"Yardening"

As usual, this weekend held lots of yard work for us. Saturday, we put our raised beds in place and picked up the dirt to fill them with from Biomass (which is where you take all your wood clippings and other organic waste, and pay to drop it off, and they make dirt and compost and mulch out of it, and then you pay them to get it back). The bed in the foreground is ours, and the one behind it is Steve and Betsy's. We lined the bottoms of both with dry leaves, in hopes of keeping some of the moisture contained (and adding to the quality of the soil, as the leaves break down over time). Yesterday, in between brief torrential downpours, I planted our little basil plants and some onion sets, leftovers from the neighbors (thanks, guys!), in our bed.There's a nice closeup of the basil. It's from Trader Joe's, which I visited with Cat on Friday in Bend. It smells amazing, and I'm really excited to harvest and eat it.

Our neighbors' garden, in case you are interested, looks like this:

Personally, I don't think lettuce and sugar snap peas have any business looking that good (is it trying to get eaten? Because that's what I want to do to it), but maybe I'm just jealous they got started sooner than we did.

In other yard-related news, we were chatting with Tom, who mentioned that he has a friend who can hook us up with some lovely mulch, like this:which is verrry exciting, because it involves one of our favorite words: FREE. Also, because we have a lot of things we are planning on mulching. I sprayed weeds this weekend in the yard and all our flowerbeds out front, in hopes that they will die soon and we can mulch over them.

Let's see, what else...I'm really proud of my ghetto water catchment system. That would be an old garbage can positioned under a gutter that has no downspout.

You can make fun of me if you want, and I'll understand, but bear in mind that I watered all the plants in my yard this weekend without turning on the hose. I would like to put in real catchment barrels (ideally that look nicer than old trash cans) at the downspouts around the house, and in my green dream world, dig a hole and put in a water-storage cistern to stash all that rainwater for irrigating in the summer. I suppose in the interim, my "system" will work fine.