This week has been both a) school break week, which means a vacation from routine, and b) super nice weather!!! Which means: GARDENING! I've done a lot of yard tasks while enjoying the sunshine and it is finally starting to feel like Spring. :D
I've had a very chill week, including lots of relaxed outside time with Kelly while our kids hung out together. Yay! Sometimes school break has felt like it drags on, but this year it's rolling along quite nicely. I had a few ideas and goals of things to do this week, and while I've done some of those (baking, volunteering, yoga), most days the weather has drawn me out into the yard instead. Since it's back to clouds and cold outside today, I'm going to do a little sewing. Which, yes, was on my list. ;)
Anyway, the garden! I've been meaning to rethink a bed in the front yard and prepare it for THORNLESS black raspberries when they arrive in the mail next month. SO, yesterday, I worked hard on it!
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I initially created this bed out of my empty lawn (woot!) not long after we moved in. It used to house a giant azalea that I then moved, mostly because voles got under it :( and it wasn't thriving. After that, last summer I had a raised bed of snap peas in it (yes, within the bed, perpendicular to the raised bed in the photo), and while those did okay, it was an annoying configuration for harvest. Too many perennials in the way! Plus it was pretty shaded.
When I impulse-bought the black raspberries a few months ago, I decided to try them in this area, but the whole bed needed a redesign. So I think I have it now! Check out the photo and follow along:
1. This is parsley that has come back from last summer! I kinda wish the cilantro had come back, but I'm not that picky; I'll just put in more.
2. Some rogue strawberries that I put in way before I had plans for "actual strawberry production". They sometimes fruit, sometimes get eaten by critters; I don't really care and I'm leaving them. I can always propagate them and move elsewhere!
3. OK, the middle area is where I plan to move my RHUBARB in the fall, and add a couple more rhubarb plants soon if possible. I have one rhubarb planted in shade (oh well, my mistake) and it's very meager, so even though THIS bed gets partially shaded, it's less shade than where the rhubarb is now.
4. Little narcissus daffodils! And some coral bells. Just some general perennials that I can always move if I feel like it.
5. A lovely peony lives here! It had come with the house and I plopped it in when I first made the bed. Keeping it!
6. This rock (and the white rectangle paver) are my step-stones to make future raspberry picking easier.
7. I was going to make the raised bed wider, but then remembered/discovered that a really nice, variegated, pastel cool tone blue-green fern lives here!! (I say "discovered" because I knew it was in that general area, but when I set up the empty raised bed boards weeks ago, it wasn't coming up yet. Yesterday, all the fronds were coming up inside the raised bed!) So I'm keeping the raised bed out of the fern zone.
8. You will laugh at me, but in the fall, I had a big pile of nice compost-y dirt here, left over from where the raised bed had been. While gardening, I pulled out a start of some shrub -- and not really having a place to plant it, I stuck it in this dirt. Well, it's growing! I'm not even sure what it is, but clearly I thought it was worth saving, so I'll see what it is when it leafs out, and deal with it then.
9. These are some volunteer "wild Rhode Island onions", some chive type thing that's everywhere.
10. This pot is holding up some of the raised bed for now. It's an old dead houseplant fern.
11. The black raspberry bed! It was going to be the full width of the boards, but then I remembered that the row really doesn't have to be that wide. And then I had the fern pop up (see #7). So I narrowed it (in a hopefully temporary way since it looks pretty dumb, ha ha!) and actually that was good because I didn't have a lot of the excess compost-y dirt. What I had, fit nicely in this bed! At some point I'll adjust the boards and make it look better. I've just been moving and re-using this same compressed plastic raised bed for yeeeeears now! It makes my crazy projects quick and easy. :)
