Over the years, I’ve heard it suggested that people should keep garden journals, jotting down notes regarding lawn and plant conditions, fertilizing schedules, care tips, etc. It always sounds like a good idea, but I always stumble on how a bound journal would be structured, how pages would be continued once they filled up, that kind of thing. In short, I just wasn’t committed enough to the idea to give it a shot.
And then I started to think the other day that a blog might be the right tool for this job. You could never fill it up, it could be illustrated with pictures, arranged and rearranged as desired and might even attract advice from the right sort of people (i.e., people who know what they’re doing in the garden).
So, we’ll give this a shot and see what happens.
For now, I think it will be less blog and more static pages devoted to various topics — mostly the type of plants in the yard, lawn issues and general observations.
The lay of the land
There are two main areas — flowerbeds in the front and back yards — and two areas on the sides of the house — one more tended than the other currently.
When I moved into the house, the back flowerbed was a sprawling affair, measuring nearly 60 feet by 13 feet across the back property line. The previous resident had lovingly taken care of it for decades, planting peonies and irises there among other things. But it became overgrown and needed more attention than I was able to give it, eventually filling with thistles and other noxious weeds. In April 2011, we decided to start over and hired a landscaping firm to plan and plant new beds, a little smaller this time around with a raised area for a vegetable garden at one end.
The front flowerbed was elevated slightly in 2010 after major excavation to waterproof the basement walls on the east side of the house. We let it settle over the winter and also had a plan made for it in April 2011. The entire plan for that area was deemed overambitious, so we scaled it back a bit.