Like a Pig Rooting for Truffles

I'm SO sore.

My back aches. My legs ache.

I'm hobbling around like John Wayne moseys through a pair of batwing saloon doors.

Looks way less cool when I do it. Pilgrim.



Why am I hurting?

I'm an idiot. But I'm an ambitious idiot!

Last week, I decided I wanted to grow pumpkins. I've always wanted to grow pumpkins. I figured it would be difficult.

Then I saw many of my garden blogging friends with posts about the pumpkins they were growing. They made it look easy, so I decided to give it a go this year.

Even this baby grew one.




The only drawback to growing pumpkins as I far as I could see, was that one needs a shit ton of room. My whole yard is room.

I think we have a third of an acre? I have a memory like a goldfish, so I could be wrong. We have a lot of yard and no fence.

I'm so excited (but not quite 'Royal Wedding excited)! I hope I don't cock it up. But I figure all I put into it was $2 for a pack of seeds.

Oh. And a lot of sweat. I dug a very large patch of earth all by myself. With a spade. Not a tiller.

You don't understand what a great feat this is. I have zero upper-body strength.

I'm like a Tyrannosaurus Rex.



Chuck and I usually rent a heavy-duty tiller because our ground is such a bitch to dig up.

MY impatient Canadian ass decided on a Sunday (when the rental place is closed) that it was tired of waiting and wanted the pumpkin patch IMMEDIATELY.

In one short week, I have been rewarded. My pumpkins are sprouting.

My friends say that I should have them looked at by a doctor.



My sunflowers are doing very nicely as well. I dug that sunflower bed up myself about a month ago. Once again, all by hand.






And if that wasn't enough vertebral punishment, yesterday I got a wild hair and decided to make a new garden out front.




I'm terrible at estimation when it comes to measurements.



Especially curved measurements, and I wanted a curvy garden with curvy stone edging. What can I say? I'm a curvy sort of girl.

I actually surprised myself by guessing the right number of edging stones I'd need. But of course I bought the wrong number of curvy and straight ones. I laid them all out as soon as I got home in the shape I wanted, and it was totally not working.

I usually buy this type of stuff at Lowe's Home Improvement, and it takes me about 40 minutes to drive there and back from my house.

I discovered my mistake AFTER I was already covered in dirt. A thick layer of dirt. Sunscreen and sweat-matted dirt. There was no way I was making that 40-minute drive AND going into Lowe's covered in greasy freaking dirt. But I wanted to finish my garden that day.

I could only think of one option.

I put out the Chuck Signal.



Shit. Wrong one. But all that digging does make a curvy girl hungry...

Anyway, after I asked my lovely, wonderful, amazing husband to save me by stopping by Lowe's for the right stones on his way home from work(I might have cried if he'd said no), I got down to business.

That little area started to look a lot bigger once I started digging. It probably took me two hours of digging to make the garden as big as I wanted. With the scorching sun beating down on my back. I might have gotten it done faster if I didn't have to take breaks to prevent heatstroke.






And I found out there were a whoooooooole mess o' wolf spiders making homes in that little patch of dirt.

Pissed off Mama-Wolf spiders.



Ten years ago, if I saw a spider like that within 20 feet of me, I'd have been running away screaming, garden abandoned. Funny what you can get used to.

Don't get me wrong, if one of those fuckers happened to scamper across any patch of bare skin I might possess, my screams would have been heard in Nepal.



When Chuckles got home, I was finally able to put in my edging stones. I made this garden mainly as a feature for my new gardenia, but I also bought a couple of daylilies, gomphrena, and petunias to fill it out a little till I decide what to really do with it.

When it was all finished, I was really proud of myself. I worked so hard, and I did it all by myself.

Well, 97% by myself. When I was attempting to place the edging, Chuck was hovering around and eyeing me as if he wanted to take them out of my hands and do it himself.

"What?" I asked. "Am I not doing this right?"

