Twiggybet1's Blog

It's been a while since my last blog entry.  I have been busy putting in my rain garden.  Why a rain garden?  I have a few practical reasons:

1.  in the spring, there are a couple of areas in the yard that tend to get marshy and hold water. 

2.  we also tend to get moisture in a corner of the basement

3.  it's supposed to be an ecological smart thing to do to help ease the burden on municipal storm drain systems.

So, I'm hoping my rain garden helps in all three of these areas.

I dug out a trench leading from the rear corner downspout on the house, over toward a low area that runs along the side of our yard toward the back.  Then I dug out the garden part, about 12 inches deep.  We have really hard packed clay type soil.  Over the years, the ground settled down too much next to the house (which I think contributes to the water in the basement) and the yard really needed to be regraded.  So, all that hard pack dirt I dug up, I broke up and redeposited it next to the back side of the house, so the water would drain away from the foundation.  On this I planted fresh grass seed.

I lined the trench with plastic pond liner and filled it in with rocks, so the water would travel over to the garden spot.  I filled in the dug out garden with a mixture of sand, compost, and spaghum moss.  Then I planted all sorts of plants, many of them spring flowering bulbs.  I planted a section of it with black flowering and black folliage plants, and this is my "Gothic" garden.  Weird, I know, but my teen daughter thought it was a cool idea.  We will see what it looks like in the spring. 

We have a lot of squirrels in our area, and they love bulbs.  I had read somewhere that if you use chili powder when you plant the bulbs, they will leave them alone.  So, I had some dehydrated and powdered habanero peppers from...well, it could be last year, or the year before, but at any rate, it was getting too old to use in food so I mixed some in the holes when I planted my bulbs, and sprinkled some more on top when I finished planting.  Lets hope that keeps my bulbs safe, some of them were rather expensive.

I still have more work to do.  I have to decide what I want to do for a border.  I want to get a bird bath to set in the middle of the round section.  I also need to get an arbor for my climbing rose that is next to the new stuff I planted.  It doesn't seem to want to stay on the fence any more.  I need to make up my mind on the border soon, the other stuff could wait until spring.

Besides working on this, I also spent a day digging sweet potatoes and tending to stuff in the vegetable garden.  We got about 1 and a half bushels of sweet potatoes.  Yum!  We had one sweet potato plant that really went crazy, with some of the vines going out over 20 feet.  It was such an amazing size, I thought I gotta save that, so after I removed the sweet potatoes, I brought the vine in and put it in a pot, at the top of the stairs and draped the vines over the hand rail.  Well, for a few days, it seemed it might be a wasted effort, as it seems I shocked it and all the leaves started to dry up and drop off.  I removed the dead leaves, and lo and behold, I have new leaves growing, so I think it might be o.k. after all.  When the vines fill in again, it's going to look so awesome!

We already had a couple of hard frosts, and the zucchini still has not given up, although the squashes aren't growing very fast.  I should put them out of their misery and call it a season.  

I made a batch of basil jelly.  It came out good, but very mild in flavor.  I still have some basil, so I may try another batch using a different recipe and see how that comes out. 

The leaves have been keeping me busy too.  I swept my patio clean of leaves yesterday, and today when I stepped outside, It looked as if no one had cleaned out there in ages!  Oh, well, the trees are about halfway done dropping their leaves, so eventually, that job will be done too.  Lets just hope the leaves finish falling before the snow starts!  I'm not really expecting snow for a while yet, but you never know.  Last year we got an early snow fall.

I took a day off of yard work and gardening.  Just a little ways north of us is an area where there are a lot of apple orchards and cider mills (about 15 miles or so).  I invited some family members over for a trip to the cider mill and orchards.  So we spent a day picking apples, choosing pumpkins, and petting farm animals. Oh, and drinking cider and eating doughnuts.   All the kids really enjoyed themselves, and some of them had never been to a cider mill before.  I, uh, kind of hurt my back picking the kids up so they could reach the really tempting apples high up.  I think I pulled a shoulder muscle.  It could have been cumulative, all the digging I was doing for the rain garden.  Anyway, I spent a day on the sofa with the heating pad.  So I guess I actually took a couple days off of yard work and gardening.