Garden Days

The weather this weekend was beautiful, and I've been too busy to keep up with my yard work until now, so I brought the weed whacker, rake, clippers and gloves up from the basement and did what I could to bring some order to my yard. I am not a gardening expert by any stretch of the imagination, but for the most part I can tell the difference between weeds and things I planted last year.

Weeds are amazing. They sprout up everywhere and grow SO fast! Does anyone know what this yellow flower is? It "bleeds" orange dye.



The downside to pulling up the weeds: the trash that blows into my side yard from the neighboring corner store becomes very visible.


Rogozhin carefully supervised all my activities by lying down wherever I was working. When I took a break and put my gloves on the ground, he stretched himself out on top of them almost immediately.


Here's the post-weeding, pre-litter pick up view alongside the garage. Fortunately, this part of the yard is hidden by a privacy fence--it would have been very funny if the blight patrol had cited me for overgrown weeds potentially harboring rats, considering that the weeds were mostly harboring cats (my cats, the neighbors' cats, stray cats....).



The fern growing wild in the side yard is still going strong. It was one of several pleasant surprises when I bought the house two years ago. After I cleared out the weeds back then, and picked up all the garbage, I found that I had a fern, some trillium, and wisteria vines snaking everywhere. This is one of the things I like about Waterbury--it's a city, but it's still full of Nature.


A bonus for this year: one of the carrots I planted last year is growing this year! Amazing! (Honestly, if anything I put in the ground fails to shrivel up and die, I'm amazed.)



Next weekend, assuming the weather is nice, I need to dig up the side yard and put down some sort of drainage system to cut back on the amount of fungus growing on the basement wall. I might even get really ambitious and try planting a vegetable garden again.