Well, I knew that one day my blog would come to this. I spent the day outside in the yard yesturday and realized something. From this moment on until the next cold fall day, I will be spending all my spare time outside in one of the many gardens. Of course I will still be cooking, thats the basis of my blog. I will just be adding things that pertain to being outside in the garden as well. I will try and get pictures as I go, a before and an after, maybe.
Just a quick picture of what this yard used to be - the previous owner was serious about her gardens. She used to win awards and always had people driving by just to look at her garden. She, I suspect, was an excellant cook because I find some sort of spice or herb all the time. Who grows that stuff and dosen't cook with it? In short - I have a kick ass skeleton, but bruised and broken skin.
Yesturday I worked on the peonies. I have 3 of these and they are gorgous. I need to buy special things for them - sort of like tomato cages but they're shorter and flat but will allow heavy plants like these to grow tall without falling over. I've seen them in gardens, specifically for peonies and so there's no arguing that I need to get me some.
Let's backtrack a bit. When we moved into this house almost 2 years ago, the yard and everything in it hadn't been touched in about 2 years. Everything was so overgrown and gone wild it was hard to tell what we had. We had trees completly covering windows, 5' tall thistles...yes, 5 feet tall! We had a pond with a sophisticated waterfall, roses, grapes, blueberries, blackberries, strawberries gone seriously wild, daisies up the yin yang, more lilies than I could ever count, and the list just went on and on and on...and then on some more.
The inside of the house was priority so we decided that attempting to do any of the yard even in the slightest was just too overwhelming. We also didn't really know what else would pop up so we decided to simply cut the grass and call it good until spring so we could grasp what we were dealing with. It was that September that we found that we had a very mature grape vine. We had so many grapes we didn't know what to do with them. So I taught myself how to make grape jam. I made 12 batches of grape jam, ate some fresh, gave bags and bags and bags of grapes away and still had a ton left, which in turn fed racoons, birds and squirrels quite well for a while.
Last spring we started paying attention to what was popping up and also we started pulling things out, including a large tree that was about 30' too high, random overgrown bushes and thistles from hell. Yes, they are from hell and I wish they would go back already.
I just realized in getting a cup of coffee, that there is just no way I can talk about everything to do with gardens right now and in one posting. So I will talk about here and there as I go. Don't mean to end so quickly but this will be continued.
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