Notes From Zone 4

Okay, we got that one bed, the primary one for the spring flowers, put to bed for the year. It turned out to be a huge amount of work, but I’m hoping to not have to repeat it in the spring. We covered it all with a couple of inches of beautiful black compost and then about an inch and a half of shredded mulch.

That mulch smelled wonderful. I kept being reminded of flower shows, and it took me a while to figure out why. Flower shows have lots of newly spread mulch in an enclosed room, so that makes sense. It was nice to remember attending pretty flower shows while I worked in my own garden.

Frank got the hang of using the scoop on the tractor, and was zipping around like a pro with it. He’s figured out how to get it very full of both compost and mulch, and he was maneuvering it into tight locations really well. It still spills bits all over the place, but I’m reminding myself that they will go away without too much trouble with rains and snow.

I tackled the end of the bed where the forsythia have almost overtaken the entire space and found it just an absolute mess. I think I must have missed this end of the bed last spring. Oops. It really took me a while to get it under control, and it was really weedy underneath all of the ends of the branches which had rooted themselves.

That whole corner could handle a couple of hundred bulbs, just to make a note.

I almost started on the bed that I hate, right where the driveway turns. We’ve completely ignored that bed for three years. It has nothing in it that we’ve planted. The landscaper put a forsythia and some ditch daylilies in it, which are all doing fine, but it’s being overtaken with vetch and other weeds.

When I was starting to pull leaves out of it, I thought I’ll just pull everything out and start over. It would be a great place to put the two tree peonies that are coming. But by then, we were really getting tired and decided to just finish what we’d been doing and take a break, and then we didn’t go back out because it started to rain.

So now, we still have to figure out where to put the two tree peonies that are coming. And some day, we’ll have to tackle that bed.

I looked at the pile of mulch that we ordered earlier this month, and I think we might have used about a fourth of it so far. Frank says that it’s more than that, probably a third and he was wondering if it was a half. The guy we bought if from was surprised that we wanted two truck loads, and I bet we call him again early next year for more.

We have a couple of confused little plants. I think the snow and then the melting snow with warmth convinced a couple stupid ones that maybe it was spring? We have some daff green shoots appearing, and the white creeping phlox has a few blooms on it. Silly plants. I hope they aren’t killed when winter really comes.

I had a hard time convincing the kitties to come in tonight. We want to stay outside and play, Mom! But fall is when we have to be extra sure that everyone is snug inside at night, because the fisher cats prey on domestic cats when all the other small critters hibernate. We lost several cats to them in our early years here, before we figured that out.

Lisa and I have been making our living more or less on the road since we came back here in 1999. Just this month, several things have come together to let us get serious about getting off the road, working together again, and making our living from ‘here’.’ The non technical stuff will be cogitated on in Crustimony Proseedcake, I just signed myself up for a 400 level course in web geeking. That will get talked about here.

One of the things is winning two photography contests. That and warm feedback from friends and relations has convinced us to start selling prints and notecards and… online. We’ve registered gardenporn.com and the site will start answering today.

I am thus now shopping for a storefront. RSN there’ll be an entry about that. It’s also time to start looking to replace MovableType. I think we’re still inside the license terms, but RSN we’d need to switch to a commercial license. Unfortunately because Six Apart has take vendor funding and is jockeying to go commercial, I don’t have warm fuzzies about depending on them. No problem with the $150 or morally with closed source, but the booby trapped license (it allowed retroactive changes, which they made to disallow hosting MoveableType for others) they had for a while didn’t make me happy, and now I’m concerned that TypePad is where their action is going to be. Anyway, I’m looking for alternative weblogging in particular and sitebuilding/cms in general software

So there I am, looking to upgrade two major chunks of the Vast Richards Web Empire (TM and SM).