"Well....maybe if you move that one there...And tamp that one down a little...And put some more dirt under that one..." he said, sipping his beer.

"Do you want to do this for me or something?" I puffed, sweating my ass off. Covered in dirt.

"No, no! I'm too tired," he said. "But maybe move that one there a little..." Another sip of beer.

I think he finally had enough of watching me place them 'wrong' and helped place a couple of the stones, no matter how tired he was from work. I mulched and it was all done.

I didn't get enough mulch though (of course). I got more today.

I think it looks damn good. Jazzes up the place.














Here are some quick looks at other random things in my yard that I couldn't cleverly fit into the above:

My vegetable garden. A cherry tomato, a bush cucumber, and a cayenne pepper. Aren't those drywall buckets glamourous?



My Japanese Maple (dwarf Bloodgood). When I bought it for $12 late last fall, it was a sad sight. The garden center had it out in way too much sun, and it was all scorched.

Looks a damn sight better now.





My English lavender. I usually kill this crap every year. It dies over the winter.

This year, it not only lived, but re-flowered. It's the small victories!




And this is my favourite! I love this caladium. It was an impulse buy today when I was getting more mulch. I want to buy another red pot to put it in. For now I just have it propped up behind my hosta. Sexy!



I think I'm going to take a rest from all this 'extreme gardening' nonsense for awhile.

I'll be 30 in three weeks.

My old bones just can't take it anymore.

Kyna's Winter Landscape

I decided that since my blog is quite new, I would post some pics of my yard and gardens in their winter state.

I use the term 'winter' loosely, as most of the time the temps are mild and there is no snow. My old Canadian friends have resorted to name calling when I use the term 'winter', and therefore I resort to smugness. :)

I believe my smug look is quite formidable, yes?



Mr. A had this house built in winter of 2002/2003, and the gardens were a clean slate. There was only one existing tree on the property, and it was a Sweet Gum tree.

Behold the Sweet Gum!


Sweet Gums are nice looking trees, but extremely messy trees. They drop a carpet of spiky balls in the growing season. This random resourceful person has turned them into a Martha Stewart-esque holiday delight:



My husband has a stepson from his previous marriage, Michael. When the boy was little, Mr. A would make him clean up the Sweet Gum balls as punishment. Michael is now 32 years old, and I find that story highly amusing :)

But I digress. Mr. A quickly removed that tree from the front yard. Which gave us a grand total of zero trees. He says he loves trees, as long as they're in someone else's yard. :P

When I arrived from Canada 4 years ago (which is a crazy story in and of itself), I wasn't able to work until the immigration people told me I could. I decided to fill my time with gardening, something I had never dabbled in before. I couldn't stand the treelessness and flowerlessness of the landscape any longer!

I was so amazed that I could plant a bulb, and in the spring, a daffodil would magically appear.


The only thing is, I haven't had a lot of money to make my garden and yard everything I want it to be. It seems like the project is forever 'in progress', which is probably a good thing. :)

Anyway, here are the winter pics (I took them two weeks ago). That way you can see the transition of my yard from winter to spring to summer to fall and then winter again. And hopefully, some of you will be helpful and give me some great ideas for what to do with the place as I go :)

Our yard is completely fenceless, the only barrier between us and the neighbours being a hedgerow (which the neighbour planted).

The front of my house (east side):






The rear of my house (west side):




The master bedroom windowbox and 'Endless Summer Hydrangea' (west side)




'Goldflame Honeysuckle' (west side)



The back vegetable garden. My husband made this way too huge for our needs...we're planning on overhauling the thing this spring. Maybe making it into a smaller, raised bed. This thing gets blazing, full day North Carolina sunshine:


The south wing:


I don't have anything planted on the north side. I'd like to remedy that this year, and take advantage of some of the day's shadow for a part-shade tree. And maybe a hosta garden :) If they can handle all the slugs....O_O