Gifts from the Garden

I've been toiling all week in the yard like a tireless garden gnome; raking, weeding, mowing, weeding, trimming, weeding . . . the list of chores seemed interminable, and I was a very very grumpy gnome.  Just when I was going to dig myself a hole and burrow in it, some very cheerful things appeared:

Not only did our garden yield gorgeous peonies, but the mailman brought me a very exciting early birthday present from three very thoughtful garden fairies.

What is this exciting present?  Well, it arrived in a chic faux bois box . . .

and inside was a brochure for a certain charming garden center that happens to be owned by a certain store I love . . .

and below the brochure was a faux bois gift card!

Great friends are people who know just exactly what you'd love, who anticipate desires before you even articulate them.  And my great friends realized that what I'd love is an excuse to shop at Terrain, the garden center that was recently acquired by Anthropologie.

Maybe I'll assemble my own little terrarium:

Bird Finial Cloche

Bird and Nest Cloche

Or maybe I'll acquire these whimsical bamboo garden markers:

Bamboo Garden Markers

Or maybe I'll wait to do my shopping until later in the summer, when I go to Philadelphia to visit my SIL (and soon-to-arrive niece!), and I can visit Terrain at Styer's in person!

Image Source: Sugar Pond (aka the fabulous Mrs. Bellpepper)

Image Source: Oh Joy!

Have you visited Terrain?  I'm so excited to see it in person!

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Going to the weeds

I have been a bad blogger this week because I've been engaged in the battle of my life . . .  against my lawn.

Image Source

The lawn is winning.

Let's get one thing clear: I'm not a "Mother Earth" kind of girl.  In fact, when I first told my friends that I was getting a lawn mower, one of them asked whether I would be mowing in an evening gown and Louboutins.  (The answer, by the way, is no; I mow in my sexy Lululemon sweat pants and Dansko clogs, thank you very much!)  But when one suddenly finds herself with the most ragtag lawn in the neighborhood, and a husband who, in addition to working a billion hours a week, subscribes to some Darwinian theory about letting weeds and grass fight amongst themselves for lawn dominance, one has no choice but to get her hands dirty.

I started out by weeding.

Left: Dandelions galore.  Right: No more dandelions!

And boy did I weed.  I weeded for days.  Because every day I would put in a good few hours of weeding, only to discover the next day that more dandelions had sprouted over night.  I swear I heard those fuckers laughing at me.

But while it drove me totally nuts, there was a part of me that took macabre pleasure out of staking those suckers in the heart, pulling them out of the ground, and throwing their limp little bodies in the garbage.  I filled up a whole 10 gallon container with those weeds.  Guess who's laughing now?

Yeah, they still are.

BTW, if you have a yard full of weeds, I'd highly recommend the Rocket Weeder.  It's a long-pronged device that lets you weed without having to bend over.  You just stick the pincher end of the device into the middle of the weed, use the foot pedal to rock it back and forth, and the whole weed -- root and all -- comes up easily.  It even has a weed ejector handle so you can dispense of the weed without having to actually get your hands dirty.

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I then dethatched the lawn.  From what I can understand, it appears that over time, a layer of thatch -- lawn clippings and other living and dead organic matter -- builds up under the grass, depriving the soil of nutrients and making overseeding pretty much impossible.  So every once in a while, you have to dethatch the lawn.  It's kind of like removing mats from under the hair of a dog.  You pull a thatching rake -- Ames True Temper is allegedly the best of the manual ones -- through the lawn, essentially giving your lawn a good brushing out.  Except it takes far more strength than brushing.  My back no likey.

After the weeding and dethatching, I was basically a Golem-like mess.  I actually crawled -- yes, on my hands and knees -- upstairs at one point because my lower back was killing me.  My lawn not only kicked my ass, it aged me by fifty years.

And I swore after that that there would be no more lawn shenanigans for the week.

But then I heard that it was going to rain for two days straight.  And being cheap, I had to take advantage of the free water.  So I got my tired, broken little body back outside to mow the lawn (manual push reel mowers may be great for the environment, but they were not built for a five-foot-three desk jockey with flabby arms and no core strength) and overseed it before the rain came.

After four days of dealing with the grassy patch outside, I'm officially done with all my lawn tasks for spring . . . until it's time to put down the organic pre-emergent herbicide and fertilizer and mow the grass again.

Home ownership can really suck.

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Spring!

After a dreary, soggy, miserable winter, spring has finally arrived in Boston.  And our yard, which for months looked like it was tended by a blindfolded and angry Edward Scissorhands, is beginning to resemble a garden that sane, somewhat responsible adults would have.

Clockwise: Magnolia tree across the street, our hyper-unruly daylilies,
cherry blossoms, and hosta leaves fighting through the woody undergrowth

To add to the gloriousness of this day, look what was waiting for me at my front door today:

Jess, not even my husband gets me flowers.  Consider this a proposal of marriage, whenever you get tired of that hairy spouse of yours!

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After the deluge

"The worst part was that the rain was affecting everything and the driest of machines would have flowers popping out among their gears if they were not oiled every three days, and the threads in brocades rusted, and wet clothing would break out in a rash of saffron-colored moss.  The air was so damp that fish could have come in through the doors and swum out the windows, floating through the atmosphere in the rooms."

- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

After days of torrential downpours, the sun finally came out today.

I got to take out my Liberty of London for Target gardening gloves to clean up the debris in the yard -- huge tree limbs had fallen and the wind had snapped the twiggy remains of the dead echinaceas that I'd left up for "winter interest."

Under the dead leaves and branches, I found the beginnings of spring.  Yay!

Has spring sprung in your neck of the woods yet?

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