May Long Weekend--Here we go again!

Happy Victoria Day Long Weekend!
Lazy Gnome checking in to wish all you gardeners the best as you battle crowds at garden centres to score that red geranium you want for your front planter...LG is taking (most of) the weekend off. (She and family members are heading to Jasper where LG is anticipating much cooler weather than here in the city—not that it has been HOT or anything!!

LG’s internal clock is off kilter: in some ways it seems way too early to get excited about planting annuals, and she is perplexed to see people combing over the racks of lobelia at Home Depot. On the other hand, because of the past 10 days’ activities, she rather feels she had DONE gardening this year.

So, update on the yard. Leaves are bursting out all over and the tulips are almost all blooming--LG is very happy she shoved those babies in the ground late last year as they add a wee bit of perkiness now....and if the landscaper had not yet returned, she can't imagine how bleak the yard would be by now--and covered in weeds!!

Last weekend LG transplanted about 20 shrubs and perennials from her neighbour’s garden where they wintered to their new homes scattered about the yard. LG was stunned at how dry that earth was over there--LG hadn't even thought about watering there yet this year and realizes she may have just saved some of the shrubs in time as there was virtually no dirt clinging to the roots of several, including the amur maple and the weeping crab. But, they all seem to be thriving from her watering routine! None of them went back to where they came from....things are very different in the yard now. Anyway, this was a good work out. But, as usual, there was a certain angst based on an inability to identify what some of these shrubs were: potentilla (which, honestly, LG is not fond of)? Spirea? Ninebark? So, placement was a bit of Russian roulette. The potentilla is a bit of an issue—somehow, of the three, it ended up where LG will see it as she works inthe kitchen, whereas the other three are around the side of the house.

Part of LG’s angst was about placement because even though she had the landscape design in her hand, things on the ground didn’t work out as the designer planned. For instance, the path along the south side of the house ended up a lot closer to the house, meaning the beds on either side are not the same depth. (And, in all honesty, the plan looks way off the actual space there.) And LG didn’t want to mess up the themes or patterns of the designer’s concepts, so this “found” area ended up with several of these shrubs which also aren’t on the plan, at all, but LG refuses to sacrifice. Except that she is not a fan of Potentilla, partly because she has never had luck with them....somehow, these bushes thrive in Wal-Mart parking lots, but LG can’t grow one to save her life...perhaps attitude adjustment is in order, but, well, it may be too late.

Anyway, LG has been mostly pre-occupied with watering the sod: all waking hours that she has been at the house for the past 10 days have seen sprinklers trying to spread the liquid of life for the sod. Nine of those days have been incredibly windy and likely hindered the success. The front lawn looks not bad from a distance, but the back is rather patchy. Sigh...she kinda hopes for RAIN!

Cheers for now, and happy Garden Hunting!

Presto--a yard!

So, twelve hours earlier Lazy Gnome was bracing herself on this very blog-thing for hours of sweat and tears over the next week to slop around with mulch, yet as she approached the house, the three fabulous Landscape Gentlemen were finishing off the sod and had done 75% or more of the mulch! There was a bit of guilt; enough for LG to get into her scrubs and help spread around the rest of it, but she's happy--even if they charge her more, she is a happy camper!

The bigger picture: yes, there is still a lot of work for LG--planting ALL those shrubs the landscaper will eventually deliver, and moving those that wintered next door. However, she now feels, finally, that she has a yard, that the eyes of the neighbours and those dog walkers or cyclists happening past won't be looking quite as critically at her place. She has returned this lot--well, once the sod takes root, literally--to a more upstanding member of the neighbourhood.

Now LG simply has to, well, pay for all this...and try not to think about all the moola she has sunk into this house and property over the past 22 months...there is more to come. Tomorrow, for instance, the Floor Guy will be installing laminate in the basement room and the maybe Window Guy will stop by to develop a quote to replace the original wood-framed windows in the basement...and LG started on a WHIM to paint the bathroom--that will be a five-week project if she doesn't get going...and then there's the hot water tank that has been sitting in its box in the basement since Thanksgiving...it just never ends!! Oh--then the basement room will need to be trimmed and the electrical finished...when all she really wants to do is remove the awning above the north living room window and sit outside and read on the front steps...

Well, she's rambling and sadly not very elequent. She's also not as relieved as she thought she would be to have arrived at this stage...oh, that's right: there's the wee conflict with the Garage Guy, including the fact that something he has left may be severely dangerous...sigh.

Anyway, now perhaps LG can dedicate more of this space to discussing the virtues of actual plants....

