Port Potager

This morning we spent some time downtown for the Labor Day festival in Newburyport. We watched Jonas' karate demo team and ate some fried food for lunch. After a nice bike ride back home, there were some last tasks to complete before calling it a summer. I have to go back to work tomorrow, you see, and we'll be officially in fall mode with the garden because of that. Overseeding Last weekend we finally finished pulling out all the giant crabgrass from the back lawn. That gave us just a week to relax and enjoy some croquet on it before having to overseed it for the fall. As you can see, this half has a lot of bare dirt left after removing the crabgrass. These patches got extra love with some raking, extra seeding, and sprinkling of more compost to cover the seed. The rest of the lawn just got a regular old overseeding. This is a great example of an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure. This section is where we started pulling the crabgrass, so we got it ...

I am ready to call it a season on the perennial border. We started by pulling out a lot of overgrown plants (and things we didn't really like) back in the beginning of June while we were bored waiting for the excavation of the back yard. And then we got just smidge busy with all of that, and then the late heat wave planting  kind of killed the fun part. The good news is that, after three days of much cooler temperatures and a bit of rain, I think those plants have survived. I suppose another bit of good news is that I was able to give this area some attention now that the struggle to just keep everything wet enough to live is past, and I pulled three five-gallon buckets of weeds: It's mostly some more goddamn crabgrass. So now it's cleaned up, and the perennial border looks like this: Perhaps you are wondering where the plants are that I was nursing through the heat? In the top picture, you can find them if you follow the black line of the soaker hose. You ma...