The Clueless Gardeners - A Garden Blog

Catastrophic failure my ass! My drainage trench is not only functional, but trendy. I’ll post a picture when it is finished and the rain has washed it clean. We may have to excavate more rocks first, however.

The sand and rock may be inappropriate for the bottom of a vegetable bed, but we have found great uses for them both, so digging the beds are like digging for gold. Big rocks are for showy walls; the sand is for the new little hill we’re building at the edge of the woods, and for lining my drainage trench, and the smaller-than-potato-sized rocks are for the top of the trench.

In other news, the deer ticks are already active. On Friday night I went to scratch and itch on my back and ended up with a tick between my fingers. I think it may have been biting me, but it wasn’t engorged yet, which means I should be safe from Lyme’s disease this time.

So that’s it for my playing in the woods until next winter. And I had better get used to wearing tick repellant. As an additional precaution I trimmed the low branches from the pine that I bump into every time I unload rocks and sand from the wheelbarrow.

The skunk cabbage blooms are all over the swamp now. Under a rock I found a cricket today. In downtown Norwood Chris and I had a close encounter with an entire flock of cedar waxwings that were eating the shriveled berries from a tree in front of the bank. It snowed while Mom was visiting this weekend, but just long enough to look like a snow-globe. Oh, and Mom took one look at my transplanted lilies and said “irises”! Which would be awesome – I love irises. I feel silly for not considering the possibility, and I hope I didn’t transplant them to unsuitably dry locations.

On the ninth I started wild blueberry cuttings in milk-jug greenhouses. We’ll see how those fare.

I have no good pictures from today, so instead, here is the unexpected visitor to our bird feeder who stopped by during the heavy snows before Christmas.