Hullo, folks. I've stumbled upon the info pages of this site more than a few times of late when I've been puzzling out some things in our yard and garden.
We recently bought a home where the same family lived there since 1935 until the last half dozen or so years ago (still trying to confirm the exact year). At that point, the property was left to a different generation of the family, but rented out. That generation passed not long ago, and the third generation had long since moved out of state and was absentee landlady-ing, with varied success.
Most of the renters were not gardeners at all from what we've learned from elder neighbors. The very last tenants were, in fact, the nightmare sort. The sort who drop a large piece of safety glass in the backyard, and just leave it where it fell rather than clean up all the bits and pieces that are now stubbornly hiding beneath the overgrowth, which of course, is prickly. The sorts who do auto repair on the lawn and toss the large and small mechanical bits they don't want to take to the local scrap yard wherever they like. The sort who burn furniture in a makeshift fire pit. (We know because not all of it burned, and we are still sifting out the hardware because some of it is old and still might be useful.) The kind who drop butts of their cigarettes anywhere convenient for them rather than use an ashtray. (Point of Clarification: we are smokers, so this is not an anti-smoker thing, it's just another sloppy folk thing.)
We inherited a backyard that still has some inklings of what it used to be, and although we're not talking get-out-the-machete level overgrowth, it's a lot of work trying to bring it back to some semblance of something. The front and sides are their own challenges, but at least those were a wee bit better kept as far as the rubbish clean up.
We also have a dedicated Squirrel Army in our neighborhood that loves to leave bombs all over, and since no one has been minding those sprouts, we get to have adventures in pulling up saplings too. I think so far I've pulled over three dozen oak and maybe a bit over a half dozen maple.
As I'm not from this area, I'm still learning about what the local natives and invasives are, and of course we have one of the worst--a climber that is established in several conifers we share with a neighbor.
I grew up in a home with both a large vegetable garden as well as extensive flower beds, shrubs and small trees. That was a few decades ago, and almost everything I ever learned looking over my Nana's shoulder is that just missed grasp in my mind.
We've been here since March, and now we've had roughly a month and a bit more without snow on the ground. A lot has happened since then, but much more will happen in the years to come, I truly do hope.
Despite the mess, we love this place. There are many wonderful things that would have taken us years to establish already here. Good bones, and obvious former longstanding care was given to those bones. We hope to splint them up as best we can as we carefully do our best to discover what's here, and act as caretakers moving forward. We have lots of plans, but they will take time to develop. For now, the focus is mostly on clean up, with a few minor additions we've made since moving here.
My avatar is the most recent image I have of what I call our "garage bed". Below are a few shots I've taken over time. We still have not found which box has the better cameras, so I apologize for the image quality as we only have the cheapie we used for viewing shots we took when house hunting.
The three of the garage bed are: Mid April when the snow was finally gone; late May when the last cold snap finally ended and things remembered how to grow; and then a week ago this June after an awful lot of rain kept me indoors during most days when I had free time for almost two full weeks. It looks a bit better than that now, but I haven't taken another image since then.
There's also an image I took just this week. The iris on the east side of the house are finally showing some chance of flowers. Most of the iris here are overcrowded and need thinning, and we have a few patches of them here and there, although they are not all the same given the leaves. We had one bearded present in the garage bed, but that bloom has already passed. I think you can see it in the middle picture below if the forum allows images to be clicked for enlargement.
Just yesterday, I finally found what I'd been looking for--an old strainer. Now I have a much better chance of getting the safety glass bits out of that area in the bed near the house on the south side. Trying to pick them up by hand was frustrating and tediously time consuming given the tangles they were buried beneath at the best of times. Of course, we have a rain filled weekend predicted. Still...soon!
Time will tell.
I look forward to learning, sharing and discussing here.
