The previous owner of our house was here for nearly 50 years - according to what our next-door neighbour told us, she grew up here, and never really worked outside the home. One of the ways she passed her time was in cultivating and caring for a variety of perennial plants in the backyard and the front yard.
Now, as the title of this post says, I am not a gardener. I have a black thumb, and very little interest in caring for plants. I certainly appreciate them, but know very little about them, and thus far have not really been motivated to learn anything useful.
We've been living here for five years now, and one thing I've noticed is that the previous owner was actually really thoughtful in how she cultivated the front garden - the collection of perennials includes plants with a variety of blooming periods, so the end result is that there are almost always flowers throughout the spring and summer months, just different ones at different times. That's quite nice, and the neighbourhood honeybee population likes it too, which is great, since honeybee populations need all the support they can get. (Allegedly, the previous owner actually did some nighttime pilfering of other neighbours' plants to create her gardens. I get the impression she wasn't particularly well-liked.)
So we've got this pretty nice perennial garden set up, and the great thing about perennials is they just keep coming back, right? So I carried on in my usual way and largely ignored the upkeep of the garden. That means it looked like this:
Pretty rough and full of dead crap. I knew it looked crummy, but never made getting out and doing something about it a priority.
Until today, since I've pretty well put this semester to bed. Well. As of right now, it's all done, but this morning, there was still a bit of administrative work to take care of. Less than an hour's worth, though, and we've had a late spring because it was still snowing last week, but the past few days have been a lot warmer, and I noticed that some plants are starting to wake up, so it seemed like a good time to get in there and try to clean things up a bit, before it gets super hot, or before too many things have woken up and I end up killing stuff in my thrashing about removing dead things.
So I was directed to some clippers, and some gardening gloves, I got out my earbuds, saw they had 20% battery left, figured that should do me a while, put on some music, and got to work. The music only lasted about five minutes, but the whole effort was only about 40 minutes, so I guess that's not too bad. The front garden now looks like this:
I cleared out a lot of the old dead stuff, to make way for new things. A few days ago I had noticed that the snowdrops were out, and as I cleared things away, I found more green poking up from the ground too. It's still not beautiful, but it's better than it was.
The backyard? Oh, it's still a mess. Am I going to do anything about it? I doubt it - I've got another semester to prepare for. Classes start in two weeks!
Now, as the title of this post says, I am not a gardener. I have a black thumb, and very little interest in caring for plants. I certainly appreciate them, but know very little about them, and thus far have not really been motivated to learn anything useful.
We've been living here for five years now, and one thing I've noticed is that the previous owner was actually really thoughtful in how she cultivated the front garden - the collection of perennials includes plants with a variety of blooming periods, so the end result is that there are almost always flowers throughout the spring and summer months, just different ones at different times. That's quite nice, and the neighbourhood honeybee population likes it too, which is great, since honeybee populations need all the support they can get. (Allegedly, the previous owner actually did some nighttime pilfering of other neighbours' plants to create her gardens. I get the impression she wasn't particularly well-liked.)
So we've got this pretty nice perennial garden set up, and the great thing about perennials is they just keep coming back, right? So I carried on in my usual way and largely ignored the upkeep of the garden. That means it looked like this:
Pretty rough and full of dead crap. I knew it looked crummy, but never made getting out and doing something about it a priority.
Until today, since I've pretty well put this semester to bed. Well. As of right now, it's all done, but this morning, there was still a bit of administrative work to take care of. Less than an hour's worth, though, and we've had a late spring because it was still snowing last week, but the past few days have been a lot warmer, and I noticed that some plants are starting to wake up, so it seemed like a good time to get in there and try to clean things up a bit, before it gets super hot, or before too many things have woken up and I end up killing stuff in my thrashing about removing dead things.
So I was directed to some clippers, and some gardening gloves, I got out my earbuds, saw they had 20% battery left, figured that should do me a while, put on some music, and got to work. The music only lasted about five minutes, but the whole effort was only about 40 minutes, so I guess that's not too bad. The front garden now looks like this:
I cleared out a lot of the old dead stuff, to make way for new things. A few days ago I had noticed that the snowdrops were out, and as I cleared things away, I found more green poking up from the ground too. It's still not beautiful, but it's better than it was.
The backyard? Oh, it's still a mess. Am I going to do anything about it? I doubt it - I've got another semester to prepare for. Classes start in two weeks!
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