Farmer Elizabeth

Can one become an amateur gardener if one hates bugs and being hot?  The jury is still out on that.  I am slowly familiarizing myself with some gardening tasks in our front and back yards, and finding it rather enjoyable (except for said bugs and said heat).  I spent two hours last weekend clipping daffodil stalks, and although the work was satisfying, I concluded that a yard with 5 or 6 daffodils was preferable to a yard with 50. 

I did some general weeding, and then began this year’s war on the Horrible Plant-, Tree-, and Bush-killing Vine that we have been battling each summer since we’ve moved in.  We’ve hacked it thick off trees and windy and snaky off bushes and plants.  It’s evil!  It had almost succeeded in choking a big tree in our backyard, which last summer only put out a few feeble leaves, but after I convinced Sean to attack it with a machete, this year the tree came back to life and is flourishing!  But I keep finding the vine intent on sucking out the lifeforce from the bushes in our side yard.  The problem seems to be that it is hard to spot amongst the real bush branches until the damage has been done.  I didn’t notice it was on our holly bush in the backyard, for example, until last fall when it began to turn red and yellow like proper fall foliage, while the holly stayed dark green.

We’ve also planted a small vegetable garden for the first time.  Sean built a raised garden bed and filled it with mulch and earth, and we planted four rows of veggies.  It’s been a week and now:  

Greenery!  We put up a fence so we wouldn’t merely be creating a vegan buffet for our backyard woodcharlene, although she might find a way past our tricky barricade eventually. 

A month or so ago we planted two Thuja Green Giants to eventually block out our neighbors’ appliance garden.  They are only about a foot high so far, but we have high hopes for the duo whom we have named Hall & Oates.  

And it seems I have more weeding to do....

We have these two tall things sprouting in our backyard.  Any ideas as to what they are?  They are both almost taller than me:

We also have this bush in the backyard which is flowering now and looking pretty.  The picture below is overexposed, but it has nice lacy pink flowers.  I don't know what it is either! 

The new hydrangea we got at the end of last year is doing well.  There was a sale at Lowes and all the plants looked bedraggled and sad, so we rescued one called a pinky winky (Owen thinks it is the long-lost fifth Teletubby) and it is thriving.  I'll show you a picture once it blooms.  Suspense! 

A Win/Win Situation

I am unduly pleased with myself because I did a bit of weeding in the front yard on Sunday.  Seriously, I’m as bad as Owen, who likes nothing more than to plunk a leaf in the bag and proclaim proudly, “Weeding!”  But I was outside with Owen for the umpteenth time, and getting a little bored of watching him flick water from a bucket with a paint brush, so started removing obvious weeds from our flowerbeds.  And it was very satisfying!  I was tidying the yard!  And I love to tidy.  There were a few moments where I had to stop because I wasn’t sure if a plant was a legal resident or an imposter, but on the whole, I was able to significantly improve one small square foot or two of our front yard.

It didn’t hurt any that I had a very enthusiastic helper in Owen, too, who once he saw what I was doing, decided he would take each weed that I plucked and run it down the driveway to where his bucket was.  I didn’t bother suggesting to him that he bring the bucket closer, because I figured it was a good way to tire him out; and indeed he ran down the driveway to his bucket and back at least twenty times.  I know fifteen minutes of weeding does not a gardener make, but it was the first time that it occurred to me that gardening could be something in actuality that I enjoyed doing, and not just in very fuzzy theory.

I knew not to weed this:

I was also able to get Owen to walk almost around the whole block on Sunday, which is a pretty good distance.  He walked halfway around so that we could go look at the school buses where they are parked; I carried him up the hill, and then he walked the rest of the way on his own accord, albeit with numerous stops and starts.  A toddler walks a lot like a puppy:  he squats to look at a stick, and then picks it up and moseys for a bit while examining the stick; then hits a few things with the stick; and then all of a sudden will start running out of the blue until  he reaches something else that grabs his attention.

He likes to say “hi!” and “Bye-bye” to anyone who might be out in their yard, although he also will get a little tongue-tied should they want to have a longer conversation.  If he is feeling really shy, he will hide his head in my legs, but sometimes he will chat, too.  You can never quite tell how shy Owen will be, if at all.

Not shy at all while shaking his booty 

to a musical card in the Rite Aid: