Gardening

We're into a stretch of very sunny days, and the temperature is perfect.  It's warm enough to wear shorts, but not too hot.  After weeks of gazing outside and trying to figure out how our yard has changed now the black walnut is down, it's time to get to work!  The people who owned our house before us had very firm ideas about their gardens, but by the time we purchased, the lady was a widow and her memory was very poor.  As a result, the gardens have always been overgrown.  I haven't done much to change anything because there were so many enormous trees that I wasn't sure anything would grow other than hostas and daylilies.  

I love this time of year.  I'm busily pulling weeds, and trying to get all the twitch grass out of the gardens.  I'm going to be very cautious and check out how the sunlight falls before buying a lot of new plants.  We had a very unhappy rose garden between the red maple and the black walnut, but the roses did very poorly because of the lack of sunshine.  This is the last year for them, if they don't start to look happy because the walnut is gone, we're going to dig them up in the fall.  This is their written eviction notice, so they'd better smarten up.

We don't have enough sunlight for a vegetable garden, although we tried tomatoes and peppers in a spot by our backdoor for a few years.  Fortunately, my neighbour loves his tomatoes and peppers, and happily shares his produce in the late summer.   He is pretty organic too, so I don't need to worry about what chemicals have been used.  Last summer a bunny took up residence under his garden shed, and I know we saw him in our yard during the winter.  Hopefully he doesn't eat all the seedlings, or nibble the tomatoes when they're green.  You don't mind losing the odd veggie, but it would be really frustrating to lose everything.  

Another major challenge in our backyard is that we have the mother of all anthills close to the rose garden.  I hate the idea of poisoning the ants, but it's so huge that the grass has stopped growing over it.  Even mowing the lawn or weeding in the vicinity of the ant hill is not a pleasant way to spend time.  I've heard that pouring boiling water on the hill works, but it sounds very cruel, and I don't think it would be effective over such a large area.  You couldn't transport enough boiling water safely.  I should check the internet for ways to destroy ant hills, because I contacted a pest control company for an estimate and there were way too many zeros in the bill to be comfortable.  Besides I really don't like the idea of using poison on such a large scale, killing the worms and all the benign insects indiscriminately.


Enough chatting.  The sky is blue, the sun is shining and the garden is calling.  I'm going to go putter around!