Playing in the Dirt

While it may not seem like I recognize any other pastime besides fiber arts, I am in fact something of a gardener/landscaper. Nothing formal, but I do like to make whatever yard I call my own at the moment a better place for me, for critters, and for the environment. That said, even gardening can have a tie-in to fiber arts, but I'll get to that in a minute.A few months ago, I moved in to a different place. It's a reasonable little rental, with a small front and back yards to play in and a landlady that doesn't really mind me messing with the space. The backyard faces north and has lots of tall trees around it (read: not much sun), and the front yard is itty bitty tiny but faces west and gets a reasonable amount of sun each day.

There is this thing that has always puzzled me about people and their yards. More often than not, a person will decided their yard needs some flowers, go to the nearest place that sells plants, buy some things, and plant them. At no point does the thought seem to enter in to their heads "hmm, will this plant actually thrive where I want it?" And so it was with the last tenants, who seemed to think it would be a fine and dandy idea to plant roses in the backyard where there is no direct sunlight ever. They also planted some asian jasmine, another sun-loving plant, right up against the house facing north where it, too, will get little to no sun.

So, last weekend started the yard recovery. I dug up all of the rose plants in the backyard where they were getting all gangly looking as they reached out for some sun, pruned them, and replanted them in the front yard.

Those roses will be so much happier!

I've never actually planted traditional tea roses like this before. Mostly, I don't find them particularly useful or practical. Birds don't get seeds from them, I don't get food or dye from them, and they are a lot of work. But they are part of the property, so by golly I'm going to make sure they are in a place where they can grow properly! Going back to the thought of useful and practical, dealing with roses isn't the only thing I did in the last week or so in my gardening explosion.

The whole front yard is now mulched with pine bark, and I've got a shiny new Whitney Crabapple tree growing in the container. Mostly it looks like a stick stuck in dirt, but in 2 or 3 years, it's going to have tasty little crabapples. Yum! And what I don't get, the squirrels will be totally happy with. Or, perhaps the other way around - whatever the squirrels don't get, I will be happy with!

Also planted on the other side of the walkway are some herbs that will be fine in partial shade: oregano, lemon balm, catnip, and english thyme.


Such a pretty green, isn't it? I can't wait to see how those herbs do against the house like that! And I planted the catnip near the air vent for the garage. Hopefully the cats, who love to hang out at said air vent, will appreciate the plants too.

No crazy gardener person would be without a compost set up, and I got mine going last weekend. It hasn't quite started to do that compost heating up thing yet, but I'm just happy to have it started. I hated throwing away perfectly good worm and plant food!


And the last bit of work I did in the garden was a raised bed in the one spot in the backyard which gets a few hours of sun. There won't be any tomatoes growing there - not quite enough sun for those babies - but spinach, purple carrots, fava beans, onions, and lettuce should do fine.


Now to tie the last bit in to fiber arts (you know I had to, right?). Next weekend I'll be putting up a 3'x3' raised bed, similar to the one in the picture above but with some willow lathe bordering around it, where I will start to grow some of my own natural dye material. On the list: Dyer's Coreopsis (lovely golds) and Indigo (totally blue, baby). The indigo will actually need a bit of a greenhouse thing to really thrive, so that section of the planter will have some vented plastic over it to make it that much warmer than the rest of the world. I'll also be planting some Hopi Black Dye (green, purple, black) sunflowers along the side fence to see if they'll work in the yard. They'll also feed the local birds, which doubles the pleasure of having them around.

And that's where things stand for now! If I actually manage to grow a few things from seed (I've never been successful at that), I'll post a bit about how that worked. But for now, while my yard settles in to a new routine, I'm going to back to doing some spinning. For the next blog post, I'll be posting about a new spinning wheel - the SpinAway Holiday wheel, scheduled to arrive on Tuesday!