I don’t know about you, but I always feel that my garden isn’t quite ready to be seen. I see all the things that need to be done instead of being able to appreciate how far we have come.
We were pretty happy with our 10 years of landscaping. January of 2009, Mother Nature called for a do over in the form of a flood and landslide coming off the mountain across the street. Many areas of our landscape are still suffering. In one section that we haven’t rehabbed yet, the weeds, mostly alder trees are taller than I am. That’s pretty overwhelming. Every once in a while I venture into that area to rescue some botanical treasure that has been buried by the weeds. I don’t know if we will get to that area, this year or next.
All these rocks…. where do you even start?
We’ve all heard it… when mother nature gives you lemons, make lemonade. Well, we have been, but it’s a lot of hard work.
We started by trying to rescue the lawn.
Re-landscaping… As difficult as all the rebuilding has been, it is better than it was before. OMG -We used to buy landscape rock, but Mother Nature delivered all sort of wonderful rocks. Sizes varied from small boulders to sand. We were able to fill the huge whole in the driveway without bringing in rock. We ‘shop’ around the property for rocks to define pathways. So many plants washed away or died over the next year from the trauma, since we weren’t able to un-earth every plant right away. The flooding also had some interesting side effects. We keep finding special plants in places that we didn’t put them. Flood waters distributed things in interesting places. There is also a new distribution of weeds. We never had stinging nettles on our property before, but they are here now. I want to learn to cook with them, but they scare me. I still remember exactly how much the stinging hurt from my childhood misadventures running into stinging nettles in the woods.
Since so much soil washed away, while we had the track hoe here, we had him dig a large hole that will become a pond. We used the soil to build new gardens and hopefully will build the pond in the next few years. It will be our biggest most challenging landscape project.
My takeaway from all this has been…
- be grateful for what you have, things can always be worse.
- enjoy the planning and process, not just the end result.
- work together
- keep shopping for plants 😉 there is always room for another
- a glass of Bailey’s Irish Cream and a long soak in a Jacuzzi tub is a great way to recover from a hard days work in the garden. ( My husband would prefer a cold beer.)
It’s going to be hot today, so I’m going to go out and work in the garden before the sun comes over the mountain. I’m planning to work hard and I’m already looking forward to the Bailey’s and a bath.
Have a great day, appreciate what you have!
ourhomeinthewoods 