We interrupt these moodlings for gardening

As happens every year at this time, I realize that I have been neglecting my online moodlings. Never on purpose -- my head has moodling thoughts all the time -- it's just that life gets really busy with all that needs to happen outdoors. 

So you may not be hearing from me much over the next few weeks. If I get a chance, I'll post pictures of what's happening around the yard, but then again, maybe not.

In the meantime, here are a few images of our earliest blossoms to entertain you...

small yellow crocus

ever present violas

my favourites right now -- tulipa

and a few Dutch beauties

We worked very hard on Friday and Saturday to reduce the size of our lawn through lasagna gardening, also known as sheet mulching. Covered it with a layers of cardboard, compost, straw, and pine mulch. 

It involved a lot of rock wrestling, cardboard cutting, and wheel barrowing. I'll dig out my gardening books and figure out some good ground cover shrubs, and it will become more interesting over time. For now, it's a blank pallet with a lot of potential.

Our thanks to neighbours and friends who contributed cardboard and good will toward this future garden. If you have any ideas about what we should do with this space, I'd love to hear them! And if you don't hear from me for a while, you know where to find me -- out in the garden!

Simple Suggestion #251... Start a Bee Bistro

Our front yard is a buzzing Bee Bistro these days. Little bumbling friends visit all day every day in good weather. I could sit and watch them for hours.

When we bought our home in 2003, you could hardly think for the drone of happy bees in our back yard blossoms, but the front yard was a grass monoculture. It wasn't long before we decided to change it over to perennials a little at a time. We began in 2004 by digging up a three foot swath of turf along the sidewalk that leads to our front door and planting potatoes. In 2005, the City replaced our sidewalks, and instead of allowing them to replace the sod where they had removed a strip of our lawn, we asked that they hold back the sod so we could plant iris beds along the front sidewalk. Slowly and surely, our lawn monoculture was being replaced.

In 2007 I took a Master Composter/Recycler course and learned about lasagna gardening. By then, I had noticed a serious decline of bees in my back yard and learned about colony collapse disorder and other bee-related health issues. I really wanted to do something to help our little fuzzy friends. So when we dismantled a back yard rock garden that was shot through with quack grass in 2008, we layered newspaper over a large piece of front lawn, covered it with compost, and divided and transplanted a few perennials from back yard to front. It wasn't much to look at, and there weren't very many bee visitors, but it was a beginning. (We did all the work ourselves... those are city trucks and machines for cleaning the streets.)

In 2010, we turned the remainder of the south lawn into garden with more sheet mulch and moving more perennials from our backyard to the front, which allowed us more room for vegetable gardening.

15 months later it looked like this...

And this year it's really filled in...

Lupins, columbine, day lilies, irises, daisies, perennial geraniums, bachelor buttons and even chives are putting on a show, and our little bee friends are literally feasting on beauty! Butterflies, birds and jack rabbits seem to like it too...

It doesn't take much to start a Bee Bistro. Flowers are all that's needed -- even dandelions will do. It's not necessary to turn a lawn into floral chaos like we did -- tending flower seeds that will happily grow in a pot also works and requires much less effort. Starting small is always a good idea.

It's such a joy to watch things grow, and hearing the buzz of bees is definitely thanks enough in my books.

P.S. Looking for more Simple Suggestions? Click here.