut the branches on our pin-cushion hakea tree. One might say this tree is a weed because it grew from the seed of one we planted when we first started our garden. The original was beautiful but died quite abruptly one year, leaving heaps of seeds behind.
The current tree has grown rather awkwardly and looked a bit like a gawky teenager, I guess. I have cut it back significantly around the bottom and trimmed off some of the longer, drooping branches that seem to drag it down. It looks much healthier now. Despite it’s gawky appearance, it bloomed quite nicely over the winter, far more than this or the original ever did.
On Sunday, the Scientist and I went off to the nursery to find plants. That nearly was a complete debacle because I suggested an alternate path and we ended up rather lost. In fact, I had indicated the correct turn but the road we needed to get to just afterwards was inaccessible in that direction and neither of us saw that the road was there. We did finally arrive and the place was packed, probably thanks to the first sunny day in quite a while.
We did much better than usual in the choosing of the plants. Normally we get a random mixture of plants with no real idea of what we will do with them. This time we chose plants just for that area along the driveway. We are trying to make it into a rockery of sorts. The only exceptions were seedlings for cherry tomatoes and for sage plants. There were some other plants that looked nice but we resisted the temptation to buy more until we are ready to work in other areas.
After returning home, I set off to work in the back yard, shredding branches that have been cut over many months. There are currently several piles of branches to be shredded but many need to dry out a bit more. The oldest pile was practically covered by other things that had been moved when the fence came down (and never returned). After nearly two hours, I felt like I’d hardly any mulch from all the work but it filled nearly two wheelbarrows…so I guess it wasn’t too bad.
While I had been out back, the Scientist and Lego Lover set to work planting most of the new plants. Lego Lover loves helping in the garden and had a great time helping his dad. It was quite an event to have the Scientist doing all the planting because he tends not to have much to do with the garden. The advantage this time is that the plants probably won’t be too close together. There is one shrub that seems rather close to the fence but we will just see what happens there.
The Scientist and Lego Lover took an old batch of mulch to put around the plants, then added my fresh mulch to it. It looks a bit funny out front due to the dark color of the aged mulch compared to fresh. I suspect that will even out soon enough. Once it dries up for a few days again, I will get back to work on the shredding before I have to do more cutting back from the spring growth.
Anyway, it’s all looking much more welcoming out in the front yard. The other positive side effects were lots of good exercise with some sense of accomplishment attached.
