one monkey typing

The woman at work that I got dahlia tubers from a couple of years ago just came in with about 20 bags of sorted iris rhizomes. She's no more organized or diligent in the garden than I am, but she has a master gardener neighbor who is always trying to unload excess.

I'm thinking next year I'm going to give up on most of the vegetable garden since most of the output there goes uneaten anyway, and plant flowers instead, so that takes care of a place to put these. I do have to get them in the ground FAST though - they've been in her trunk since Sunday and are already drying out. I should at least mist them and get them into a pot of peat moss if nothing else.

I almost didn't take any since I'm such a negligent gardener that I felt I didn't deserve them, but she has a huge amount and just wants to get rid of them.

Thankfully it's nowhere near time to dig up the dahlias yet, though I should check on the glads. I have been exceedingly bad and haven't even visited that garden for weeks. I walked by and had to endure the dahlias, un-deadheaded for a month, dried up blooms hanging there while a few live blooms looked at me accusingly.

And the strawberry patch isn't even visible for all the weeds. I spent over two hours there a week ago and barely made it passable down the center; I don't think I properly cleared even one plant out of dozens. At this point it will probably take me an entire weekend to weed that 30 feet.

New trees, selected to replace the dying paper birch (I think I'll be getting a sugar maple to replace the ash tree that's coming out after dinner)

In the front yard, Tupelo AKA Blackgum (Nyssa sylvatica). It's very "architectural" - it has interesting bendy horizontal branches and open space inside. They get to be 75 feet high and 30 feet around.


And in the back, a River Birch. The paper birch nearby is still alive but not doing well; they don't really live very long anyway. I'll probably be pulling it in 2 years or so, hopefully the river birch will be jumpin' by then. They get to be 40-50 feet high, and 30 feet around.

Finally planted the garden today. There are cucumbers (straight-eights) and sugar snaps on the climbing fence, sweet corn (one row, I'm dropping in another tomorrow), peppers, watermelon and cantelope [edit: also some sunflowers]. That looked like a lot of space until I started planting in it. The strawberries we're nipping the flowers from, giving them another year to get established before taking any berries. I have a freshly tilled stripe of land next to them that we'll be moving daughter plants into in a few weeks, then next year we'll start harvesting from the original row, then we should be into a regular rotation (perhaps a 3 row rotation, we'll have to see how these plants produce in our soil and weather).