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dragonlady7Tucked in with my Burpee order this season, I ordered a bareroot Stella D'Oro daylily, since it was $4 and I wanted it. (That's not bad, for a plant.) I have orange daylilies in my backyard-- they're attempting to take it over, in fact. And I got some red daylilies from Mom lo these many moons ago. I'd dug a bunch of them out of the back garden at the end of last year when they stopped blooming, and chucked them into a pot just to get them out of the way. This spring I noticed they were still alive in that pot.
So today I went out front and lasagna-gardened a bit -- I added a bit onto the little hump-o-extra-garden I put in a few years back. I put in a brick path a while ago, and cut the sod from in front of the window to make a bed there, as well as around the base of the two arborvitae beside the porch. There was a sunken area in the yard from sewer work five or six years ago, and I chucked the sod I cut from the new garden beds into that sunken area. I made it into a mound, stuck some landscape cloth over the top, and plunked a bunch of bulbs and annuals in there. It's terrible soil and very prone to weeds. The whole front yard is terrible soil. And it's sinking more; the sewer work is still subsiding.
So I extended it. But since it was so sunken, instead of just starting with cardboard over the sod of the lawn, I went into the bed I'd pulled the lilies from, which is against the south wall of the garage, has probably the nicest soil on the property, and is totally overrun with weeds and perennials I can't identify. I went in there with a pitchfork and shovel, and worked loose the root systems of some of the crap in the front-- buttercups, Star of Bethlehem bulbs ("they're like terrorists," Auntie said when we moved in), crabgrass colonies, and things I can't identify. I don't have a wheelbarrow, so I took a garbage can lid and used it as a tray to hold all this sod and root systems. I took three loads of this garbage can lid and brought it out front to use as extensions to the garden bed.
In between the chunks of sod, I slotted in the rescued daylilies from last fall. They were cut out in chunks as well, and have sod in with them. I'll deal with that as they get going, I think. Ideally, they'll shade out whatever's with them. We'll see if that works. Weeding is such an annoyance.
So I made sort of a jigsaw puzzle of lily-roots and grass sod and weeds.
Over that, I put cardboard, boxboard, and newspaper I'd soaked in water. I arranged it neatly so the layers overlapped. To complicate matters, there are bulbs coming up in that area, including in the grass around the base of the mound. So I slotted the sod around those bulbs, and tore holes in the newspaper so they could poke up as well.
I extended the paper layer over the existing bed, which has as much soil as it needs, but is definitely lacking in weed control.
I dug a hole in the old bed and put the bareroot Stella D'Oro plant I just got in there, since there are plants in there now but they're all bulbs and will die back when the weather gets warm, so maybe the new lily will fill things in a bit. I may plant something there-- I was considering putting in a trellis and adding a melon plant and some climbing nasturtiums, but of course, a nice-looking trellis would be a bit expensive. Still, I'm considering it. I put in soil amendments for the bareroot plant and planted it in a nice little oasis of finished compost in that bed's crappy soil.
Once I had all the paper in place, I put a layer of peat moss over everything.
I'm not planning on planting much in this bed so I wasn't too careful to ensure I had enough nutrients. Basically, in the absence of a nice thick layer of grass clippings to put here, I just dumped whatever I had in the compost bucket. As it's mostly coffee grounds, that was sort of OK. I had some chunks of spaghetti squash rind that are too big to break down easily. I lay those over low spots in the cardboard, and filled in gaps with them; they'll rot slowly, but it's so dry up front they probably won't just go moldy. I also had the root system from a potted plant, which I decided to consider 'green' material-- it was definitely dead, so nothing'll sprout from this. So I broke that up well and spread it over everything. Well, everything in the new area-- there's not much need to bother with the old area, since I'm not trying to improve the soil there as much as just kill the weeds by mulching.
Then another layer of peat moss over the 'green' stuff.
Then a nice thick couple of garbage-can-lid-loads of mulch: chopped leaves, and some very well crunched-up sticks and flower stalks from the garden that I put in the driveway and scuffed with my thickest shoes until they were in slivers. (I don't have access to a lot of dry leaves, since I don't have a tree.)
