I certainly have been awol lately.
My oldest son and his wife came to visit for a few days. I was working in the garden and then in the house in preparation for their stay. It took up all my attention and energy. They left yesterday in the late afternoon. It has been really quiet around here. I was moping just a little bit, missing the company. Boo hoo!
But today I went out and did some more work in the garden.
A few years ago, I found a volunteer lilac plant growing in the chicken yard. It was only about 8 inches tall. I decided to dig it up and put it in a pot to see if it would grow. Well, it DID. This year I decided it needed to get put into the ground. Since there is already a lilac in the chicken run, I decided to plant this one in the garden.
It needed a pretty good sized hole dug:
It was a bit of a project to get that tarp loaded with dirt out of the garden afterwards... 🙄
But it looks happy in its forever home:
I got up on the ladder to take a before planting photo.
The dark path on the right is where I planted grass seed last week. On Saturday, we had a whole day of gentle and steady rain. Half an inch! That was just what my grass seed wanted! Though you can't see in the photo, it has all sprouted! I was so happy! This will cut down on so much annoying weeding in the path. It will be like the area on the left of the garden. I just mow that now. All this grass helps keep the garden cooler in the terrible heat that we can have around here later on. I'm hoping that will help the plants. We will see.
Here is a wider angle:
You will notice in the background, there is a horse! The neighbors up the road asked Mr. P if they could keep their horse here. It belongs to a young girl. They just turned Misty into the bigger field yesterday and she has ALL the grass she wants to eat now. She was in the smaller enclosure to the right of the lane, and you can see she had eaten everything available over there! I will try to get some good pictures of her. It's kind of hard because if you come to the fence, she will almost always walk over and then all I can get a picture of it her big nose looking for a carrot!
Also, in the right-hand corner closest, is my little garden shelter. This year it is getting a complete overhaul. I'm going to dismantle it and re-build it with new wood slats for the roof, and I bought an outdoor blind to use for the roof. It's not easy to find willow branches in the two or three places I used to gather them. The ones that are on the roof now are two years old. I'm amazed that it has survived big wind storms and snow loads all this time. Anyway, I intend to make it even more sturdy. We'll see. My son pounded a t-post on the outside of the fence to help brace the structure. That is going to really help too.
Okay. Enough talk. Time to get back to work!
