the bark tree

Backyard progress

After Brandon critiqued my initial flagstone patio attempt, I reworked it a little to achieve a more coherent shape.  Though I don't take too kindly to negative comments, after a little time I was able to admit that I had more or less dropped stone randomly about with the practical goal of covering mud... and it looked, well, incoherent.

Using the line from the cement path which was once a narrow driveway to the garage I rounded a path with the stone.

Then we filled the path with pea gravel and I dragged up an old glider (which no longer glides) that had been hiding in the very back of the yard to serve as a bench. 

Though the area is always littered with toys, August loves to haul the gravel in his trucks, it beats bare soil.

On the other side of this path I've been working on the lawn.

As you can see, there are lots of patches and in this shady area I'm fighting a losing battle trying to grow turf grass. 

However, in the sunny front yard, I've been widening beds and digging out new areas so I've used chunks from that lawn back here and it's slowly filling in as the weather warms and more sun trickles through.

My little hydrangea bed looked very cheerful all spring.

It's still amazing to me that I have all this space to work with and I'm enjoying each little improvement.

 

May dreams

Pretty pix of the garden from May.

 

The dead thang

Did I ever show you this little Cleyera (Ternstroemia gymnanthera 'Jade Tiara') I planted in early spring?  I didn't think so.  It wasn't exactly a significant planting. Being only a little one gallon plant, it barely stuck up above the iris, but I imagined it slowly growing large enough to softly fill this area with shiny evergreen simplicity and tolerating both the sun and shade which this area provides.

Well, it's dead.  Yep.  I killed it.   Not on purpose, of course.  It started looking like this and I carefully clipped off all the dead stuff in hopes of it's recovery, but it just went ahead and croaked.  I'm pretty sure it got overwatered and stayed wet and smothered from lack of oxygen in this mostly shady bed.  Sometimes we tell our customers at NHG that this type of loss is caused by an "inadvertent watering problem."

It's no fun to watch plants die and I'm always hesitant to show my failures, but it's part of gardening. Bleah.

Lawn

We never had to worry about lawn while living in Brooklyn.  Our tiny yard at first had some weedy grass which I eventually eliminated.  However, now we have an urban field of green and I spent a little time working on making it greener this spring.

Using a hand-held aeration tool, I poked lots and lots of holes all around the dead patches and in the decent looking areas too.  Many times I just left the thing sticking in the lawn so I could go back to it later.  With 2 year old August always playing around the yard as I work, there are constant stops and starts with every project.

To make the patches more inviting for the St. Augustine runners, I added several bags of Humax Turf Soil Builder which is finely screened and easily trickled into the lawn by hand.

Finally, I applied an inexpensive organic fertilizer, NHG's 6-3-0 once the lawn began to show active growth.  In three weeks there was a marked difference and now it all looks great.

Spring pix

In an effort to get you up to date: photos of my springtime garden.