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dragonlady7I am deeply, deeply tired, though I don't feel like I've done much today. I sort of have that problem with gardening-- it is extremely tiring but I never feel like I've done very much!
Today I awoke intending to work more on the garage bed, but it was already 75 at 8:30 am, and blindingly sunny. I started off by applying sunscreen while topless, to avoid the other day's gaffe of putting on sunscreen then changing shirts, so I wound up with narrow strips of burn where one shirt didn't cover what the previous had.
So I'm entirely sunscreened in the shoulder/cleavage area, and... wearing a backless shirt. We'll see how that goes.
The sun made me wilt when I stuck the shovel into the ground the first time, and I said, Screw that. I went behind the garage and got to work on that bed, tilling it and pulling out the lush growth of buttercups, purple nightshade, and violets that had taken over. I repented, and stuck all the violets into the space between the garage and the fence. But everything else, i threw into a bucket and dumped in the newly-set-up composter. The nightshade vines are woody and flexible, and I hope will be a nice sort of fluffy layer at the bottom to keep things from getting too squashed down.
It took me hours to get all those weeds out and the soil turned over. It was really exhausting. But it's this tiny little space-- I really mean tiny. Three feet wide, a foot of which is taken up with concrete pavers to make a walkway against the garage. And mm, however wide a one-car garage is. There's not even room on the garage's front, I should mention, for so much as a pedestrian door-- the only door is the car door, and then there's about a foot to one side, and two feet to the other side. How wide is a garage door? Eight feet?
We'll say it's a ten-foot-wide space. So that's twenty square feet?
I'm planting the whole thing with my read-a-brief-description-on-the-Internet version of Jarjarkot's Polyculture. So we'll see. As far as I can tell, you just evenly space peas, spinach, radishes, and more peas, and then when the radishes grow up, you pull them and replace them with lettuce. Right? I hope I'm right. I'll see how it works.
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urban_homestead also had a tip: lay wet newspaper over fresh compost mulch, then cover with potting soil-- or, if you're lazy like me, carefully sorted and cleaned garden clay, crumbled, mixed with potting soil (some of which is salvaged from deceased indoor plants), composted manure, and peat moss, and plant your spinach and lettuce and the such into that. I tried it, and am poking holes through the newspaper for the peas. We'll see if it works-- anything to cut down on weeds. I am so terrible at keeping up with weeds, and my summer is going to be so busy I will not have time to force myself to do it. The idea is that you use potting soil for the top layer since it will have no weed seeds; I am deviating from that because I don't so much care if weeds come up, I just want them to be easier to pull. Weeds in our heavy clay soil become tenacious and impossible to pull, and that's why I had to basically double-dig the bed just to dislodge two years' growth of buttercups. Buttercups are motherfuckers. For the record. Root systems like you wouldn't believe.
So I'm doing the planting now, and have finished about half of it, and am so exhausted I've had to come inside and sit down. I might mention I also took a break for lunch. I'm just bushed. I think I'm not used to the heat. It doesn't help that now that it's afternoon, the back of the garage is in full sun, and will be until sundown.
Gardening is so much work. I don't know how people with normal jobs manage it. I have probably spent forty hours just on garden bed setup, not counting ANY planting, and not counting the stuff I got ready last year. I like doing it, it's satisfying. But oh my goodness. I am not yet ready to plant pretty much anything. I feel so lazy.
And filthy. I am filthy. I think I need to go rinse off and lie down.
Maybe this will motivate me to, this autumn, do a whole bunch of garden bed setup, and maybe even solarize some of the beds with black plastic so that next spring I can just turn it back and plant. We'll see... I do plan on hoarding materials to lasagna basically the rest of my garden for next year. But I'll have to do a lot of hoarding.
Today I awoke intending to work more on the garage bed, but it was already 75 at 8:30 am, and blindingly sunny. I started off by applying sunscreen while topless, to avoid the other day's gaffe of putting on sunscreen then changing shirts, so I wound up with narrow strips of burn where one shirt didn't cover what the previous had.
So I'm entirely sunscreened in the shoulder/cleavage area, and... wearing a backless shirt. We'll see how that goes.
The sun made me wilt when I stuck the shovel into the ground the first time, and I said, Screw that. I went behind the garage and got to work on that bed, tilling it and pulling out the lush growth of buttercups, purple nightshade, and violets that had taken over. I repented, and stuck all the violets into the space between the garage and the fence. But everything else, i threw into a bucket and dumped in the newly-set-up composter. The nightshade vines are woody and flexible, and I hope will be a nice sort of fluffy layer at the bottom to keep things from getting too squashed down.
It took me hours to get all those weeds out and the soil turned over. It was really exhausting. But it's this tiny little space-- I really mean tiny. Three feet wide, a foot of which is taken up with concrete pavers to make a walkway against the garage. And mm, however wide a one-car garage is. There's not even room on the garage's front, I should mention, for so much as a pedestrian door-- the only door is the car door, and then there's about a foot to one side, and two feet to the other side. How wide is a garage door? Eight feet?
We'll say it's a ten-foot-wide space. So that's twenty square feet?
I'm planting the whole thing with my read-a-brief-description-on-the-Internet version of Jarjarkot's Polyculture. So we'll see. As far as I can tell, you just evenly space peas, spinach, radishes, and more peas, and then when the radishes grow up, you pull them and replace them with lettuce. Right? I hope I'm right. I'll see how it works.
urban_homestead also had a tip: lay wet newspaper over fresh compost mulch, then cover with potting soil-- or, if you're lazy like me, carefully sorted and cleaned garden clay, crumbled, mixed with potting soil (some of which is salvaged from deceased indoor plants), composted manure, and peat moss, and plant your spinach and lettuce and the such into that. I tried it, and am poking holes through the newspaper for the peas. We'll see if it works-- anything to cut down on weeds. I am so terrible at keeping up with weeds, and my summer is going to be so busy I will not have time to force myself to do it. The idea is that you use potting soil for the top layer since it will have no weed seeds; I am deviating from that because I don't so much care if weeds come up, I just want them to be easier to pull. Weeds in our heavy clay soil become tenacious and impossible to pull, and that's why I had to basically double-dig the bed just to dislodge two years' growth of buttercups. Buttercups are motherfuckers. For the record. Root systems like you wouldn't believe. So I'm doing the planting now, and have finished about half of it, and am so exhausted I've had to come inside and sit down. I might mention I also took a break for lunch. I'm just bushed. I think I'm not used to the heat. It doesn't help that now that it's afternoon, the back of the garage is in full sun, and will be until sundown.
Gardening is so much work. I don't know how people with normal jobs manage it. I have probably spent forty hours just on garden bed setup, not counting ANY planting, and not counting the stuff I got ready last year. I like doing it, it's satisfying. But oh my goodness. I am not yet ready to plant pretty much anything. I feel so lazy.
And filthy. I am filthy. I think I need to go rinse off and lie down.
Maybe this will motivate me to, this autumn, do a whole bunch of garden bed setup, and maybe even solarize some of the beds with black plastic so that next spring I can just turn it back and plant. We'll see... I do plan on hoarding materials to lasagna basically the rest of my garden for next year. But I'll have to do a lot of hoarding.