I arranged the mulch so it'd look even and cover the paper on the old side of the bed as well as the whole assemblage on the new side. I put the thicker bits of sticks around the edges, which stick up out of the surrounding lawn kind of sharply just now-- I may revisit that concept later. (I need some sort of edging for that bed, I think. I just have to think about it a bit to decide what.)
Then I watered the whole thing.
So there's lasagna gardening, done the cheater way. We'll see if it's at all ineffective. I'm just trying to fill in a sunken hole in the lawn.
If I can score another bag of dried leaves from home (Fi's going home for Easter; if there are any lying around there, maybe she can get them? I feel weird asking, but not that weird), if I can get ahold of another newspaper or two, and if I can hang on until the first lawn-mowing of the season, then I can make another bed in the backyard with the materials I have. I just... don't remember when the first lawn-mowing of the season is...
Oh, and 2 hours after I finished out there, the TrueGreen ChemLawn guy was going door-to-door and knocked on our door to try to sell me their treatment products. Mmhmm. No thanks. I said "I'm actually doing my best to get rid of as much lawn as possible because I think lawns are wasteful and harmful to the environment." Which just got him trying to sell me the low-chemical option. Thanks! No thanks! Have you noticed my lawn is the brownest on the block? Nobody's fertilized it in years. The soil's crappy and that's that.
So anyway. Flower gardening! Crazy. If I join a CSA next year I may do some crazy flower-gardening in the backyard. For now, not so much. Just daylilies, since I love them immoderately. (Why do I love them? I don't know. I love irises too. I wanted to go hog-wild and buy tons of irises from White Flower a couple years back but I didn't. I have one kind, and only ever one or two of the plants bloom. I tried transplanting them. We'll see how that goes.)
I almost bought an Oriental lily at the local garden co-op, but I restrained myself. I have wanted one for years. Casa Blanca-- big, white, scented. Wouldn't it be nice? But it's frivolous, so, no. Mom had some in a garden bed she's dismantling, but I forgot to dig them up last fall. They were yellow and little and not scented, but still would be cute.
Anyway. Otherwise I spent today working on bout footage. If I finish it by tomorrow night... well, there's a bout the day after tomorrow. And I haven't so much as seen the footage from the bout two weeks ago. I'm trying to stay just one bout behind, though.
I think it'll be done by tomorrow night with no problem, though, so at least I'll have that...
I am so boring. I got no sewing done yesterday or today, though, and I need to do that. I have practice in... OK, I have to leave in half an hour. So it's unlikely I'll get any sewing done today either.
But I did reread the latest draft of The Novel Formerly Known As Barbarians_Novel. I'm going to go back to its old working title, Protector, because now I have too many novels that have barbarians in them. I reread the whole latest version... and...
I love it. Am I crazy? I totally freaking love this thing. That I wrote. That I haven't looked at in months.
I am secretly convinced I'm a genius.
"Get up, child," he said, putting his hand on her arm. His hand was warm, and there were calluses on the palm. "Oh child, you're freezing. Sit down."
She sat on the bench, and blinked in shock as he put his beautiful coat around her shoulders. "My lord," she stammered.
"I assume, then, that the ritual master is still busy with the Captain," Galjis said, sitting next to her. "Otherwise you would not be sitting here by yourself catching your death of cold. I must convince him to take an assistant for days like today. He ought to be training another apprentice anyhow."
The coat was still warm from Galjis's body; the fur lining was soft against her bare skin, and she fought off an urge to shed the towel to wrap herself entirely in the coat instead. It had to be rabbit fur. It was finely made, the outer layer a thick wool dyed deep blue, with green and yellow embroidery in a repetitive geometric pattern.
Galjis laughed, and she remembered that he had spoken. She cast back frantically, trying to think of a sensible response. "Perhaps you have not been sitting here long," he said kindly. "I will not ask you taxing questions yet. We will sit and wait." He turned to the men who had come with him, and spoke; they went back out the door and closed it. He stood, and went through the other doorway, the one that didn't lead to the room where the rituals happened.
