I have a picture post to make in the near future, but for now this is just a boring To Do list trying to itemize how the hell I'm going to accomplish everything I need to accomplish during my glorious Project Week of Doom.


DONE

* acquire concrete and trowel (thank you, brute squad)
* weeded most of the upper 1/3 of the front yard - more like half, actually, considering that the path takes up a fair swath of the middle - to the point where it's mulchable
* established a nice flat-bottomed trench for the concrete toe on one side of the path


TO DO

Tuesday (forecast: partly sunny)

Starting 8AM
* install half of concrete toe, weeding during any pauses (installation 2h? curing 3h w sprinkler)
* while curing: empty project room, move baby stuff into former project room, move bookshelves and futon into new project room
12 or 1PM
* delicious Zola's lunch w Corey
2PM
* mulch upper half of front yard (except edge around path)
3 - 4:30 PM
* tackle setup of project room and baby's room


Wednesday (forecast: partly sunny)

8AM
* dig trench for concrete toe on other side (2h)
10AM
* weeding middle of yard (except edge around path)
11AM
* continuing setup of project room and baby's room
12PM
* lunch
1PM
* install concrete toe on other side
* while curing, top up backyard mulch, weeding as I go


Thursday (forecast so far: showers)

MORNING
* deal with weedy edges around pathway
* mulch middle of yard
* weed front bed and mulch
AFTERNOON
* linen closets


Friday (forecast so far: periods of rain)

* deal with Mt. Laundry
* clean up bedrooms

To Do This Year
* weeding: remaining 1/3 of backyard, front yard
* mow the damn lawn, such as it is
* prep front yard expansion
* plant bulbs, including lots of alliums (especially in shade bed, next to hazel, and front yard)
* clean up the throughway - why, why, why does this always end up such a mess??

To Do Next Year
* prune yew, willow, grapevines, roses if necessary
* front yard expansion, including replacing the black lace elder if necessary, since it isn't doing so well...note to self: mid-summer is NOT the time to plant shrubs
* make use of Fine Gardening's sneaky edging technique throughout front and back
* mulch again, since it is working so beautifully this year - although 1.5 cu yd ought to be plenty this time!!
* prepare for vacation time such that mulching can start right at the beginning of it, since it's a big frigging job
* line paths between beds and possibly also a strip around the patio with river rocks or gravel - soil and mulch washed down over the stones I put down and they have completely disappeared
* spray the front side bed with soap and water at regular intervals early in the spring, since everything in there is looking very munched-upon
* 6' stakes for delphiniums...also stakes and/or hoops for crocosmia, lilies, joe pye weed, goldenrod
* plant more phlox everywhere, because damn, come midsummer that stuff really rocks
* plant more digitalis
* plant some asclepias (yay butterflies!!)
* plant some eryngeum
* get an early start on continuing Operation Sudden Lily Beetle Death
* plant some annuals, since the ongoing colour is nice


To NOT Do Next Year
* don't plant beans in the backyard, since they are beetle bait. May see how they do out front, though
* don't bother starting seeds ahead, or at least not so many, since the only place where there's adequate light and protection from the cats is also somewhere I'm liable to forget about them completely
* don't plant cleome in the front yard - too dry and/or exposed for it there, evidently

Well, after a week of 35-degree weather, the annuals in the front bed are looking pretty fried, despite my efforts to keep them watered. I think cleome must be a water hog of a plant, given the contrast between last year's 4' tall specimens and this year's shrimpy, shrivelled ones. The front lawn is also fried, but whatever, it's just the lawn.

Out back, things are doing better, but the Fairy rose is still looking pretty fried, despite its very pretty tiny pink flowers. Damn, that thing is a lot more persnickety than my other roses. I suppose I could try fertilizing it again.

