A.D.D. Yard

Like everything else in my life, my backyard reflects how my brain works. Parts of the lawn are mowed, but the weeds are very well incorporated into the whole layout, with this kind mixed in in this corner by the fence, and that kind covering the ground around the tree, and the other kind towering over the grass along the edge of the compost bin. In fact, the whole quadrant around the bin is unmowed lawn and a little bare dirt patch. I like to think of it as some kind of natural area experiment that I'm doing for the children's benefit. Somehow there is something to learn for them there.

There is a half dismantled wooden swing set pushed to the west side of the yard. It hasn't been fully assembled since we moved to this house over a year ago. In fact, I gave up decided that it had been disassembled and reassembled too many times because of our many moves and that it wasn't safe any more so now I'm using the wood to construct more raised garden beds (less lawn to mow!) Of course, the new beds are right now only one bed, and it only has two sides so far. It's fun to nail together disparate pieces of wood when you don't seem to have the correct nails (I should probably bolt them together?) and are doing it on the ground and the nails keep coming apart. Did you know you don't even need wooden sides? You can just pile up the soil a bag at a time in a sort of square shape and it works just as well. You don't need to make the whole bed before you plant either. You can just plant one little square at a time as you pile up the dirt on a weekly basis.

Now, this planting something new every week is of course part of the big master plan for the garden plants. Just because all our friends planted their stuff in the spring and now have these huge lush gardens with new vegetables coming out of their ass every day so they can blog about how great they are eating and isn't it wonderful to pull food off the vine and cook it in a little olive oil and eat it with some home-made aioli? Not for us. We are conducting a grand gardening experiment to see if we can harvest after summer is long gone.

"When is the garden going to be finished?" is my wife's daily mantra now. She just doesn't understand. Hasn't she read the shelf full of gardening books from the library? (I haven't either, who has time to read that much about gardening? I've flipped through them though, and I promise that I'll read them all winter and build cold frames and plan the garden layout on the computer and start the seedlings early and... and... )