She put her arms through the sleeves of the coat and hugged herself, trying to concentrate. Galjis was a dangerous sort, she was certain. No king could fail to be, not one who had lasted more than a handful of years. He had been the King of the Letts for nearly thirty years now, and certainly knew what he was about. In her current state, Callonia wasn't sure she could answer any questions he was likely to ask. She had to focus, but her brain was slow, easily-distracted, and unreliable.
Galjis came back in and sat beside her, handing her a cup. She took it, and noticed in astonishment that the cup was made of metal. A metal cup. It was bronze, slightly warm to the touch and gleaming softly, faintly blue with patina in the crevices of the stamped design beneath the rolled rim.
She looked up and Galjis was watching her. His eyes were a dull medium blue, with a sharpness behind them like Talus's. "You're afraid of me," he observed. "I imagine the things you have heard of me cannot have been good."
She looked back down at the cup, realizing she was hungry. How odd; she'd just eaten. She sipped at the cup's contents, which were both sweet and tangy. Whatever it was, she'd never had it before, but it was good. "I have heard both good and bad things, lord," she said, "but I am afraid because I know that powerful men are dangerous, rather than because of anything specific I have heard of you."
"Why should I be dangerous to you?" he asked, his tone mild and faintly amused.
She looked back up at him. "Powerful men are always dangerous, lord, and I am not only alone in a strange land, but also have been drugged. I have no defenses against you, and given who and what you are, it is certain that you will be taking advantage of this."
"Is it really?" he asked, still mild.
"I would, if I were you," she said. "I would be very suspicious of me, and would take any advantage I could get. Powerful men do not remain powerful by always doing what is kindest."
Would you read more of that, or is it vanity that urges me to continue? I had gotten stuck, only a little farther on, but now I want to go on.
We'll see how that goes. Of course, I've already written something like 500,000 words on this project, and discarded them all, but I think this time I've whittled it down to what's important. So that excerpt above is from a "rough" draft, in that this precise scene was new-written when last I worked (November?), but it's probably my fifth attempt at a scene with similar functions, so "rough" isn't the word, really.
Of course, it's all mostly dialogue, unless it's sex or violence; that's how I write. You'd think there must be a market for that... Hard to say.
So today I went out front and lasagna-gardened a bit -- I added a bit onto the little hump-o-extra-garden I put in a few years back. I put in a brick path a while ago, and cut the sod from in front of the window to make a bed there, as well as around the base of the two arborvitae beside the porch. There was a sunken area in the yard from sewer work five or six years ago, and I chucked the sod I cut from the new garden beds into that sunken area. I made it into a mound, stuck some landscape cloth over the top, and plunked a bunch of bulbs and annuals in there. It's terrible soil and very prone to weeds. The whole front yard is terrible soil. And it's sinking more; the sewer work is still subsiding.
So I extended it. But since it was so sunken, instead of just starting with cardboard over the sod of the lawn, I went into the bed I'd pulled the lilies from, which is against the south wall of the garage, has probably the nicest soil on the property, and is totally overrun with weeds and perennials I can't identify. I went in there with a pitchfork and shovel, and worked loose the root systems of some of the crap in the front-- buttercups, Star of Bethlehem bulbs ("they're like terrorists," Auntie said when we moved in), crabgrass colonies, and things I can't identify. I don't have a wheelbarrow, so I took a garbage can lid and used it as a tray to hold all this sod and root systems. I took three loads of this garbage can lid and brought it out front to use as extensions to the garden bed.
In between the chunks of sod, I slotted in the rescued daylilies from last fall. They were cut out in chunks as well, and have sod in with them. I'll deal with that as they get going, I think. Ideally, they'll shade out whatever's with them. We'll see if that works. Weeding is such an annoyance.
So I made sort of a jigsaw puzzle of lily-roots and grass sod and weeds.
Over that, I put cardboard, boxboard, and newspaper I'd soaked in water. I arranged it neatly so the layers overlapped. To complicate matters, there are bulbs coming up in that area, including in the grass around the base of the mound. So I slotted the sod around those bulbs, and tore holes in the newspaper so they could poke up as well.