To Do whenever it becomes bearable to set foot outdoors again:

* give grape vines a haircut, since they are attempting to grab the japanese maple. I fear this was a stupid location for said maple, since I will have to hack the grape vines away from it every single year.
* finish weeding and mulching the foundation bed.
* prune dead wood out of the remaining anonymous shrub in the foundation bed; I may or may not keep this one. Will think about it till the fall, since I'm told you're best to transplant hydrangeas when they've gone dormant anyway.

Plant Du Jour that I have my eye on: Sea Holly, aka Eryngeum. Specifically the stunning Sapphire Blue featured in the latest Canadian Gardening magazine. It likes full sun and poor, dry soil. Hmmmm, I think I can provide that!

* I seem to have hit the midsummer maintenance plateau, which is a little depressing, but I have gotten an awful lot done this year, I think, so progress is progress. I will bide my time for the fall perennial clearances.
* I am doing better with having things blooming later in the season. Sun is helpful that way, since most shade plants are spring-flowering.
* The cleome is just about flowering and is going to be stunning - definitely planting that again!!
* I spent a little while weeding in the front yard; doesn't feel like it made much difference. MULCH MULCH MULCH how I need you desperately. I think I will go to Canadian Tire tomorrow and grab a few bags, since all I would need for the front yard is 18 cubic feet. Next spring I will fork out the delivery fee and get a few cubic yards deposited in the driveway, thus getting the drop on the weeds right at the start of the season.
* I should also get a trellis of some kind for the David Austin rose.

Right, so now that I can lift my self-imposed ban on plant-buying, time for a Picture Post!

The whole thing is kind of a jungle. I haven't been devoting enough time to it lately. Next year, by god, there will be mulch!!!

FRONT YARD

Not a lot has changed here, except for the daisies and the magnolia in the foreground. The daisies were an experiment - I spotted the foliage in the lawn and figured I'd mow around them to find out what they'd turn into. I suspect they are of the perniciously invasive variety, but they are very pretty.




Also possibly pernicious but pretty: the laughably inaccurately named obedience plant. I had a stand of these at Jamieson and was warned that they were a weed, but my repeated attempts to dig them out were in vain.




BACK YARD

Well, there's certainly been progress back here since this time last month!

Below are a few images looking around the back half of the yard. (The other half is such a disaster I'm not even going to photograph it. I probably won't even touch it till next year.) Too bad I forgot to get a picture of the spirea in full bloom, it was gorgeous. Yesterday's rain has mostly dispersed the blanket of poplar fluff that fell back here from the neighbour's tree - it was sitting on the ground in snow-like drifts. The rain was, however, too late to save a chunk of the patio thyme, which I probably should have been watering. Dammit. I'll buy another potful and try again. I'm scheming a surprisingly affordable Lee Valley irrigation system back here, so hopefully I can get that set up on the weekend and things will be less parched from then on.








Here's a closer view of the sunny bed so far.




Monster alliums in bloom - AWESOME, I think I need more of these:




And revenant hydrangeas of insanity. I cut these fuckers down to the ground this spring, and here they are, back again, 3' tall and going strong. The one next to the house, which I didn't get around to pruning, is even threatening to bloom already.




Garden tasks
* Weeding: front yard, in front of spirea, borders of beds, beside house
* Calculate gph of faucet and plot out irrigation system, snap up components from Lee Valley, and set up
* Collect all the yard waste
* Get leftover stone into a pile and brainstorm some ideas of what to do with it
* Mow the patch of grass beside the shed, which has almost buried the pile of roots I left there
* Take Ed Lawrence's sneaky soap and water treatment to the honeysuckle, which is being snacked on by something

Hear me roar:

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRR

RRRRRRRRGHHHH!

Today while Rose noodled along with Corey I schlepped 1.5 tons of crushed rock from the front of the driveway to the backyard. It is now spread out in the patio circle and more or less leveled.

