gardens & greenery

The dirt and mulch arrived today! Very exciting. We got about 2 pallets into the hole today, tamped it down, and ran over it with the mover, and it looks fantastic (pictures tomorrow of that).  

I've got my plan ready and will probably start planting on it by the end of the week. Late but better than last year!

When the dump truck arrived last week, we found out that the contractor had the dump truck going through the neighbor's yard. That involved tearing down and reinstalling a fence, which shocked and horrified all of us. The neighbor was fine with it, but we decided that it wasn't really an optimal solution to the problem.

After careful calculation, we've decided to order the dirt and mulch from Lowe's. It's only about a $30 difference and we'll have the convenience of being able to store the excess in bags. We'll have to move all of the dirt and mulch back bag by bag, but the impact on our home and the neighbor's will be minimal.  

The bags do pose a bit of an ethical problem, for me, however. I would have preferred a dumptruck load so that we didn't have to deal with the excessive packaging from over 300 bags of product. I plan on saving the packaging, as I usually do, and will probably re-open fluffnfixings to share the recycled joy. I'll probably also be giving some away to a few of the websites that I'm on that deal with trades.

So, another week put off. I'm going crazy and itchy waiting for this stuff to get here so that I can make a late start on my gardens. It seems like I always start out with the best intentions and I never make it on time. We'll call it fashionably late, shall we? ;)

When our home was built, the scrap building materials were buried in a part of the yard, eventually resulting in a sinkhole. We noticed that it had started growing about two years ago, and I began depositing my compost and sod scraps from yard projects in a half-hearted attempt to fill in the area.  

It'd been a dry couple of years, and all of the rain revealed the true extent of the problem late last summer. The sinkhole expanded to about 20' long, about 6' across, and close to 6' deep in some places. It's huge! I know the contractor was probably trying to save money on disposal costs, but it's really resulted in quite the mess.

So next week sometime, we'll have a dump truck depositing an estimated 16 cu yd of screened fill dirt in our front yard. From there, it'll be moved painstakingly into the backyard. We have some very old, very lovely trees that prevent the truck from dumping it directly in the affected area. The Bobcats that several contractors suggested would cause a lot of damage to the tree roots and potentially lead to their demise, so it's going to be moved by three guys over the course of several days. Oy.

I'm pretty excited for it to be done, though. Once it's filled in, I'm going to dress it and put my vegetable garden there, since it's a completely prime location. It'll be great to have the space usable again, and I suspect it'll help a lot with a drainage issue we've been having in a portion of the yard.

After the fill is in and compacted, then the mulch comes!

For once, we got snow!  Real snow that lasted for several days.  The ground was even hard.  Here are some pics!

We've been running around, visiting, for the past few weeks, and winter has officially set in. We've had our first flurries of the season, several hard freezes, and all of the leaves are off of the trees.  

Next week, the glads will be 'dead' enough to dig and divide, and I'm really looking forward to it (and have been for several months!) My beds have gotten very crowded and I'm not sure where to put the extras. Some will probably end up in my shop, but we'll see what the haul is when I've finally gotten my hands in the dirt.

I hope everyone is having a great month and have had success in tamping in their gardens for the winter.

Stores are rotating out their holiday displays, and it's a great opportunity for anyone who uses wheat straw. We grabbed eight wrapped bails after a midnight run to Kroger. They were clearing out the straw for their Thanksgiving displays, and we got all of the Halloween hay. They told us to call after Thanksgiving to see when they were dumping the rest.

The hay is obviously not feed quality, since most of it has been sitting outside in the elements for a few weeks, but that's not a problem when you're using it as composting, seed cover, whatever. I used a few bales to cover the sink-compost hole in our backyard, and I suspect we'll have a decent crop of wheat there next summer. A bunch of little wheatlings were sprouting inside the plastic.

So, if you need hay, check out the stores and ask when they chuck their hay! :)