I extended the paper layer over the existing bed, which has as much soil as it needs, but is definitely lacking in weed control.
I dug a hole in the old bed and put the bareroot Stella D'Oro plant I just got in there, since there are plants in there now but they're all bulbs and will die back when the weather gets warm, so maybe the new lily will fill things in a bit. I may plant something there-- I was considering putting in a trellis and adding a melon plant and some climbing nasturtiums, but of course, a nice-looking trellis would be a bit expensive. Still, I'm considering it. I put in soil amendments for the bareroot plant and planted it in a nice little oasis of finished compost in that bed's crappy soil.
Once I had all the paper in place, I put a layer of peat moss over everything.
I'm not planning on planting much in this bed so I wasn't too careful to ensure I had enough nutrients. Basically, in the absence of a nice thick layer of grass clippings to put here, I just dumped whatever I had in the compost bucket. As it's mostly coffee grounds, that was sort of OK. I had some chunks of spaghetti squash rind that are too big to break down easily. I lay those over low spots in the cardboard, and filled in gaps with them; they'll rot slowly, but it's so dry up front they probably won't just go moldy. I also had the root system from a potted plant, which I decided to consider 'green' material-- it was definitely dead, so nothing'll sprout from this. So I broke that up well and spread it over everything. Well, everything in the new area-- there's not much need to bother with the old area, since I'm not trying to improve the soil there as much as just kill the weeds by mulching.
Then another layer of peat moss over the 'green' stuff.
Then a nice thick couple of garbage-can-lid-loads of mulch: chopped leaves, and some very well crunched-up sticks and flower stalks from the garden that I put in the driveway and scuffed with my thickest shoes until they were in slivers. (I don't have access to a lot of dry leaves, since I don't have a tree.)
I arranged the mulch so it'd look even and cover the paper on the old side of the bed as well as the whole assemblage on the new side. I put the thicker bits of sticks around the edges, which stick up out of the surrounding lawn kind of sharply just now-- I may revisit that concept later. (I need some sort of edging for that bed, I think. I just have to think about it a bit to decide what.)
Then I watered the whole thing.
So there's lasagna gardening, done the cheater way. We'll see if it's at all ineffective. I'm just trying to fill in a sunken hole in the lawn.
If I can score another bag of dried leaves from home (Fi's going home for Easter; if there are any lying around there, maybe she can get them? I feel weird asking, but not that weird), if I can get ahold of another newspaper or two, and if I can hang on until the first lawn-mowing of the season, then I can make another bed in the backyard with the materials I have. I just... don't remember when the first lawn-mowing of the season is...
Oh, and 2 hours after I finished out there, the TrueGreen ChemLawn guy was going door-to-door and knocked on our door to try to sell me their treatment products. Mmhmm. No thanks. I said "I'm actually doing my best to get rid of as much lawn as possible because I think lawns are wasteful and harmful to the environment." Which just got him trying to sell me the low-chemical option. Thanks! No thanks! Have you noticed my lawn is the brownest on the block? Nobody's fertilized it in years. The soil's crappy and that's that.
So anyway. Flower gardening! Crazy. If I join a CSA next year I may do some crazy flower-gardening in the backyard. For now, not so much. Just daylilies, since I love them immoderately. (Why do I love them? I don't know. I love irises too. I wanted to go hog-wild and buy tons of irises from White Flower a couple years back but I didn't. I have one kind, and only ever one or two of the plants bloom. I tried transplanting them. We'll see how that goes.)
I almost bought an Oriental lily at the local garden co-op, but I restrained myself. I have wanted one for years. Casa Blanca-- big, white, scented. Wouldn't it be nice? But it's frivolous, so, no. Mom had some in a garden bed she's dismantling, but I forgot to dig them up last fall. They were yellow and little and not scented, but still would be cute.
Anyway. Otherwise I spent today working on bout footage. If I finish it by tomorrow night... well, there's a bout the day after tomorrow. And I haven't so much as seen the footage from the bout two weeks ago. I'm trying to stay just one bout behind, though.
