Suburban Dirt

Hey, ho -- let's go!

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 20:16:53 -0500

I started out less blitzkriegy, then lost the entry (damned Firefox -- it's too easy to close tabs when you've had a couple of glasses of wine) but what the hell. It was a pretty day, it's been a decent week, shit's a-growin' -- might as well just hit it.

Well, I'm not very reliable ...

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 16:53:45 -0500

but there will be lots of pictures here, since we finally undertook that major renovation of the slope behind the house, between us and the neighbors on the north side of the block.

Miscellaneous notes and stuff

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 23:51:24 -0500

Yeah, no way I'm actually doing anything out there the first week of January. The weather has actually been unseasonably damp and warm (well, aside from any questions about what's unseasonable in Ohio, in this day and age), but there's really no point doing much about anything, except drooling over online catalogs and discussing dates.

Oh, ouch. Almost six months.

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 00:14:34 -0500

But I'm going to post, now that the garden is on its way to sleep for the season (though the delphinium is, in fact, still blooming it's supposed to hit the twenties tonight -- it'll stop). I don't have many pictures -- maybe I'll do some Friday or Saturday, no time during the week, with SICSA and work and classes.

The Dirt Farm 6/18/05

Sat, 18 Jun 2005 00:18:37 -0500

Posting some pics and a progress report, just to keep things up. It's actually worth making an update -- things have grown and bloomed and made it worthwhile.

Notes

Sat, 04 Jun 2005 18:39:32 -0500

Because today has been too busy to actually take any pictures of the stuff.

Photographic updates on the Dirt farm

Tue, 31 May 2005 20:56:31 -0500

Managed to get a lot done on the holiday -- we were out of town (Pittsburgh) from Thursday night through Sunday afternoon, but the weather held for about 24 hours, so we got a lot done -- weeding, mowing, starting to spread new topsoil both in flowerbeds and the low spots in the yard, fertilizing the plants. It's starting to look pretty decent, now that the warm weather's set in.

Got the containers up and the 'starts' out.

Sun, 22 May 2005 22:17:36 -0500

Yesterday couldn't have been a better day for getting the container plants put up and out. Fortunately, no diarrhetic dog or household emergency ensued, so we actually were able to get the larger portion of what we intended to get done yesterday completed. No more often than that happens, you'd think we had children.

Man, I guess it's what I get for living here.

Sun, 15 May 2005 17:24:57 -0500

Temps are supposed to be in the forties again tonight. I figure all my starts ought to be okay -- I'm leaving them out there, in other words. Two weeks of temps hovering around eighty, a soft frost, a few weeks in the sixties and seventies, then a night of lows in the forties (I've seen lots of people probably wasting money buying and planting annuals today, a day that looks and feels so much like mid-October I expect the brand new leaves to fall off the trees), and a week of temps not even getting to seventy. It's freaking May fifteenth! I hate Ohio, sometimes.

Got my roses last evening.

Sat, 30 Apr 2005 23:48:33 -0500

Figures the temps are supposed to be in the upper thirties at night all week. I was savvy enough to go for two instead of one of the same rose, so I think we may put one in the ground tomorrow and stash the other one somewhere I can put it in the sun during the day, then plant it next weekend.

Bleh -- supposed to freeze overnight

Sat, 23 Apr 2005 16:27:29 -0500

and snow two or three inches. It's the last week of April, it's been above 40 even at night for about two weeks -- everything's in almost full leaf/bloom. Hell, the daffodils and the muscaria are already bloomed out and the tulips are at full maturity! So naturally it's going down below 30 degrees tonight and a couple of inches of snow.

It's springtime in Ohio, none of it surprises me.

Moving right along.

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 23:55:42 -0500

Went out of town last weekend, but still had a few hours' daylight Sunday, after we got back, to do some minor chores. Trimming, mostly, since it's still really too early to harden and plant most of the stuff I still have living in the laundry room (I estimate I lost a third of the plants, between them getting mildewed and some not thriving once I put them into the peat pots, for whatever reason).

Here we go -- now it's on!

Sun, 03 Apr 2005 19:25:15 -0500

Well, the weather is finally breaking, and the temps have been above the freezing mark for at least a week. Good thing, since we bought one of the major living yard ornaments we'd had on the schedule for this year.

So just about everything's sprouted, now.

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 09:42:10 -0500

Everything but the delphinium, at any rate. Clearly, I'm going to have to rig something that will allow me to move some of the more aggressively growing seedlings out of the warm beds before it's warm enough outside to use the container garden shelves as cold frames.

I disconnected the heating pads last night, since 80% of the stuff is up now. The pinks shot up within three days. Not too surprising, actually -- they always sprout. They just haven't always done well once I transplanted them. I never 'hardened' them properly before, though. Not sure when I should go out with the duct tape and plastic to set up the cold frames -- probably not before April first, I'm guessing.

Briefly ...

Tue, 08 Mar 2005 00:44:15 -0500

Finally ordered the flowering almonds from Spring Hill. They e-mailed me a $25 coupon, so I got three of the almonds (I'm sure they're considerably smaller than the last one, but three of them for about the price I paid for the original still ain't too shabby). I also bought some anemone corms that are supposed to tolerate sun -- again, we'll see how that works out. Anemones seem to be gourmet pickings for the rabbits in my neighborhood. Maybe they'll at least keep the little bastards out of everythinge else.