Something about gardening is you come to realize the amazing spreads you see in magazines are optimized for the day they were photographed and look like crap four days to either side
Realized some flowers sprouting in my backyard were bluebells the week many of my Facebook gardening groups went off on how impossible it is to clear that out once it gets established, so pulled them
Realized some stuff I thought of as among the 4 or so types of clover in the grass are in fact woodsorrels. They’re known as “false shamrock”, so fair enough.
Gardening is a great pastime for Discoursers, because it involves a bit of positive intervention but mostly you transform a small portion of the world under your control exactly the way you want by letting things take care of themselves while you track down, stab, and throw away the ones doing it wrong
is a hori-hori, a Japanese gardening knife. They’re great and I think they’re within 4 years of breaking through – already within gardening scenes you see knockoffs – so let me fill you in.
A hori-hori is used for weeding. Unlike the garden trowels I was familiar with it doesn’t work by forcing its way down and scooping up the root, instead you plunge it into the soil to sever the deep attachment and your other hand pulls the weed up by the above-ground part, which feels like an order of magnitude easier.
The one in the picture is like what I’ve found to be good - a heavy, thick straight blade with a straight tang one side serrated (for root-sawing). The ones I got the blade was blacked at the start but that wore off, musta been style.
I see ones with leaf-shaped blades and I dunno, especially how those often incorporate like line cutters by the hilt, seem a little tacticooled out.
Distrust the ones that have depth in inches marked along the blade.
Distrust the ones that have narrower blades than that and especially the ones that have aluminum thinner and call themselves “hori-hori"s
Oh though, here’s something. Hold the hori-hori out in front of you, in the hand you’ll use it with, point up, with the slightly concave side of the blade towards you. The serration should be on the edge away from your core.
(I’m only holding it in the left hand in that pic so I could take the photo with my right, dominant hand)
If the serrations are toward you it can help a bit to cut through grass roots as you pull towards you cutting out a disc of turf, but IMO it’s way too easy to have your fingers too close pressing down as you pull the blade out of the soil and saw them open on the way.
This year the lawn’s been weeded so thoroughly in previous seasons I only pull one incipient broadleaf every other week so we’re on to what I guess I’ve been considering the 0-level cantrip stuff:
Waking up, rousing myself, and trying to get a little yard work in before dark actually gives me a pretty direct contact with the day getting longer all the time.
The yard doesn’t actually look much different with the cypresses gone, which I guess is confirmation they weren’t delivering any aesthetic value for the space they took up
Really appreciating that the result of spending several years trimming off every branch of every tree in sight that looked wrong and otherwise encouraging them to grow “right” is that the view out every window in the house now strikes me as almost meditative tranquility-inducingly correct
Realized that the reason the ramp in my backyard was so steep is leaves have been falling in it and rotting into dirt for decades and the “top” of it is really the top of the first of three courses of stone on the side walls. Got like two wheelbarrows of dirt out with like three or four left.
Realized that the sandy ridge I exposed had been flowing downhill and if I dug it out I would notice I had actually built this retaining wall up like one now-buried flight higher so far this year.
Realized if I made mud out of the dirt from the ramp then added in sand it would make a good solidifying paste to mortar the next flight on the wall in with.
So this is basically the product of this year’s yard work, a pile of felled tree plus five years of branches plus some rotting fence planks plus a lot of green waste turned into a compost pile that’s melting down to fill in a depression with me building up a slope from loosed stones to keep clear a path while building up that part of the side yard to plant blueberry bushes in, partially shaded by the pine.
You’ll see that end of the wall by the narrow tree is fully canopied over so just dry pine needles, so what I do there is gather up a trash can of leaves, fill it partway with water, stir the next day, then on day 2 glop the wet pre-mud mush onto the stones
So this is basically the product of this year’s yard work, a pile of felled tree plus five years of branches plus some rotting fence planks plus a lot of green waste turned into a compost pile that’s melting down to fill in a depression with me building up a slope from loosed stones to keep clear a path while building up that part of the side yard to plant blueberry bushes in, partially shaded by the pine.
