Garden Update
The spring cleaning of the gardens is making steady progress. The next big project is to mulch the area that holds my newest trellis and was once home to a peach tree since departed. I’ve put down limestone blocks to replace the old fence as the back border, but there's still a couple of those to go, and there are a few windblown grasses to pull up. Then I’ll turn the old mulch, add the new and we’ll be done.
I have no idea why tidy gardens hold such appeal to me. After all, I like native plants and I don’t much care how they grow when they start to grow. I like the wild tangle. Of course, I'll pull up a hackberry whenever I get a chance, and it’s the same with bindweed. That’s one big feature of my latest cleaning program, and a lot of its appeal, I can access parts of the gardens previously inaccessible.
On the growing front, the big oaks are budding out, they’ve looked yellow and dead for the last several months and their leaf litter is thick. But I like the litter, it decays into good topsoil. After the leaf buds come the oak blooms, nice yellow tassels, that also make good compost. They stain concrete, however, so I sweep them off the porches, but otherwise it’s a cycle of life I like. Now, if it would just rain we’d be all set.