Here's book for a paranoid gardener on a rainy day: Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln's Mother and other Botanical Atrocities by Amy Stewart. LG picked this up in the midst of that wicked winter we just survived, and read in horror about all the nasty plants we all probably have in our gardens. Despite the arctic-temperatures and the soothing ride home on the bus from Whyte that Saturday afternoon, a chill went down LG's spine to read that azaleas (so gorgeous!), foxglove (an LG fav since finding them wild across Ireland), and lobelia (that reassuringly successful annual for pots), and the hydrangea (which LG has ordered to be added to this new yard!!) each have tendencies to be nasty!! Yikes!!

Cheers for now, as a giddy LG bids you a good night....

"The coward's weapon, poison"~~Phineas Fletcher, 1614

The excitement builds....

Blooming tulips!

Trees in the ground!

Rolled sod!

The landscaper has been busy! And tonight when Lazy Gnome gets home, she will probably be busy herself spreading the mulch. The landscaper is going to dump it all over the area of the yard where the sod is currently rolled up--because by then it will be all laid out!!--and LG will be pilling mulch into her wee wheel barrel and trucking it carefully on the paving stones only--NOT across the fresh lawn--and setting it out over the beds...

This is not true Lazy Gnome activity, but at some point Lazy Gnome has to take more care over the costs and turn into Cheap-o Gnome. She has been doing some serious training to get her body into shape--lots of crazy Ashtanga Yoga which might just kill her...the entire right side of her body feels like it might just fall off!!

Anyway, the yard is really starting to take shape now....plus, the landscaper re-set paving stones where the settling of the area around the foundation was causing them to split between the rows, and the back door area where the ground beneath the stones had simple eroded due to all the moisture, combined with the apparently poor backfilling after the foundation work. LG wasn't around to see if they had tampered it back in, but luckily the landscaper was able to fix it. This particular landscaper guy, Chris, is really good to deal with. Very calm, asks lots of questions, explains things, takes the time to go over things, and has really done a fantastic job with the paving stones....wow. (The guy here with him yesterday was part of the tear-down crew last summer...he remembers the rain reallly well! And apparently because of the old deck, they had lots and lots of flat tires from old nails....oops.)

Anyway, looking forward to that hard labour after work!

LG

"The labour we delight in physics pain." ~~ William Shakespeare, Macbeth

"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." ~~ Oscar Wilde

They're baaack!!

This is very exciting—but it is so hard to welcome spring back without burbling over with clichés!

So, Lazy Gnome will focus on two events in the garden this past week...

First, the tulips are up and budding!! LG hastily tucked them into the earth some time in the fall, worried that as they had been untimely ripped from the yard last spring and banished to the basement (there being at the time, no garage!), they may not be appropriately primed to last the winter and put on their show...well, LG is happy to report that there are patches of them on three sides of the house! Characteristically, LG neglected to notate where she put what and as a result, each wee green or purple pointy, curled leaf that has come up has been a joyous surprise! And if some aren’t coming up...well, no one knows! Triumph of nature, those wondrous bulbs!

(As a somewhat depressing side note, if you, dear reader, were to trace back to LG’s posts from early May 2010, you would see that the tulips were up, had bloomed and then were unceremoniously trounced with snow by this time last year...)

Now, perhaps even more interestingly, the landscapers are back, too! In fact, they installed a whole new section of paving stone and outlined the edging for the beds on Friday. This is major progress! Tomorrow they promise to fix that section of paving stones that collapsed at the back door, and there should be sod when LG returns from work...sod! glorious, green grass!! This will require daily watering until it sets, and then an eventual high cut, but still, it will start to look like a yard!!

Now, the sad-ish part of this: in negotiating the work with the landscaper last summer, apparently in a fit of frugality, Lazy Gnome indicated she herself would lay the mulch. Ahem. Lazy Gnome loves mulch—it allows her to be extremely good at the lazy part...AFTER it is in place. Not that it is heavy, mind you, but she has been told she cannot roll it over the new sod. So, there will be several evenings this week and possibly all of next weekend during which LG will be steering the wheel barrel along the new paving stone to dump the mulch and then try to rake it into place...egads. Perhaps she can recruit / draft the 3-year old across the street who is enthralled with the "diggers"...
There will be a very high need for G&T’s by Saturday!!

PS: Happy Mother's Day!

"May is a pious fraud of the almanac." ~~~James Russell Lowell, 1869

"Who would have thought my shrivelled heart

Could have recovered greenness?"~~~George Herbert, The Flower, 1633