progress

Posted on August 5, 2012 by paridevita

This is what happens when you jump to conclusions. First conclusion I jumped to was that I had no more room for plants, until I looked at this space (room for at least fifty), and the second conclusion was that this soil was hard as a rock. I tried digging in the soil here, using a cheap shovel someone left in the front yard some years ago (the tip of the shovel is now concave, which doesn’t happen with the heavier-bladed Bulldog tools), and it was a snap. This had been a garden before, so the top eight inches or so were easy to dig in. I needed to fill the hole with water to get down deeper with the shovel, and the water drained away in just a few minutes.

Some people say that if a hole doesn’t drain in thirty minutes that’s bad; others say two hours, or twelve hours. The soil here is so dry it hardly matters one way or the other. There were no earthworms in the soil I dug out.

I happened to have a nice Vitex agnus-castus that I was going to jam into any space I could find, until it occurred to me that empty spaces have some potential. The vitex won’t become a tree here, which is okay by me. I don’t need any more trees. The Cotoneaster multiflora in the corner has become a tree, but got seriously pruned when the fence went in. I was daydreaming about moving to California the other day, but there, everything becomes a tree. Sometimes living in a less gardening-friendly climate has its advantages.

 

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the last empty space

Posted on August 5, 2012 by paridevita

It isn’t quite the last empty space, but the other two spaces are the corners of the back yard, where wood and branches and dead plants are piled, and there might be spiders there, so I pretend those places don’t exist.

I posted a picture of this back in June, when it was filled with junk after the fence was put up, and now it’s all raked clean and ready for planting. The required implement is in the picture, too. What fun.

This is the first thing people see when they come through the gate; it used to be part of the North Border, which is mostly horrible alkaline subsoil trucked in from hell when the neighborhood was built and the excellent creek bottom loam was scraped off, never to be seen again. The actual subsoil is reddish, like Red Rocks a couple of miles to the west, probably decomposed sandstone, and reasonably easy to dig in even when dry ….but you have to dig to get to that.

Not only is the soil awful, it’s been hard packed by dog paws, since the chain link fence offered a good view of whatever border collies think is a good view, and years of running down the gravel path have turned this into a conglomerate of hard packed awful soil and pea gravel.

My garden staff is nowhere in sight, the dog is no use at all (he expects me to cut a hole in the fence so he can see through), and soil, no matter how awful, doesn’t dig itself.

Time to get to work on this. After my nap, of course.

 

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