Monday, November 12, 2007

Breaking Ground


Perhaps you're noticing a few changes to the "Midnight Garden". Despite a crazy work schedule, I found a few minutes to give the blog a bit of a facelift. I hope you'll enjoy the addition of the Moon Phase clock. Down below that, you'll find my usual assortment of gardening-themed links, but now also another set of links which will guide you to some other places I'm fond of on the internet. Be sure to check them out!

Today was a day off, and with temperatures "soaring" into the forties, I used the day to take another load of rocks to Harwich, where I began work on the new garden bed, making it ready for the Big Transplant. The rest of our move will happen after Thanksgiving, but I need to get this out of the way now, since winter will be with us before long.

First I used the latest load of rocks to outline the proposed bed, and then got to work spading it into sections, so I could go back and loosen it all up with a long-handled claw.



I was pretty excited to find some lovely and rich black earth and many earth worms waiting for me in the area where the garden bed will be.

I was expecting a sandier mix, which is why I brought along some bags of topsoil.

While this bodes well for the garden, it also meant I had some tougher work battling against the root systems I was displacing.

At the far end of this new border bed is a tangled hedge of birch and bittersweet and who knows what else, just now. I know I'll have to keep up with the bittersweet to keep it from taking over, but I also discovered that there's a family of chipping sparrows living happily inside there.

That's a project for another day, of course.

As the sun began to sink away (ugh, this Standard Time thing...) late in the afternoon, I hadn't gotten everything turned over, but you can see I got most of it done. I'll want to be a little more careful working around the lamppost near the driveway, since A) there'll be an electrical connection underground and 2) a clematis vine grows there...and it won't serve me well to damage either of those.

Some light showers are expected in the early morning, which may make my work tomorrow a little messier, but I think it may also help to loosen up some of the soil from the over-turned clods. We shall see.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey, Greggie - As always, love the photos of the harbor as well as the gorgeous plantings. Also great to see the start of that new border garden. Cannot wait to watch it evolve.
And, by the way, thanks for the birthday greetings in the blog.
Love, Mom