|
My Profile
Fairytales for a Practical Princess - 2008-11-30
|
12:16 a.m. - 2005-06-25
Dirty deeds done dirt cheap. Sorry if you're stuck with AC/DC now, the above is to apt to ignore. We got dirt. LOTS of dirt, and yes, it was dirt cheap. Only Michael, the maestro of timing, could decide the day before a party to go off and buy 3,000lbs of topsoil. Really nice topsoil, but still! The dirt was for the perennial garden. Last week Mike built a wall on top of the concrete footer which encloses it. I'd been wanting to make the soil level deeper. With all the rock and broken cement under the scant dirt layer, the only way to get more depth was to go up. The wall Mike built is lovely. Brick and fieldstone topped with milled slate. Ties together all the materials used elsewhere. Brick support columns hold up the front porch (which is up almost a story from ground level, the house is set into a hill). The curved planting beds are fronted with fieldstone and we're using more fieldstone to cobble the driveway. The slate is from the haul Mike made a couple years ago. Slate he used to make the sidewalk and stairs out back. The new wall is about a foot high. Theoretically this meant I could have another 11" of dirt. Right. Not when I have to deal with Mulch Man. That's Mike's 'contribution' to my gardens. Not lovely squishy organic mulch, Mike is enamored with pitch black mulch made from chewed up recycled shipping pallets. He'd bought a trailer load a few weeks ago to put under Wolf's swing set. The mulch is treated with an anti-fungal to keep it from rotting and further treated with an insecticide. All well and dandy for under a swing set, but lousy on top of a working garden.Some bugs are good for the garden. And isn't the point of mulch to decompose and add nutrients to the soil? This stuff is worse than pine bark. Oh, and the fricken landscaper's paper! Last gardening season I made the mistake of buying a roll of landscaper's paper. I decided against using it, I don't mind pulling weeds. Mike, however, was enthralled by the landscaper's paper. Been panting for a year for a chance to use it. Yup, he was going to help, help, help! He was gonna take care of my weeds whether I wanted him to or not. If you're unfamiliar with this stuff I'll explain. The paper is a water permeable dirt condom. You roll it out over your soil and it keeps weeds from sprouting. You poke X-shaped holes in it like the opening for a straw in a soda cup lid and jam the plants in. Or as was the case today, you dig UP the plants first. I kid you not. The day before a big party I was out in the sweltering heat digging up all my perennials so Mike and Carlos could shovel in the new topsoil and roll out the &%$@# landscaper's paper. Then this afternoon Carlos and I sunk all the plants back in while Mike tootled off to the House of Mulch and bought half a trailer load of that black junk. I tried! I tried and tried! He wouldn't listen! When he gets like this he never listens. I could write, "No paper! No black mulch!" on his windshield and he wouldn't get it. I could tattoo it on his forehead and he still wouldn't get the message. Imagine a bulldozer with cruise missile targeting and that's Mike when he's determined to 'help'. If it wasn't so aggravating it'd be rather sweet. Except for the all plants (which are droopy and transplant shocky), the perennial bed is very…er…tidy. Much like I imagine the landscaping might be outside Anal Retentive Headquarters. I was shooting for delightfully jumbled English Country Garden and what I've got looks like it was plotted with a slide-rule. Oy. Mike was especially anxious to help because he'd been a Doubting Thomas this week in regards to another of my projects. He was feeling contrite. See, I finally got around to putting the mosaic on the wall behind the stove. I gots me one fantabulous backsplash now. (Yes, yes, pics are coming. My camera hates me. And my diary is iffy about uploading images too. Okay?) I've been collecting random mosaic beads and tiles for a while now. I finally got brave and decided to get that puppy up on the wall. I'd laid it out on the floor on top of white poster board. It's rather eclectic. There's the aforementioned beads, geometric and garden motif mosaic tiles and some larger tiles I'd broken into bits, but also copper pipe end-caps, small bits of stained glass, largish glass 'rocks' with a rainbow-y copper tint, and glass squiggles. Like molten glass had been poured in loops and curves then broken into pieces. Mike couldn't translate the muddle on the floor into the end result on the wall. He didn't say anything bad, but he had nothing positive to say either. Then he came home when I was about a third of the way finished and he got all smiley. "Wow, hon! It looks really> good!" "And here you were thinking it would look stupid." Uh huh. Busted. His smile morphed into a sheepish grin. "Um, yeah. Sorry. It really does look good, though." He'd doubted my artistic talent. A huge no-no in our house. We do not pooh-pooh creative endeavors. Ergo, he felt bad. So to make it up to me he was going to finish the perennial bed. Today. Despite the time-suck of gardening when I should have been prepping for the party everything is ready. Only my bathroom to clean and making the deviled eggs to do in the morning. I like them fresh, they get soggy in the fridge overnight. The salads are made. The coolers stocked. The meat and buns are thawed/thawing. The beans are in the crock. We're good to go. And I need to go to bed. ~LA
|
