Monday, May 28, 2007
The Strip of Death, Step Two
When we last met our hero she was bravely fighting off the blackberry bushes from hell in hopes of reviving the strip of floral death that runs along the driveway entry to her home. She successfully transformed the area from being overrun with sticks and twigs and the hated blackberries and weed to this:
No, it's not pretty yet, but these things take time, patience, and hard work, My Sweeties. The time and the patience are particularly tough for me. I want to run out and buy all of the flowers that I see and plant them in the ground! But then they die. So sad.
Along the preparatory lines, today I began to kill off the grass and weeds that reside in my future Strip of Bounty. I used the newspaper method because 1) I'm cheap and 2) I'm lazy. The newspapers were free from a friend who was saving them to recycle, and I didn't have to dig up any of the weeds and grass other than the larger pests that I took care of a couple of weeks ago.
First I marked the area that I want as my flower bed. I laid down several layers of newspaper in the bed area and wet it down well. I would lay a few feet of paper, wet it down, lay a few more feet of paper, wet all of it down again, and continued until I ran out of newspaper. Lay, rinse, repeat. Then I put dead leaves and some year old grass clippings on top of the newspaper. This serves a couple of purposes: It holds down the newspaper so that it doesn't fly away when it dries out, and it will compost with the newspaper to provide a good base for the bed. I wet all of that down really well too. All this water helps compact everything to keep it from flying away, and gives the paper and old plant bits a head start on breaking down into a nice compost.
If you plan to plant directly into the ground, you can go ahead and put down your mulch in this step instead of leaves and such. When you plant, just brush the mulch out of the area where your plant goes, dig into the dirt, and replace the mulch around the plant after you've planted. I prefer the look of beds that are mounded up, so in a couple of weeks I'll cover all of this with fill dirt mixed with Black Cow and plant into that.
I really liked how well the grass clippings worked over the newspaper! So much that I plan on push mowing portions of the lawn this summer in order to acquire more grass clippings to use for this purpose next year. Our push mower has a grass catcher, you see, but our riding mower does not.
And here are pictures of the fruits of today's labor. No, not quite gorgeous yet, but I'm getting there slowly and surely. I ran out of paper before I got all of the inside portion of the fence layered. That's ok because I'll be working around in the same direction as I put in plants, so I won't get back there for a couple of months. Anyhoo, I'm off to research what kinds of pretty flowers I'll soon be installing!
No, it's not pretty yet, but these things take time, patience, and hard work, My Sweeties. The time and the patience are particularly tough for me. I want to run out and buy all of the flowers that I see and plant them in the ground! But then they die. So sad.
Along the preparatory lines, today I began to kill off the grass and weeds that reside in my future Strip of Bounty. I used the newspaper method because 1) I'm cheap and 2) I'm lazy. The newspapers were free from a friend who was saving them to recycle, and I didn't have to dig up any of the weeds and grass other than the larger pests that I took care of a couple of weeks ago.
First I marked the area that I want as my flower bed. I laid down several layers of newspaper in the bed area and wet it down well. I would lay a few feet of paper, wet it down, lay a few more feet of paper, wet all of it down again, and continued until I ran out of newspaper. Lay, rinse, repeat. Then I put dead leaves and some year old grass clippings on top of the newspaper. This serves a couple of purposes: It holds down the newspaper so that it doesn't fly away when it dries out, and it will compost with the newspaper to provide a good base for the bed. I wet all of that down really well too. All this water helps compact everything to keep it from flying away, and gives the paper and old plant bits a head start on breaking down into a nice compost.
If you plan to plant directly into the ground, you can go ahead and put down your mulch in this step instead of leaves and such. When you plant, just brush the mulch out of the area where your plant goes, dig into the dirt, and replace the mulch around the plant after you've planted. I prefer the look of beds that are mounded up, so in a couple of weeks I'll cover all of this with fill dirt mixed with Black Cow and plant into that.
I really liked how well the grass clippings worked over the newspaper! So much that I plan on push mowing portions of the lawn this summer in order to acquire more grass clippings to use for this purpose next year. Our push mower has a grass catcher, you see, but our riding mower does not.
And here are pictures of the fruits of today's labor. No, not quite gorgeous yet, but I'm getting there slowly and surely. I ran out of paper before I got all of the inside portion of the fence layered. That's ok because I'll be working around in the same direction as I put in plants, so I won't get back there for a couple of months. Anyhoo, I'm off to research what kinds of pretty flowers I'll soon be installing!
Labels: Gardening
idyllicchick, 12:27 PM
1 Comments:
It's really looking great, in that happy hopeful flowerbed way! Yay!
Lorena, at May 29, 2007 4:07:00 PM
