Garden housekeeping

As I’ve mentioned a time or twelve our spring has been wet and cold, so I’ve been prioritizing the time I actually get to spend outside, only the high impact things were getting done. Finally, last week we finally had a stretch of dry (and sometimes even sunny!) days and it was time to do a few of those mind numbing garden chores. This is definitely not the glamorous side of gardening, yet it must be done. Unless of course you want to be surrounded by a Laurel forest or have your pebble patio moat lost beneath a sea of fir tree needles (no worries, I’ll explain what a pebble patio moat is). Last summer was a good one for Laurel berries, they were dropping in buckets. That was the first round of dealing with the dropping berries but now they’ve become seedlings. Hundreds, wait no…make that thousands of them. They were everywhere, especially (as you can see) growing through the grasses (they are the glossy almond-shaped leaves). Nothing to do but just but on my gloves and get to work.

Next up the “patio moat”… For drainage and wiggle room we left a 5” gap between the retaining wall and the patio, I later filled this area with blue pebbles and so I’ve always thought of it as our moat. The illusion was somewhat compromised by a year’s worth of Fir tree debris. Time to tackle it before I start filling the patio with containers and this area becomes mostly inaccessible.

The strategy? Wear gloves, drag the pebbles (along with the debris) out of the moat and then pick them up individually and toss them back into the moat, leaving the debris behind. Simple! But time consuming. Here it is in process. Done… Yet to do… It’s kind of meditative, really. Finished with both of these chores I looked up and realized Mother Nature had hit repeat… Those blooms on the Laurel promise more berries, and these blooms (?) on the Fir trees mean showers of more crud raining down on the patio. A gardener’s work is never done…