Time for a little garden update. This time, the back yard.
As we bought the house. The orange trees in the back were full of disease....the plants on the fence offered nothing of value to wildlife. The fence, well it was barely standing.
The path that went nowhere.
Diverting the downspout water to spread it out in the back yard.
The first of two big piles of bark that was delivered. We had 4 yards of mini fir bark delivered. My husband trucked it into the backyard. My job was moving it once it got there.
The second pile of bark.
What is left of the first pile of bark after I spent 4 days moving it with my two buckets. I haven't even begun to touch the second pile yet.
The outline of the path that took me two days only now I realize that I need to change the shape of it. I thought I was only going to have to soften the square corners into curves but now I realize it needs to curve from the right to the left. Sigh. The two tall trees/bushes on the right are Toyon and on the left against the house is Catalina Ironwood. In the front of the picture on the left is Ceanothus Dark Star.
I need to get more cardboard and newspaper before I can continue. The cardboard and newspapers goes down to help with weed suppression. For some reason the worms love it and as they come up and go down helping the cardboard decompose we get lovely worm casings to help with the soil.
This little hill is Cassie's hill. That lone tree is a Wax Myrtle, (bayberry) a huge favorite of the birds. We'll be planting a Carex Pansa meadow lawn on the hill for her and probably 3 more Wax Myrtle's along the fence. The plant in the foreground is a hazelnut.
I had tons of cobbles (round river rock) leftover and I'm not ready to do my water features yet so I used them to line the path. I still have tons of them left so I guess I'm going to do a second row,
I feel like I should have a lot to say about it all but right now, posting pics is all I can manage. Soon I'll have the native plant blog up and running and I'll give more play by plays over there.
There are so many stories only you can tell.Tell them, please.
Who am I?I was born on the Cancer/Leo cusp and share a birthday with Ernest Hemingway and Robin Williams. The similarities don't stop there as I can go from depressed to ecstatic without ever passing go. I feel scared most of the time though my friends call me brave and I find it easier to believe in my friends than to believe in my own abilities to make what I want out of my life.
Who am I? A wife, a mother, a daughter, and even, gulp, a grandmother.
Who am I? A writer who never gets tired of playing with words, even when the words are hard to find. A writer of books for children and articles for grown-ups and many things in-between.
Who am I? A motivational speaker, writing instructor, workshop leader and full-time follower of dreams.
Who am I? Read and find out.
Susan Taylor Brown
Create Your Badge
Page Summary
"Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties."
--Bonnie Friedman
"As writers, we must be willing to feel our sadness, our anger, our terror, so we can reach in and find our sweet vulnerability that is just sitting there waiting for us to come back home."
--Nancy Slonim Aronie
"Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is."
--Anne Rice
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Comments
Re: Needing more newspapers/cardboard: Do you ever use freecycle? They have groups all over the world, and it'd be a good way to help someone recycle (the point of freecycle) and would help you out with your garden!
(Okay, I'm done pimping, promise.)
I have an extra toyon to swap you if you're interested in that.