Garden Construction

Chris and I have only one real shovel between the two of us, which means that when one of us digs, the other has got to find something else to do. Chris was in a real digging mood today, so I started investigating the possibility of making a path down to the swamp. Chris obliged me by bringing wheel-barrows full of sand. I trimmed the plants, raked the sand around, and placed those slates that I had previously found stacked in the woods. And now we have a path!



It isn’t a long path, but it cuts through an area that was formerly mushy, and that will be dense with tick-infested foliage in another month. It ends perfectly on a large, flat rock that has the Indian pipe bed on one side, and deep mush on the other. This means that I will have safe access to my swamp come summer, hooray!

For now though, it looks like an ugly scar through the woods. I’ll still have some trimming and planting and poison-ivy removal to do, but I think the area will naturalize beautifully into a secret green niche. Perhaps later I’ll even shovel out a little of the marsh around the rock to make a frog-pond.

I also spent some time moving rocks and sand about other parts of the yard. The giant sand-heap is now looking a little like the raised bed that it will eventually become, and the drainage ditch at the end of the driveway is finished, if still dirty-looking. It also seems to function as intended; which is to say our driveway did not look like Lake Michigan during the last rain.