Garden Work Day! -- Yea!

With so much going on in our lives a the moment, the garden has once again taken a back seat to new adventures, old jobs and other commitments. Today, though, we were presented with a complete Saturday with no baseball, no appointments, no errands, nothing.

Despite a somewhat late start, we have just come inside for some lunch after a good 3 hours of work in the front garden. It had been looking quite shaggy, of late, and I was getting a little embarrassed about the face we were presenting to the neighbors. The azaleas and juniper in the geometric beds missed their annual prune last year so I had to deal with 2 years of growth.

Overall, it wasn't too bad, though. This is one of the few times when we had all hands on deck, with everyone pitching in at one time and it actually went quite well. I had decided beforehand that I wouldn't try to do the entire front yard, as it usually leaves my arms as wiggly as wet noodles to hold the hedge trimmers for that long. Surprise, surprise, though, with a couple short breaks I was able to complete the whole thing. There is still a lot of raking and other cleanup to do, but we filled not only our own garden waste bin, but the neighbors, as well, so cleanup will have to spread out over the next several days.

While I was trimming, wife and son were clearing one of the geometric beds that had lost most of its plants over the 11 years we have lived here. This is part of our overall design change for the front garden. She wants a place to grow a few tomatoes and she loves the lavender we started in the front bed, so this newly cleaned up bed will be the beginnings of that. The front garden is gets more sun than the back, but neither one is perfect for growing vegetables. We will have to do some sun surveys and try to maximize those areas that get the most.

One way to gauge how much sun your garden receives is to do a time-lapse video of the area you are interested in. The sped-up nature of the video very clearly shows where the sunlight falls and for how long. You can even freeze various frames and market the farthest extents of the sun during different times of year,

Here is a slide show of our work for today. I hope yours was just as fun and productive.


Created with Paul's flickrSLiDR.

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