Exhaustion Gardening

9 am to 6 pm non stop gardening, except for that trip to Home Depot, and really it wasn't all gardening. There was all the wood chopping with the miter saw (much faster than actual chopping). The wood pile is now about 2 feet high and 6 long. It's sad we don't have any use for it. Almost makes me want to buy a fire pit.

This is the first year I'm starting with a few parts of the garden actually being full sun, instead of pretending. I only had to take down 10 15-20 year old Norway maples. The chainsaw last fall was an adventure. The stumps are still blocking my plans. AS I expected I was too tired from the chainsaw to move the wood any distance, so it spent the winter piled in the middle of the yard. The wood really needed to be moved and chopped, our annual lawn is coming in.

I have no perennial lawn, numerous dogs and neighborhood children killed it. (I'll admit digging out the few sunny patches for gardens helped do it in.) About June the annual grasses all come up and it looks like I have grass till September. If I didn't have 5 full months a year of mud (and muddy dogs) I wouldn't even be planning on reseeding it this fall. I hate all the wasted space grass creates, but I will not take the yard away from the dogs completely. What would be the point of having enough space to have dogs then not letting them use it?

The rest of my time was spent banging in posts to keep said dogs out of the gardens that all this sun has given me. Two of the dogs are fine, anything will keep them out. The third needs a nice secure and robust fence, 2x4's and chicken wire sometimes works. If she didn't gallop around like a wounded zebra the fences wouldn't need to be able to bounce her back out. And if she didn't pull plants up as clumps, or dig like a jackrabbit I'd be more enamored with her. I'm tired of filling in holes, and replanting tattered remains hoping they recover. As she isn't my dog though I just keep trying new fences and wishing she'd get to training class sooner rather than later. At least my two grew out of it, maybe she will too.

Rubber Boots and Insect Eaters

A view from the Ponkapoag Pond Boardwalk in Canton, MA. This is the view from the second to last board (I was too afraid to walk on the last board.) The walk is about a 1/2 mile, and if you want to do it all you're going to want some nice waterproof knee boots. There are a few boards that dip as much as 4 inches into the water, and get mighty slippery. It took me a year to get up the courage to walk the "boards." It is exactly as it sounds, thick floating boards, chained together making a path through a slightly overgrown peat bog. Blueberries and Sweet Pepperbushes (Clethra alnifolia) create the islands in the swampier portions. I went in to see native MA pitcher plants (Sarracenia purpurea), found a few, and a larger number of small red sundews (Drosera sp.). Once I saw my first few they were everywhere. Of course the first one was next to the sinking board. And there is no picture of me falling into the bog. I managed to avoid it.