Today I weeded ferociously for a good 3h and got out of it about 3 square feet of bare dirt. And that no doubt is temporary, since I know I didn't get all the roots out. Man, lily of the valley is a lot more pernicious than it looks.

I have, randomly, a red-osier dogwood growing right next to the pine. I was happy to see this, since I have no objection at all to bird-feeding berries and nice red twigs for the winter. Strange place to plant it, though. Apparently low-lying branches will root themselves; I pulled up one branch that was attempting this feat and redirected it so it goes around the pine instead of into the spot I want for the lilies. Google, however, tells me that dogwood thickets can get pretty massive, and now I'm not sure what to do with it; I don't think it has enough room where it is, unless I send it in the other direction to do battle with the hydrangeas, and I'm afraid it would be the loser in that fight (considering that it was totally invisible until I chopped the hydrangeas down). Maybe I could try digging it up and moving it over to the west bed, since I've been wondering what to put over there for some height at the back? Easier said than done, I suspect...well, whatever I dug up would no doubt grow happily in the west bed, but I bet any root pieces left behind under the tree would ALSO grow happily.

Planted the anonymous bigass thing next to the maybe-a-spirea; planted the solomon's seal in the west bed, next to the fence where there's near-total shade; planted the filipendula between dogwood and lilies, since it's supposed to reach about 3.5' tall; planted the red sempervivens in the front yard where they will hopefully spread and fill up an empty spot under the yew. Still hemming and hawing about where best to put the others. The little alpine doodads will probably go in the front yard too, since it's drier there and there are better-defined places for tiny border plants. This is sort of my problem with the remaining shady stuff, since most of it keeps a pretty low profile but it's all interesting-looking enough that I want to be able to see it. I suppose I could just throw them all into the west bed for now and move them around or divide them once I start to get things more straightened out...not like that's going to happen very quickly, after all, and I may as well give them the chance to multiply a bit.

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

Recent discoveries, notes, observations:
* The things I thought were geraniums, with the bright orange blood? They're not geraniums. I have no idea wtf they are; 99% sure they're a weed, though. Celandine, maybe? Anyway, they are EVERYWHERE, but not for long.
* Mowing the front lawn this morning, I found patches of what I think are daisies and yarrow growing in the middle of it. I am going to mow around them and see what they turn into.
* As sad and scraggly as said lawn is, it does look better for having been mowed. The backyard lawn, meanwhile, is so weed-ridden and generally lame that I can't find the motivation to bother.
* I posted before about the lovely purpleleaf sandcherry, which we wants, precioussss. As it turns out, it looks like we already have one in front of the front steps. Awesome! Pictures to come when it blooms.
* The front yard in general is actually looking not-half-bad at the moment. The hanging baskets full of mini-petunias I hung by the door certainly don't hurt, either.
* The probably-a-spirea looks a hundred times better with the dead wood mostly chopped out. As a bonus, this freed up a nice chunk of sunny dirt to weed and plant stuff in. After the thing blooms I will take out the remaining low-hanging branches, thus freeing up more dirt, and call it pruned for this year. Also, I ♥ my new bigass Lee Valley ratcheting pruners.
* Blaze climbing rose is already twice the height it was when I planted it. Eeeeexcellent.
* Something is eating the flower buds off my rhododendron...close inspection suggests insects. Grrrrrr. Dammit, City of Ottawa, I want my rotenone powder back! Well, at least the leaf spikes seem to be undamaged.

Patio Progress:
So the UsedOttawa vendor with the rocks is a private individual with, well, a lot of rocks on their land. I am going to go visit them on Tuesday, hopefully, to check that said rocks will be barefoot-friendly enough to use for my purposes. If they are, this will be an unbelievably kickass bargain, to the tune of saving me $2.50 per square foot, aka about $1000 when taxes and pickup vs. delivery are figured in. So needless to say I really hope this works out. The stones will not be as schmancy as the $3/sqft limestone variety, but I'm going for a rustic look anyway, so whatevah.

Brought my seedlings home from mom's place. Mixed results - no pinks, marigolds, jacob's ladder or astilbe. One single solitary delphinium. And one of the cats has just chowed down on the pampas grass, and then to add insult to injury, threw it up all over the floor. Siiiigh. Well, we'll see if they recover, it's not as if the stuff was likely to bloom the first year anyway.

The annual seedlings are doing well, though. Cosmos, asters, bachelor's buttons, and zinnias are all looking good. Need to assess what annuals to buy...after tomorrow's plant sale, I guess, so I know what space I have. Lots of begonias and double impatiens to fill the shady west bed, anyway. I would really like to track down some cleome, too, but have never yet seen it for sale. In any case, the prospect of being able to mess around with all the sunny annuals has me drooling. Although it would be very easy to spend a lot of money this way, so I will endeavour to use annuals only as punctuation and container plants.

Anyway, need to make dumplings, so my garden fantasies will have to wait. Till TOMORROW. Ahahahahahahaa!

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.

Some previous owner of this house gets a massive EPIC FAIL in composting. In moving the compost to a different spot, I discovered that one of the two composters was full of plastic bags, candy wrappers, and styrofoam. I mean, WTF, people?? Adding to my irritation at having to pick out all this crap was that the composter in question was also set a good 2 feet into the ground and was a big fat pain in the ass to dig out and get rid of.

On the plus side:

* I have a generous amount of nice compost to use, now that it's garbage-free
* in addition to being sunny, that soil in that back corner is going to rock
* due to removal of the pain-in-the-ass composter, I now have a nice big hole in a sunny/rich-soil spot

This last cries out for a flowering almond, but still I hesitate. The power lines are almost directly above, although I think they'd probably clear the max height of a flowering almond; also I need to make sure that anything tall and leafy planted there is not going to cause undue shade in the rest of the yard. And I'm not sure that it won't look weird with the massive white pine and the anonymous shrub sitting right next to it.

Canadian Tire plant spoils:

Money Plant, which starts off like so -



- and ends up like so:



Artemisia (yay sun!)


Delphiniums - I did attempt to start some of these from seed but am increasingly skeptical that I'll get any return from that venture, so for $2 a pop I figured it was worth backing up the seeds with perennials:


Blaze climbing rose, which I last attempted in a pot; we'll see if it survives better in the ground and in full sun. My David Austin rose is also hardy to zone 5 and has done pretty well without protection, so crossing my fingers!

Today I:

* dug under about half of the west bed (up to the stupid pavers, which I'm going to wait to tackle till I can get my hands on a crowbar), digging up many rocks and all the daylily rhizomes I could get my mitts on
* having checked with the neighbours, trimmed back the prickly climbing thing that is invading from their yard
* tidied and swept the through-space between carport and shed

I also kept an eye on the sun conditions through the day and confirmed that the front yard is indeed full sun (6h+) throughout, and so is a swath of the backyard, with much of the rest of it on the sunny side of partial shade. I've decided I'm going to move the compost, because AS IF I am going to waste one of the sunniest spots in the yard on it! It would in fact be a very good place for that flowering almond....

I AM SO EXCITED about this yard, I cannot tell you.

Tomorrow or Sunday I will whip out to Canadian Tire, where I saw a bunch more perennials that piqued my interest. Also on my to do list, although somewhat longer term, is to put together some containers to hang over the front step, decorate the through-space, and generally be gorgeous, since I seem to have acquired a bazillion containers in the last year or so. Maybe I will attempt some of those impossibly perfect arrangements I've been seeing in garden magazines. I'll just have to remember to water them this time around. For this purpose maybe I will start a rain barrel.