Now that they’re all fully trimmed and growth won’t make problems worse, and I added good piles of mulch around the bases (with a layer of bark nuggets on top that will over years decay into the base for more bark nuggets), seeing huge returns on watering trees in terms of summer growth, though I’m sure the relatively cool and moist year helps.

Makes some bushes I’d been trying to trim tight real leggy, though, so hold off on that.

Lavender outside my window hasn’t gotten any bigger since planting, but I guess at this point it’s more focused on growing the roots.

fatsexybitch:

kontextmaschine:

Okay went to transplant those annuals and realized it’s a thing where there’s like clusters of bulbs down there each supporting two leaves and a flower, and I took out one cluster one-by-one keeping their roots from ripping and I had like 11 reasonable-sized ones and one big one and I’m like okay what the hell do I do with this.

And I realize my trying to save these specific flowers is maybe old personality hoarder instinct and I can just get whatever plants I want at the nursery after I get the yard redone.

So fuck it, gonna scrap them. Also retrieved some wood from Strawberry Ridge that was too thick buried too shallow and cut it up for the side fill of Blueberry Hill.

So tomorrow planting the first blueberries, got some coconut coir to mix with compost for water retention in one site.

You FOOL those are free plants!

Also, if your ‘annuals’ are pupping those are perennials, fyi

Duly noted on the terminology, but it’s kind of realizing that if the “plants” as I knew them were really like 8 bulbs grown around each other then reinstalling them one-by-one individually OR manually rearranged to iffily replicate the cluster probably isn’t going to replicate the “fan of leaves from one point” feel I thought of as “the plant”, so if I’m not even carrying over “the plants I had here” it’s even less vital?

Like, I have some of those types of perennials out front already too, but if we’re talking backyard, where the audience is me and my guests, I wouldn’t choose those species to start with, which is what I’d really be doing here

Alright, shifted a lot of wood that was exposed atop Strawberry Ridge but too thick to rot anytime soon over where they can be the core of next year’s leaves, then got to talking with my Cascadian tree guy behind neighbor and he turned me on to using coconut coir for where I want to plant the blueberries to retain water.

Started transplanting those annuals but I’ll need more potting soil; gotta do that before the leaves dry further and fall out and I can’t tell where they are.

Tomorrow might get to that but if the air’s too bad I’ll just go see Spider-Verse.

Alright, now that I got the roses out front spreading out if I keep deadheading them they keep blooming for a while

Okay, distributed some but not all of that mulch. At the landscaping yard I couldn’t really figure what the different grades were for but now I realize that my “medium” suits flowerbeds but I should fill those first and if it runs out get “rough” for around trees that’ll take longer to break down.

Also tore out this white clover in the lower backyard that I hadn’t even expected to get to this year, just pinch off flowers when they appeared to keep it from setting more seeds.

Awright, got a bed load of mulch, cleared all the weeds out of the areas to be mulched first, expanded it to a general weeding pass when I realized I’d been in the lower backyard for a while, now fed Badger and I’m gonna go spread it out.

Okay, productive day yard-wise: fully planted and backfilled the lavender, mowed the lower backyard now that it’s finally squared away, realized there’s a better way to deploy the wood and composting greens with Blueberry Hill to still make use of them but just finish up the dugout shell by dumping topsoil from the landscaping yard in it.

So next might grab a load of mulch and refresh my beds and trees for the year, pot those annuals, but then finally on to secure the Blueberry Hill retaining wall and clear the last of the downhill bamboo patch, the last things from my winter Yard Task Updates.

Okay I don’t think any of the lavender is even in bloom right now and already the scent coming in the window is calming. Excellent call on that one.

Alright, lower backyard is fully ready for the last pre-dry season trim, then finished digging the hole for all this lavender under my sittin’ window (need more topsoil tomorrow tho).

Then it seems the woodchips jamming Darwin’s tailgate finally rotted enough to open it, that’ll make it easier getting bedloads of mulch and of topsoil for finishing Blueberry Hill.

So tomorrow mowing, potting some doomed annuals to save, finish lavender planting, then finally on to the retaining slope of Blueberry Hill and planting these first few bushes.

Man all the rosebushes – which must have been messes under the previous methhead couple owners’ tenure and then on divorce trimmed back for sale by her dad to these thick stumps that gave off like 3 man-high nightmare canes a year – have finally been developed to the point where they split their spring growth into a candelabra of color that keeps going a while if you deadhead them. Good stuff!

Good yard work day today, was appreciating all the work I’d done to bring it to here, and how much of that was either the old personality’s doing or while I was totally out of my mind and barely able to think ahead. One of the trees fished a branch out into a really rich vein of son and it’s gotten thick and bushy with first spring from-reserves and then from-local growth, so if/when I put on a second story on Karafuto and have to cut one major trunk the tree’s shape’ll still be balanced.

Then did the last of processing twig branches into wood shrapnel, then started to dig a hole to plant all the lavender.

Good teeth cleaning, then went to the nursery for some pots, soil, lavender, and the first blueberries, and scouted for the future strawberries and trees.

Yeah, still preparing the backyard. Gotta:

• Chop up and compress down the last loose twig-end branches into what’s kinda a wood shrapnel to use as a top layer in filling in the Blueberry Hill “dugout”
• Drag my weight bench up from the basement, the weights are already out there.
• Smash up some broken ceramic flowerpots onto chips to mix into soil to adjust drainage
• Dig up every bit of a clover before it starts flowering, pitch the pulled stuff in a bucket, fill it with water overnight, tomorrow use the wet cleaned green debris to build the ramp into the Blueberry Hill dugout and dump the muddy water into the sandy ditch so it deposits and starts solidifying
• Mow the grass, dump the clippings on Blueberry Hill wood fill

And then after it’s photographed still

• Transplant annuals into pots from beds that’ll be redone away
• Split some wood that’s drying cracked for firewood
• Assemble a wood rack

All my annuals coming in great. Sticking color-coded golf tees by them so I retain a sense of where they are when working the beds off-season.

One thing I’ve learned about weeding is when you look over a patch of ground for weeds sprouting you have to bob your head a little, cause if you don’t and there are any stationary in your literal blind spots your brain will hide it by sampling from the nearby ground and using a clone tool

The neighbor tending the other side of the side yard is a good guy and he’s stepped up his game since I’ve cleared out the weeds that made trying anything there pointless, but he just has no sense of where to plant things, he’s constantly putting saplings of canopy trees in the shadow of established ones or planting things where they’ll grow branches out into the pathway or in the way of other stuff

Getting colored golf tees to mark my annuals with so I can remember where they are when planning stuff out of season

nordfjording:

i love how every plant guide ever is like

One thing I’ve really taken to appreciate about trimming plants is whenever you see a photo shoot of something well-done and it’s not of something in winter dormancy it’s probably been trimmed within the week if not immediately before, it didn’t look like that a month earlier, and it won’t look like that a month later