Domino Gardening

The Dominoes

I've been absent from my regular garden scribbles and commentary.  I bet you can guess what I've been doing, hint, it's the same thing you've been doing the past few weeks.  It's a centuries old tradition known as moving dirt from one part of the landscape to another, modern people call it gardening, I call it enjoyable outside toiling.  Let me give you all the details I can muster, my hands are pretty sore from all that toil, so I'm only good for a few hundred words.

If you read my earlier post about being a plant failer then you know that I had a garden bed that needed a facelift, actually more than a lift, it needed a full new face. The roses in the bed didn't perform after four long years of hope, and I blame their failure entirely on thinking I could magically make nine very small rooted mail order rose plants grow into a five foot tall and wide hedge.  They didn't even come close to becoming shrubs, but the few blooms each summer were lovely and I will surely miss that color.  They were orange red - the color, if it were a shirt, looks good on everyone.  

So if you're like me when it comes to gardening, one imagined change often leads to several more incarnations.  I've termed it domino gardening, or 'DG'ing for short, because for weeks as I processed and planned what to do with the vacant rose bed, one idea led to another and another and before this whole domino game is over we'll have THREE new planting beds instead of one. So about all I have been saying to my husband these past weeks is "honey, I'll be outside 'DG'ing, I'll see you later, around dusk or until I can't see the shovel anymore."

In a nutshell the domino plan is thus - move the current island bed of herbs to the vacant rose bed.  Move the ornamental grasses that were growing in half of the L-shaped rose bed to the front of the house to make room for more herbs.  After all you can't have a bed with half herbs and half ornamental grasses, no siree.  And the new creation (final domino) - make the former herb bed a blooming pollinator bed with many Plant Select® plants.  Piece of cake...buy the plants, get them in the ground... dinner party at 7:00 to show off the new beds.  Not so fast - a tree needs to go, mulch removed, irrigation pipe flagged and removed, careful with the electrical wire, move the herbs, more plants are needed (never available at one garden center, try four), and the soil in the herb bed sorely needs be turned and improved with compost and expanded shale. Oh dear, the tomatoes, peppers and eggplant still need to go in the ground all while the temperatures decided to jump ten degrees!  And my poor hands, they are so sore from pulling tree roots!  Ain't gardening grand!!! 

Okay, that's the quick blog tease, I'll show and tell you soon how the domino game ends.