Battening Down the Hatches

So we heard it might be a little breezy this weekend and thought it would be a good idea to clean up around the yard. Since we're still well within the middle of this massive garden project, there were a lot of things outside to pick up. Lots of things went back into the garage: the sprinklers and hoses, the wheelbarrow, loose boards that we had used to hold down plastic sheeting, and various odds and ends (planters, buckets, etc.). Also inside went the grill, although if (more like when) we lose power, we may need to pull it back out to cook. We also used some of the leftover pallets to hold down the tarp over the piles of sand and compost in the driveway. Hopefully that works and the pallets are heavy enough to stay at least on our property, because we'd like to reuse them to make a series of new compost bins in the fall.

Another part of the Hurricane Irene prep was cutting some flowers in the perennial border. The phlox, for instance, would definitely get the shit kicked out of it in the wind, so I figured we might as well enjoy it in a vase inside the house:


There are lots of other flowers out there that will probably look a lot worse for wear by Monday morning, but they aren't that great for cutting. The only other ones I brought in were some roses that were on a cane that I couldn't lash to the trellis. The other ones I tied up pretty tight (which was, by the way, no small feat because they previous owners installed the trellises backwards, so that only the crossbars stand out from the fence, instead of the tall pieces of wood).


I thought about deadheading one of the hydrangeas, but got lazy and only cut one to round out the vase with the roses:


This makes me think that we should have made room for a cutting garden somewhere in our plans. In the past, though, I've never been that psyched about filling flower vases on a regular basis, so it might be kind of a waste of harvesting space. Hmm … if there's any visibility tomorrow, I'll sit upstairs and look out on the garden to see where we might put something like that.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What to Do With an Unripe Watermelon

Last Weekend of Winter

So Where's Everybody From?