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.

All tucked in... gardening like God does, part II

Last week our meteorologist reported that we were in for an evening of "wintery mix" weather, so I roused myself and one of my daughters from early hibernation, and we went out to put the front yard to bed. The back yard and vegetable plots have been settled in for their long winter's nap for a while, but the front yard, like the child who never wants to go to sleep, needed a little more attention. It was just a matter of raking the last of the leaves and tucking them in around the perennials so that no earth showed. A little tricky with my vertigo-spinny head... I had to be careful not to rake myself into the leaf piles!

I've learned a lot about gardening in the eight years we've lived here, mostly through what other people would call laziness, or maybe even mistaken thinking. But the practice of letting the leaves fall as they may -- like God does -- and leaving them in the border beds in my back yard -- because I had too much yard work to do everywhere else -- showed me that the beds with ordinary leaf mulch did much better than the beds without. I used to be one of those people who liked to see the dirt around my plants... but now I see that there certainly aren't as many weeds in the leaf-mulched beds as in the ones I kept raked, and the plants grow better because they don't dry out so quickly and have a bit of natural compost -- also known as fertilizer -- with them at all times.

So when you walk past my front yard, you may think that I'm a lazy gardener... but the fact of the matter is that it took more effort to put the garden to bed with leaf mulch than it does to rake it all out. I raked those leaves together more often this year than I ever have... put that front yard to bed three times, and then the wind -- petulant child! -- came and undid everything! But this weekend, we got a bit of that wintery mix to stick those leaves to the soil, and hopefully, they'll stay put as part of the lasagna gardening technique I hope to employ out there on a more permanent basis. Next spring, those leaves will keep moisture in the earth and enrich it as they break down over a shorter time period than wood chips or commercial mulch. And guess what? Next fall, God and the trees will give me another layer of free, natural mulch!

Garden like God does... or #3 of 100 Simple Suggestions

Yesterday I spent four hours working in my front yard. It's not your typical front yard, as we've gotten rid of a good portion of the lawn. Last spring, we got a couple of yards of soil and compost, begged newspapers from all our neighbours, and embarked upon a lasagna gardening adventure.

In case you're not familiar with lasagna gardening, it means that we spread a fairly thick layer of newspaper all over the grass monoculture that we no longer wanted to mow, fertilize and water, then put on a thick layer of compost mixed with soil, and planted a few seeds in it. The grass under the newspaper, soil and compost layers decomposed, and above it we had lovely cosmos, bachelor buttons, poppies, marigolds, zinnias and lavatera, as well as two zucchini plants. The stuff that the jackrabbits didn't eat looked quite lovely by the end of the summer.

Our boring-lawn-monoculture-turned-to-garden has become something of a conversation piece in the neighbourhood. People stop to ask me about what's growing or tell stories about their own gardening. Not one person ever stopped to comment on our lawn! We also see a lot more birds, bees and rabbits -- one jack has a favourite cool hollow under a spirea shrub, and he'll sit there in the shade with an eye open just a crack -- as long as I putter at a distance. The closest I've come is about four feet. He scared the wits our of me that day because I hadn't noticed him before he sprang out of his hiding place.

We have a large-ish oak tree that drops at least a million leaves every fall, so last October I decided to garden like God does. Instead of bagging all those leaves, I raked them over our lasagna garden, watered them down, and waited for winter, refusing to behave like the suburbanite tribes in the conversation between God and St. Francis. Those leaves stayed put under two feet of snow, and protected my perennials. In the past few days, I've loosened them up a little, and yesterday I decided it was time to plant a few annual seeds in the soil underneath. I could just imagine those happy little seeds under the leaf mulch, taking root, absorbing all those marvelous leaf nutrients, and poking up through the mulch in a few weeks' time.

Just one problem. For the past 24 hours, it has been extremely windy... so my newly loosened leaves have been blowing away. I cringe when I look to some of my neighbours' yards, yards that are usually perfect but now have leaves strewn across them, but then I tell myself that I'm just generously sharing organic material. Even worse is my lasagna garden, now missing at least half of its top leaf-mulch layer (which also prevents our neighbourhood Dutch Elm trees' seeds from taking root by the millions). I'm guessing God is chuckling away as She and He listens to my muttering about how there's no point in raking it all back onto the garden when the wind is still gusting between 40 and 60 km/h. Oh well, it's a setback, is all, and I'm going to keep on trying to garden like God. I just have to remember that God's way is not manicured or unmessy. God seems to be a very laid-back gardener who loves a little dandelion chaos rather than those strict, green rectangle monocultures that don't allow for any weeds to feed His and Her early bees.

So what does all of this have to do with Simple Suggestion #3? The suggestion is simply to plant a seed. God is doing it all the time, abundantly.

The view from our front step, July 31, 2010.

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