Tomorrow:

* mow the lawn, water the garden
* dig out pathways (OMG...more digging...nooooooes) which will involve redistributing that big pile of sort-of-turf and topsoil
* once mom arrives to watch the baby, to do with Corey: re-rent the plate tamper (long, stupid story there) and compact crushed rock, lay 3" of sand over the whole thing, and start putting down the Montague rocks
* get groceries for dinner of boeuf bourguignon (yummay) and some creeping thyme while I'm at Loblaws

I suspect I will be hacking at the pathways and putting down rocks during the week, too, but the bulk of the work - and certainly everything I need a second pair of hands for - should be done by the end of tomorrow.

Patio timetable! Hopefully, anyway...

Today or tomorrow Call aggregates place to order crushed rock, sand, topsoil, and possibly mulch while I'm at it; get marking paint, mason's line, line level, and stakes from Home Despot
May 18 Go get rocks with help of UHaul van and brute squad
Sometime next week Mark outlines of patio and paths; possibly start digging, depending on weather
May 22 Have aggregate stuff delivered
May 23 Dig out, fill, and compact foundation; install heavier rocks
May 24 Install rest of rocks, fill cracks with topsoil, and plant creeping thyme/moss

It was really cold and windy out, and my poorly-engineered wagon was shedding bolts all over hell's half acre, BUT: the Experimental Farm's plant sale was awesome and satisfying in a way I usually associate with eating an entire box of chocolate chip cookies.

The spoils (illustrations courtesy of Google image search):

* a big pot of wild ginger - nice shady ground cover


* a big pot of new england asters - apparently attractive to butterflies


* a brunnera langtrees, pretty and shady


* a bigass thing whose name I can't remember, which puts out baby's-breath-like flowers above a rhubarb-type cluster of leaves

* variegated deadnettle, more shady ground cover


* nice dark red sempervivens (aka hens and chicks

* Solomon's Seal, also for shade


* a very pretty variety of primrose

* a couple of very pretty, teeny-tiny alpine/rock-garden plants whose names I don't know

* dark red geraniums


* Filipendula, which looks kind of like astilbe, only it goes in the sun instead of the shade


* a pot of bloodwort and sweet woodruff


Soooooooooooooooo I am definitely digging out most of the lilies of the valley to make myself some room for additional, more interesting forms of shady ground cover - this decision simplifies my life because I will no longer have to weed around them. I am also tempted to order an extra serving of dirt from the aggregates place and get going on a sunny bed right away (a part-sun bed will be easy; since there's not much grass there anyway I can probably just turn the soil and call it ready to plant)...y'know, I think that is what I will do, it's hard to plan for the existing beds without knowing what I'm going to be putting in front of them eventually.

Other stuff I need to do:
* dig up persistent hydrangea sprouts, possibly moving some elsewhere, since I may have cut the ones next to the maybe-a-spirea back a bit too hard
* finish weeding/digging around the maybe-a-spirea and mulch around the base where I won't be planting anything (using the bag of bark chips the previous owners helpfully left in the middle of one bed)
* dig up/move some of the damn ferns, they are too tall and generating too much shade where they are
* plant some morning glories to climb the birdbath hook
* possibly move the prairie joy rose, since it's not as sunny as I thought where I planted it
* dig the rest of the daylilies (well, OK, maybe just most of the daylilies) and tree suckers out of the west bed
* cut the flowers off the rhubarb...and also eat some of the rhubarb, that thing is getting monstrous and it's not even halfway through May yet
* de-dandelion the lawn - the lawn may be a lost cause, but that doesn't mean I want to fill it full of weeds
* put up the trellis behind the climbing rose
* prune the David Austin rose
* buy a small crowbar and get rid of the stupid pavers

Hmm, good job I waited to go get groceries, suddenly it is pouring out. Hopefully this will not be an all-afternoon state of affairs, I wanted to go wield my new bigass pruning choppers at the anonymous shrub. I'm pretty sure said shrub is a spirea, so I shouldn't hack at it until after it's bloomed, but the dead wood all around the bottom can come off, anyway. I tried applying my normal pruning shears to this task and they just weren't up to it. Once it stops raining I will also have to go out and wield Neem oil at the lilies. My usual weapon of choice has apparently fallen under the pesticide ban...which, for the record, I totally support, but dammit, rotenone was the only thing that actually worked on the beetles. Well, I hear good things about the Neem, you just have to reapply it constantly (e.g. after it rains, after watering, every couple days otherwise). Hopefully it will be effective.

