gardening with water

I have a pond, though what I failed to take into consideration was that the local pond plants are just breaking dormancy, and thus nobody will sell me any quite yet. (Frustratingly, I will be down on the eastern shore next week helping plant atlantic white cedars just two days before their local wetland nursery opens for the season.) What I also have is a large pile of back dirt on a tarp in the middle of the front lawn. I continue to be astonished at the yellow clay we've got here, having grown up with Piedmont red clay, and done most of my digging in it. Strange as it may seem this far inland, even the soil agrees that we really are in the coastal plain here.

So, I've done some moving of the large pile of dirt, and some distributing of the large pile of mulch in the back (with which I am making pathways! all over the back yard!) and a whole lot of little bits of other things out-of-doors, and it would make things very much nicer if we would actually get some spring rains to go with the return of spring temperatures. We had *two* more-than-token rainstorms in the entire month of March, and thus far April continues sunny. Not promising. I would like someday to live in a world where the weather follows sane and relatively predictable patterns most of the time, but I think I was probably born about fifty years too late for that.

Meanwhile, the stacks of Things on the coffee table, the couch, the dining room table, the living room floor, and the tabs in my browser continue to collect debris in the manner of the banks along the inside of a river's slow meander; the kitchen sink* ebbs and flows in a more tidal fashion. Having just invited my parents up for Easter (partially so that they can deliver the table saw my father just replaced) I should probably Do Something about all this. But to be perfectly honest, I suspect I'm more likely to flip through another gardening book, or go outside and move a few more buckets of mulch.


*not kitchen skink, as I originally typed; had I a skink, I would most likely not keep it in the kitchen.

gardening with water

I have a pond, though what I failed to take into consideration was that the local pond plants are just breaking dormancy, and thus nobody will sell me any quite yet. (Frustratingly, I will be down on the eastern shore next week helping plant atlantic white cedars just two days before their local wetland nursery opens for the season.) What I also have is a large pile of back dirt on a tarp in the middle of the front lawn. I continue to be astonished at the yellow clay we've got here, having grown up with Piedmont red clay, and done most of my digging in it. Strange as it may seem this far inland, even the soil agrees that we really are in the coastal plain here.

So, I've done some moving of the large pile of dirt, and some distributing of the large pile of mulch in the back (with which I am making pathways! all over the back yard!) and a whole lot of little bits of other things out-of-doors, and it would make things very much nicer if we would actually get some spring rains to go with the return of spring temperatures. We had *two* more-than-token rainstorms in the entire month of March, and thus far April continues sunny. Not promising. I would like someday to live in a world where the weather follows sane and relatively predictable patterns most of the time, but I think I was probably born about fifty years too late for that.

Meanwhile, the stacks of Things on the coffee table, the couch, the dining room table, the living room floor, and the tabs in my browser continue to collect debris in the manner of the banks along the inside of a river's slow meander; the kitchen sink* ebbs and flows in a more tidal fashion. Having just invited my parents up for Easter (partially so that they can deliver the table saw my father just replaced) I should probably Do Something about all this. But to be perfectly honest, I suspect I'm more likely to flip through another gardening book, or go outside and move a few more buckets of mulch.


*not kitchen skink, as I originally typed; had I a skink, I would most likely not keep it in the kitchen.

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