Progress Report

Remember my little garden? And my planting project? Well, here they are today. The garden got a little mixed up and a little, well...eaten. The sunflowers, which were to form the back wall of the little narrow garden bed, with sweetpeas growing up them, sort of washed forward and around.

The gopher ate most of the nine original basil plants, one by one. One morning I walked out to find just the top leaves of a tender plant sticking out of his evil little burrow, the next, there was a new plant missing and a pile of stems thrown out like wingbones outside a KFC. He/she/devil-hamster also ate the cute little chives with purple flowers, the sweet peas, all the beans that weren't planted in barrels, the blue-star creeper, and almost got the strawberry.

The oregano and thyme seem to be safe, however they are so shaded out by the sunflowers that they are tall and weedy. So much for the pretty little arrangment of herbs and ground covers that were supposed to fill in and be lush and beautiful in a year. The beans in the barrels, however, are thriving.

My knee, in case you were wondering, is doing pretty well. I can run again, and I've actually been doing it. I've even been back on my carveboard twice, though I still feel like an awkward 40 year old on it. Which is about right.

The compost bin, aka the rot-box, is not doing so well. Or maybe it is. I can't tell. It's not that things are not rotting. They certainly are. Mike is sure that I need more nitrogen (he is the compost expert, I have to give him that), but he requires that I dump the existing compost out before he'll agree to get me a bag of lawn clippings from the gardeners. If you saw this black, smelly, lumpy mess, teeming with, shall we say, fauna (crawly fauna, to be more precise) you would not want to dump it either, unless you were wearing a haz-mat suit and protective eyewear. And where? In an open pile outside the fence, to further induce the neighborhood skunk to prowl around the ivy?

I think I need more brown. Compost, theoretically, is composed of greens and browns, and all of my kitchen waste, with the exception of coffee grounds, is considered green. (According to my master gardeners pamphlet, but not according to compost master Mike.) So according to the pamphlet, I need more dry material, like dead leaves or straw. Given the potato-pancake-batter quality of the current mix, I am leaning in this direction, but I'm willing to try both methods. Where DID I put my haz-mat suit....