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Garden journal entry |
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| April 04, 2015. Later than most years, but they finally arrived: the first warm days of spring. Temperatures reached the upper 60s two days this week, which got the gardening juices flowing. The garden itself doesn't show much excitement yet (all the usuals are doing their thing, of course: crocuses, snowdrops, hellebores, dwarf irises), so the time was ripe for a hardscaping project in preparation for the new season. Amy and I quickly settled on a good one: finding a better place for my collection of hypertufa troughs that house little alpine prima donnas. It was about time for them to emerge from the garage, where they spent the winter away from the onslaught of winter wet (which most of them can't tolerate). But we needed a better solution than last year, when I had commandeered the patio table for this purpose. Amy had been amazingly tolerant of this assault on patio furnature functionality, but she would really prefer to have a place where we could eat on a nice summer evening. So we settled on a strip at the edge of our patio that gets a reasonable share of sunshine. That started a game of musical chairs: the roses and some other residents of the strip had to be moved to new locations, which in turn prompted some indiscriminate hacking into established tenants of the garden (arctic willow, RIP). With a clear slate to work with, Ben helped me scavenge bricks from various garden areas, to serve as the bases for a set of pressure-treated boards, together forming a two-tiered set of shelves. The structure raises the troughs up from ground level, bringing their tiny inhabitants a little closer to eye level and also providing more light and less disturbance from rodents and other critters. At first sight, it seems like my attempts at keeping the littluns alive was more successful than it was last year, but I'll wait another week or two before taking inventory. As always, it's good to start the gardening season with some kind of a project, to enhance the spirit of renewal promised by those first days of spring. Gardening season is on! |
Visitors to this page have left the following comments| Jeanette | Apr 17, 2015 | Great project! |
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