Found a place via UsedOttawa.com selling calcified sandstone of all shapes and sizes for $100 a ton. Since a ton is estimated to cover 200 sq ft in 3" rock, and I need 325 sq ft, I could probably get all my patio stones (since they only need to be about 1.5" thick for my purposes) for about $100, which is eeeeeeeeexcellent. The trick of course is that you have to pick it up yourself. Well, UHaul's website tells me that their cargo van carries a max load of about 3700 lbs, and a ton (assuming it's a metric ton) is about 2200 lbs. Then I'd just need to find a good source for crushed rock, sand, and topsoil. Greely Sand & Gravel is the first Google stop for such things...hmm, not sure how metric tons and cubic yards match up, guess I'll have to ask about that to get price confirmation, but I *think* I might be able to achieve this patio within a budget of $500...yep, confirmed. Sah-weeeeeet.

Planted my most recent purchases this evening. OOOOoooooooh I really want to get going on that hardscaping so I can dig out and define a bed or two! The amount of space that would net me pretty much blows my mind, considering how many plants I've already crammed into the front garden and the east backyard bed. I suppose I should really take a couple weeks and let everything grow in, but the brain fizz I get from buying and planting new plants is mad addictive. I've offered to help my mom dig stuff up in her garden in exchange for patio-building help in mine, though. She may even have a sneaky flagstone connection for me.

Well, it's not like I have nothing to do out there in the meantime. I still need to:

* chop down the remaining hydrangeas - my neighbour's example confirms that they do in fact get pruned right down in the spring
* pry up the stupid paving stones in the back corner and the west bed (might pick up a pry bar for the purpose, actually)...a clematis would go nicely up the fence there (plus other semi-shade plants TBD)
* dig up the west bed in general - I will keep some of the geraniums to see how they turn out, but the orange daylilies can definitely go
* set up some sort of trellis structures to camouflage the compost bins - nice and sunny in that spot, so scarlet runner beans would probably like it there - and the a/c unit
* chop down the forest of suckers around the lilac
* clean up the through-space between carport and shed, which is littered with plant containers, leaves, and yard waste from the fall
* set up birdbath and buy a bird feeder
* get honeysuckle trained onto trellis thingy

At Loblaws today I was delighted to spy two gorgeous types of tree for $60 a pop, which seems pretty reasonable, really:

Flowering Almond


Purpleleaf Sandcherry


These both max out at about 10', a nice manageable size. I have, at the moment, nowhere prepared to put them, but god knows I've got expanses of sunny lawn I'm planning to get rid of. Or could I plant such things next to the west fence, since they're already tall enough that the canopy would probably be in the sun anyway? I hesitate, though, because these both seem to have a reputation for being fragile with regard to pests and diseases. I don't want to spend $60 on a plant that's going to die on me. They also had the extraordinarily funky-looking corkscrew hazel available for $40 or $50.

Accomplished today:

* Planted sweet peas in a few different locations around both the back yard and the front. Am totally excited to see if they come up, since this is the first time I've had enough sun to even consider them.

* Raked leaves and crap out of the garden beds. What a mess. I think I'm going to end up just digging the backyard's west bed under and starting over. The bed itself is all uneven and full of overgrown broken ugly pavers, and I'm pretty sure all that's in there is daylilies and geraniums, regarding which, bleh. Elsewhere, though, I'm pleased to note that most of what I managed to plant last year is actually coming back...including the trillium, bleeding heart, and peonies, which I was worried about.

To Do in the next couple days:

* get raked-up leaves off lawn and into yard waste bags
* plant liatris and dahlias and anything else that needs to be in the ground earlyish
* hang up string trellis for sweet peas next to shed