Garden

Well, as part of my new active schedule since I've got more free time, I've gotten together with CD to work on our yard, starting with a little lowered strip in our backyard. Basically our backyard is pretty even except for a small strip (VERY roughly 4 feet by 10 feet...I suck with estimations) which borders the fences leading to the side yard area where we park and the shed out there. It is lowered in the sense that it's about a foot lower than the rest of the yard, on level with the back where we park. We picked this spot partially because of the extra runoff it would get from our main backyard (or sideyard, depending how you want to look at it). Our yard, all of it, is pretty over run with native plants that just found their way in, some are weeds (HUGE weeds) and some are not. Some are pretty, some are not. Basically, we haven't really been paying much attention outside of CD watering pretty much everything and trying her hand at some specific planting and when I tried to grow sunflowers (to little avail). So anyway, back to that strip... first we have to clean out debris, there are some concrete blocks in there (don't know why or how) and some other tools that have to be cleared. Then we're probably going to rake away all the dead surface stuff, mostly grass. After that we'll soak it for a while and then go in and uproot all the weeds. Then we're going to turn over and go through the first few inches of dirt and mud and soil. Some of it we'll remove, some of it will stay and just get rotated. That's the first step, and I figure that'll be the hardest as far as labor is concerned. This is usually the step that keeps us from following through on our gardening plans. Afterwards, we'll probably set in the brick (or other hard material) near the fence edges for looks as well as to help a little bit to keep out extra weeds. They won't make a huge difference, but hopefully enough of one. Then we'll probably start by digging a bit of an irrigation ditch, nothing huge, nothing technical really, no watering system, just a little ditch. It'll run down the center longways and be about a foot away from the edges. Then we'll have a few channels leading off of the main ditch. Throughout this part we'll probably be adding top soil and nutrients and so forth throughout the area for when we get to planting. We were thinking about maybe putting in something to step on to get to the outer parts so we don't trample anything, but we're not completely agreed yet. It'll probably take us a good little while to get to that point anyway. Afterwards comes the arranging of plants and planting. CD came up with quite the wishlist for such a little plot, so a lot of it will involved narrowing down and tactful planting, keeping in mind species interrelation as well as ROOM. If we're lucky, things will come together nicely over the next year. We can easily prep it now, but what we plant will depend on the upcoming seasons. We won't plant it all at once of course. So that's one of the tentative-ish plans I've got for my extra time at the moment. This helps line it all up in my head and is hopefully a bit informative on what I'm up to. :)