It's a garden. I swear.
In complete and total praise of craigslist, I finally have the pile I've been waiting for. After pricing out redwood at 47 thousand dollars a board foot, I've been sitting and twiddling my gardening thumbs, waiting for some massive glut in the redwood industry to drive the price down to . . . like 25 cents a board foot. Or waiting for some way to talk myself into using chemically pressure treated wood for my organic garden. (Good one.) Or for somebody to deliver some perfect scrap wood to my driveway.
Which practically just happened yesterday. Except they didn't deliver it--we schlepped out to a town about 25 miles away and squeezed it into the mini-van along with all our kids.
I'm dying to build veggie beds and have practically had to practice anxiety breathing techniques to handle not having them out there when it's time to plant already. But then I do a little self-talk and try to calm down.
So far I've gotten from here:
and here:
to here:
and now to here:
and here:
And I've got lettuce and strawberries and lots of herbs and flowers (and even some broccoli starters--it's a nice and cool but not freeze-ish in my neck of the woods) growing happily. But I don't know if you happened to notice the uber-rocky swath on the left. That is what it is still. Which is ugly. And it is going to be non-ugly soon, thanks to the stack of beautiful, aged cedar that I picked up from a guy off craigslist for--Not Kidding--about 40 cents a board foot. And even better than its being cheap (which is really good, actually) it's very very nifty. We drove home with a stack of 2 X 8's that were originally a beach house. Love it.
I'm going to have wild and crazy food and flower beds there in no time at all, and I will post about my happiness at that time.
In the meantime, how's your gardening life? Sucky. I don't want to talk about it.
Sorry to hear that.
My whole yard is an ugly mess and I don't know where to start.
I totally know how you feel. When we moved in here I was so overwhelmed that we had one of those houses that people would have called the home owner's association about . . .if we lived in one of those places that had a home owner's association. I just decided (after negotiation with my budget spreadsheet for six months over the possibility of hiring Somebody Else to do it) that I would just start at the back of the lot and move to the front. I'm only part way there. Please know that I am so not showing you pictures of the very front of my house right now. That's for next year.
Right. Well, I kill plants.
Me too. So I tackled my non-gardener status just like I've tackled my non-baker and non-sewer status--the library. I started reading my head off about gardening. The best book I've found (most readable, most useable) is
Great Garden Companions. Good pictures. Lots of non-gardener language. Sensible organization. Most of all: you feel like you can go out and do it after you read it and not like you have to be an expert (A note: don't buy
this first--or
this or whichever one you see all those Real Gardeners in your town flipping through pensively and with a Garden Smart look on their face. You'll never plant anything if you see all those pictures. You'll just sit there and dream about affording a professional landscaper.)
It's all too expensive.
I know. See above. I've only managed that reality by doing a little bit at a time. But I feel your pain. I'm currently messing with a bed of seeds--which is turning out to be the most gratifying 5 and a half bucks I've spent recently. Those flowers up top are last year's pack of mixed seeds. Good times.
Just do a little to get yourself going. That's what I say.
