Yard and garden journal update 7/7/2011

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I’m still here. About 12-hours of my day are now spent outside. Some days are 4-hours of work and 8-hours of leisure and others reverse to 8-hours of toil and 4-hours of laziness. All of my usual plantings are done for this year; the impatiens bed on the west side of the house was finished last week, which is about a month behind my usual schedule. July and August will be mostly mowing, watering, and weeding while September and October will include painting the trim and more brickwork. My goal is someday to have oversize brick-walkways alongside the flowerbeds that surround the house, all leading to the backyard patio. The 6’ x 22’ brick pad across the front of the house serves several purposes. Foremost, it corrects some uneven terrain across the front of the house that made ladder work very challenging. Esthetically it provides a place to store the garden hose and provides a decent base for arranging flowerpots. Since the raised brick-bed is on a base of grade-8 gravel, the original drainage profile is intact. It will take me another 2 – 3 years to finish the brickwork around the house. The front pad is good enough for now and my efforts will move to fabricating a step to a slightly lower level walkway for the east side of house along a garden that is mostly Shasta daisies and Rudbeckia.

The two photos below were taken a month apart, one on June 5 and the other on July 5, and show how the irises go from colorful blooms to weedy looking beds of stems and standards. If it were not for the annuals being in full bloom, the iris beds would probably earn me a complaint from the homeowners association.

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