Look at this glorious pile of steaming compost!
There was a good summer rain last night (lovely to listen to) that left the ground in perfect condition for weeding. I was out there all morning. E even helped for an hour. D agreed to order me a truckload of compost so that I can quickly cover up the weeded areas and maximize my hard work. The nice landscape materials folks must have filled up the truck as soon as we called because they were here lickety-split.
Other pretty things:
The passionflower vine finally surfaced. It's quite late in the year, and I had given up on it -- assuming the wild winter had killed it. Not so, and I'm delighted.
These pretty baubles belong to the new apple rose (Rosa villosa) I planted this year. I love this rose so much. The flower is sweet, simple, light pink. These hips taste like candy. Someday, when the plant is larger and produces more, I'm going to make jam out of the hips. This year, I'll make some heart-lifting tea from them. I have another of these roses that I've written about before. That lovely being is down by the creek. This one is new, planted just months ago, and I'm happy about how well it's growing.
As The Cottage Smallholder wrote about recently, we're re-engineering our landscaped areas so that they can be used to grow more edibles. This apple rose will stay, and I'll add another one here and some blueberry bushes. Yesterday I ripped out a rhododendron that finally died (my fault, a casualty from our big front landscaping project... I never had time to plant it so it suffered freezing temperatures in its pot... when the ground thawed, I tried to plant it, and the rhodi sure tried hard, but it finally gave up this year... lesson learned), and now we'll nourish the soil there and plant three blueberries. Next year, I want to integrate squash, peppers, and eggplants into the front landscaping, and I also think there might be room for beans to share the same fence with the passionflower.
Recent Comments