So Very Much Happening!

I’m thirty now, and life is good! So much has been going on in the yard that I have been barely able to keep up with the plants, much less with a blog.

Thank goodness for friends and family willing to lend a hand, because I’m up to my eyeballs in plants this week, and thanks to them I have beds ready to go. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to speed through the rest of this post so that I can scurry outside and get twenty-five asparagus into the ground before Chris wakes up.

Here are a few of the other exciting goings-on about our yard:


This is bleeding heart, I think. A previous owner had planted it beneath the deck, in a spot that gets a surprising amount of moisture. I have relocated it to my pond path where it will be better appreciated. Despite slicing off numerous finger-thick fleshy roots in transplanting it, the new growth is shooting up faster than anything else in the yard.


Less alien then the mass of bleeding heart growth, the spiderwort which I transplanted is going gang-busters, too. I moved these from the dry, sunny swathe along the driveway the pond-path, where they should be more at home in the shade and damp. Like the bleeding heart, this is planted in the amazing soil that I scooped up when digging the pond. It’s black, crumbly, seemingly made entirely of decaying stuff, and holds water like a sponge. I with I had fifteen yards of it to play with.


Perhaps this summer I will have some luck identifying the ferns in the backyard. I would like to eat some of these fiddleheads, but some searching yesterday hinted that most types of fiddleheads are carcinogenic.


My reduced iris patch is going gangbusters, and the relocated irises are continuing to do well. It also turns out that some of the plants that I initially took for lilies and then thought were more irises are, in fact, lilies. Maybe. And then there are the two mystery bulb/root types I unearth while raking the asparagus bed, which I forgot to take pictures of.


Are you a good rose, or a bad rose? There is a type of rose which is invasive around here. Last summer I transplanted three rose seedlings out of the lawn. I bet I’ll have to kill them. Oh well. . . that’s more room for blueberries I suppose.


I suppose it’s good practice for having children that I woke Chris to show him a salamander! This little beauty was drowsing in the damp soil beneath a rotting stump. He became abruptly active in the warmth of my hand, and escaped me near the frog-pond, where the sun was warming the damp soil. What do salamanders want first thing in the morning when rudely awakened? Food? A mate? A nice cup of coffee flavored with dirt?

It speaks volumes for our yard that we have amphibians about. They are the canaries in the mineshafts when it comes to pollution. This yard must have seen years of neglect before we got here, despite the giant can of Preen in the shed. This yard is a little slice of heaven!