I think it'll be done by tomorrow night with no problem, though, so at least I'll have that...
I am so boring. I got no sewing done yesterday or today, though, and I need to do that. I have practice in... OK, I have to leave in half an hour. So it's unlikely I'll get any sewing done today either.
But I did reread the latest draft of The Novel Formerly Known As Barbarians_Novel. I'm going to go back to its old working title, Protector, because now I have too many novels that have barbarians in them. I reread the whole latest version... and...
I love it. Am I crazy? I totally freaking love this thing. That I wrote. That I haven't looked at in months.
I am secretly convinced I'm a genius.
"Get up, child," he said, putting his hand on her arm. His hand was warm, and there were calluses on the palm. "Oh child, you're freezing. Sit down."
She sat on the bench, and blinked in shock as he put his beautiful coat around her shoulders. "My lord," she stammered.
"I assume, then, that the ritual master is still busy with the Captain," Galjis said, sitting next to her. "Otherwise you would not be sitting here by yourself catching your death of cold. I must convince him to take an assistant for days like today. He ought to be training another apprentice anyhow."
The coat was still warm from Galjis's body; the fur lining was soft against her bare skin, and she fought off an urge to shed the towel to wrap herself entirely in the coat instead. It had to be rabbit fur. It was finely made, the outer layer a thick wool dyed deep blue, with green and yellow embroidery in a repetitive geometric pattern.
Galjis laughed, and she remembered that he had spoken. She cast back frantically, trying to think of a sensible response. "Perhaps you have not been sitting here long," he said kindly. "I will not ask you taxing questions yet. We will sit and wait." He turned to the men who had come with him, and spoke; they went back out the door and closed it. He stood, and went through the other doorway, the one that didn't lead to the room where the rituals happened.
She put her arms through the sleeves of the coat and hugged herself, trying to concentrate. Galjis was a dangerous sort, she was certain. No king could fail to be, not one who had lasted more than a handful of years. He had been the King of the Letts for nearly thirty years now, and certainly knew what he was about. In her current state, Callonia wasn't sure she could answer any questions he was likely to ask. She had to focus, but her brain was slow, easily-distracted, and unreliable.
Galjis came back in and sat beside her, handing her a cup. She took it, and noticed in astonishment that the cup was made of metal. A metal cup. It was bronze, slightly warm to the touch and gleaming softly, faintly blue with patina in the crevices of the stamped design beneath the rolled rim.
She looked up and Galjis was watching her. His eyes were a dull medium blue, with a sharpness behind them like Talus's. "You're afraid of me," he observed. "I imagine the things you have heard of me cannot have been good."
She looked back down at the cup, realizing she was hungry. How odd; she'd just eaten. She sipped at the cup's contents, which were both sweet and tangy. Whatever it was, she'd never had it before, but it was good. "I have heard both good and bad things, lord," she said, "but I am afraid because I know that powerful men are dangerous, rather than because of anything specific I have heard of you."
"Why should I be dangerous to you?" he asked, his tone mild and faintly amused.
She looked back up at him. "Powerful men are always dangerous, lord, and I am not only alone in a strange land, but also have been drugged. I have no defenses against you, and given who and what you are, it is certain that you will be taking advantage of this."
"Is it really?" he asked, still mild.
"I would, if I were you," she said. "I would be very suspicious of me, and would take any advantage I could get. Powerful men do not remain powerful by always doing what is kindest."
Would you read more of that, or is it vanity that urges me to continue? I had gotten stuck, only a little farther on, but now I want to go on.
We'll see how that goes. Of course, I've already written something like 500,000 words on this project, and discarded them all, but I think this time I've whittled it down to what's important. So that excerpt above is from a "rough" draft, in that this precise scene was new-written when last I worked (November?), but it's probably my fifth attempt at a scene with similar functions, so "rough" isn't the word, really.
Of course, it's all mostly dialogue, unless it's sex or violence; that's how I write. You'd think there must be a market for that... Hard to say.
