One of the things we’ve noticed when we mow the lawn is that there are many places where the tips of rocks are sticking out and catching the lawn mower. It’s made for a very bumpy ride, and we’re sure it’s not good for the mower. So today Frank went out there with a shovel, and wow were those rocks much bigger under the ground than they seemed from the tips just sticking up. Yes, this is why they call New Hampshire the Granite State.
We’ve now got quite a good start on a rock pile, anyway. We still need to go back behind what he did and fill those holes with soil and then re-seed those spots so that there aren’t a bunch of bare spots in the lawn.
Speaking of the lawn, one of the drawbacks of spreading fertilizer the way we’ve done it is that there are stripes of green all over the place. Is that because we missed parts? We thought we were being very careful about applying it uniformly, but I think this is proof that we have a lot to improve with our technique.
I’ve been weeding madly, especially in the beds surrounding the gazebo, in back. The lawn basically merged into those beds with no clear boundary, there were very deep-rooted weeds all through there, and it was basically a big mess. It’s taken me days to get it back under control, but I think I’m there now. Frank hauled in new mulch to cover over what I did, which we hope will control the weeds there now.
Two different types of delphinium are blooming this week. Both the Blue Butterfly and the regular light blue ones from my old garden are both doing very well. I love the blue butterfly version so much that I’m going to either do seeds or plugs from the Jollies next spring, I think. I saw them in their catalog that they so helpfully sent me this year, and I’m tempted to try a whole tray of them.
We are really struggling with the quality of the soil that Skip gave us. It sucks, and we don’t have a good composting system set up yet to enrich the soil. We are really afraid that we’re going to lose plants because the soil is so very very crappy.