Direction Connection

Rebecca is out to dinner with her friend Julie, so I’m going to spend a little time providing a gardening update. I’m not sure I have a whole lot to say, so this could be fairly short.

So, we bought this house last summer. And one of the things we thought was cool about it was that there is no grass in the front yard; it’s entirely landscaped. Rebecca was very excited because she wanted to get into gardening. The only problems with her plan to become a gardener were (1) mosquitoes really really like to bite Rebecca; (2) Rebecca is not all that strong; and (3) Rebecca does not really like physical labor very much. So, out of necessity, I have needed to become a bit of a gardener myself.

The front yard was fairly out of control this Spring, because we didn’t really do much of anything to it last year. And neither of us knows a whole lot about, well, plants. So we don’t really know what we’re doing. Here’s an example of a conversation we’ve had at least a half-dozen times since we bought this house.

One of us: Hey, come over here. Look at this. What do you think it is?

The other one of us: Hmm, I don’t know.

One of us: Do you think it’s a weed?

The other one of us: Um, I don’t know.

One of us: Well, should we pull it?

The other one of us: Maybe we should just let it go for another few weeks and see what we think.

One of us: OK. And I guess it doesn’t matter that much if it’s a weed; it’s more a matter of whether we like it, right? So if it’s a weed we like, we could just decide to keep it. Maybe?

The other one of us: Um, yeah, I guess so.

So. I think we’ve probably pulled some stuff that we shouldn’t have, but we’re trying not to dwell on it. Because I am the one of us who is more capable of physical labor, I have decided that there are enough low-maintenance options that if something proves itself to be unruly or needy, I yank it up and move on.

We’ve got some good stuff going on in the front  yard though. Two humongous rosemary bushes, three huge lantanas (there were four, but I recently dug one up and gave it to a friend), lavender, thyme, a butterfly bush, some monkey grass, and other stuff I can’t name. Oh, and day lilies. Day lilies are insidious!! I hate them, and will be yanking them up once again as soon as I get the chance.

So that’s the front yard. The back yard…the back yard is another thing entirely. There are a number of problems. One is that the former owners preferred a “wild” look in the back yard, which is not really our preference. Another is that we had foundation work done after we moved in, and then we had a large deck built, so instead of nice topsoil in our yard, all of the clay that’s usually down deeper here in North Carolina is right there on the top. It’s a mess. And it’s kind of lumpy. And we probably should have cut back a bunch of the bushes over the winter, so those are a bit wild too. And we tried to start a garden in a part of the yard where we probably should not have tried to start a garden (not enough sun). We have a plan now, though. Sometime soon, I am going to saturate all of the ivy with Round-Up to kill it. We hope to get a bunch of top soil for the back yard, and maybe have it graded. And we are going to move the garden from where it is now to someplace else, which will make a whole lot more sense. When we replace our chainlink fence with a wooden fence, it will make even more sense. The one thing we haven’t figure out yet is what we’re going to do instead of grass in the back yard. There’s not really enough sun to grow a good amount of grass, so we need to figure something else out. Any suggestions?

So. That’s about it. Not terribly exciting. Maybe I should add pictures.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 9:16 pm and is filed under Day-to-Day Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.