Consider us gardeners!

This weekend Dad and Melanie came to visit, and helped us set up the garden on the side of our patio, and back against our back wall. This is the first time we've been responsible for a garden, so this is quite exciting for me. :)

The side garden started with mom's vision and hard work, digging up the plot. We picked up some tools (now we own a shovel!) and flowers at Home Depot, and picked up some great plants (yay azaleas) at the Spring House Nursery. It was surprisingly easy to put them all in, and now we've got a great little space at the edge of our patio.

The plants are, from left to right: grandifora, deleware valley white azalea, oriental lilly (with chrysanthemums around it), another azalea, black-eyed-susans, one more chrysanthemum, rhododendron. Great, huh!

Oh look, what's that attractive (or at least not horribly offensive) bit of fencing at the back of the yard?


It's our new compost!


Just to give some context to how long I've waited for this, I take you back to the volleyball party I hosted in the beginning of May at our apartment in Somerville. The subject of composting comes up:

Rachel: Oh yeah - we're going to have a back yard, so we can have a compost! I am so excited to have a compost!
Everyone else: Laughs excessively
Tony: Zim, you may be the only person I know who is "so excited" about having a compost
Everyone else: Laughs excessively.

At any rate, now we have a compost. We stained the fence pieces and 2 x 4s we were going to use as posts the day before, and let them dry overnight. In the morning, we set in four metal posts, and wrapped chicken wire around them, to hold in the actual compost. Then dug some holes and set the front two wooden posts, and hung the front fence panel. We didn't hang the side panel (boxing the compost in with wooden fencing), so we would be able to get the compost out and put it on our garden someday. While this looked ok, it didn't seem as nice as it could be.

Chad came up with an ingenious solution to this problem - when he was digging up the compost area, he found an old cement footing (from some long-ago post) , and set that in the ground next to the compost. We hung the side fencing panel on one 2 x 4, which fit into that cement footing, and wedged it in place with a piece of brick (also found by digging in the dirt). This means we can just lift up the side panel and set it aside whenever we want to dig up some compost. And now the gross stuff is all boxed, in, so the compost is very neat.


You may also notice in the earlier picture of the back wall (5 pictures ago), that there are some new hostas planted there. I have no idea where they came from. Or at least I can assure you they were totally not stolen from our neighbor's overgrown hostas, as a loosely justified payment for weed-wacking their side of our sidewalk. Though if they HAD been stolen, perhaps an angry hosta god would explain their sorry state later in the afternoon...


Hopefully they'll perk up with some sun and water.

At any rate, it was a great weekend. We had a great time just sitting outside and visiting, so we're especially excited to have such a nice space to do that in. Thanks again to Dad and Melanie for a wonderful visit and all their help!!!