My Embarrassing Backyard

I live in a lovely new house, but my backyard is a disaster.  When we bought it last July, it had a blanket of green lawn, which promptly died after we moved in due, in part, to the shade caused by several large trees.  Not only that, as I've mentioned before, I never raked up the leaves from last fall.

Leaf-covered corner of my backyard

Plus there are several large "trees" that may have started their lives in my neighbor's backyard, but appear to have broken through the border and possibly even have propagated in my yard.  They have long branches that worm their way around the other trees in my yard and are covered in green leaves.  I'm starting to wonder if they are really just enormous weeds and not actually trees at all.  They are kind of ugly.

Green monstrosity

I finally started the process of raking the yard last week, using the leaves to start my new compost bin.  Today I spent several hours raking the rest of the rest of the leaves, but with my compost bin completely full,

Geoffrey, the Geobin - completely full

I left the leaves sitting in random piles around the yard.

No, those are not dead bodies buried all over my yard

I'm too tired to deal with them, so I will probably just bag them tomorrow.  The MOTH has promised to help, but now he's not "feeling well" so I may be on my own again.  Poor Pookums.

I also started to "prune" some of the trees/weeds/stuff at the back border of the yard, because it has grown so dense, it's basically just a mess back there.  I don't know if I should be "pruning" these plants or if they're thinking - "Hey, Idiot! What the heck are you doing? You're not supposed to be chopping my branches off!  Will you please go read a blog entry on pruning!"

After cutting back some of the mess

After today's foray, I'm even more convinced I should hire a landscape designer to help me with a cohesive plan for the front and back yards.  Even though my yard is pretty small, it is just too overwhelming to handle this by myself, particularly when half the time, I can't tell the difference between a plant and a weed.

Here are some more shots of the hideous backyard.  Don't you love the randomness of the neighbors' ugly fences juxtaposed against each other:

Geoffrey's view of the backyard

Another angle - I know, horrible.

Fortunately, I came back inside to this snuggle-fest:

Emma and Ghost

Sorry, didn't mean to disturb you - as you were

 So, that makes everything okay.

A City Girl Tries Composting

One of the earliest decisions I made when I started my gardening research was to have a compost bin. Although I had heard of composting before, I had no real sense of what it was. I vaguely associated with ancient hippies I'd met in California or radical environmental extremists who checked out of society to go live off the land.  I'm kidding of course, but certainly no one I knew in New York City composted their waste - not even my friends in Brooklyn.  Or at least I assumed not, since I rarely left Manhattan to travel as far as Brooklyn to find out.

But, as I read about it, composting just made sense.  It made no sense to spend a bunch of time and energy raking leaves and mowing grass to dump in a landfill and then go out and spend a bunch of money to buy compost made of the same kind of stuff you just threw out.  But, frankly, I was terrified of making a mistake. How do I know what kind of compost bin to get? How do I know what to put in it? How long will it take? Will it smell? Is it legal where I live? (Apparently it is.  My county actually subsidizes compost containers to encourage composting.)  So, after MUCH research, I finally ordered the Geobin from Amazon (that is not a sponsored link, by the way).  I chose that one after watching these helpful videos comparing all different kinds of composters (credit to Dave Wilson for posting these on YouTube): 

 

 Testing Home Compost Units: Intro

 

Part 2

Part 3 - the Results!

Geoffrey the Geobin arrived a few weeks ago and sat patiently in my garage where I would nervously glance at him on my way to and from the car.  Finally, yesterday, I could avoid it no longer.  I finally fastened Geoffrey's edges together to form a huge circular container and hammered the stakes into the ground behind my house (just around the corner from my new veggie bed).  I then spent two hours raking up old, damp leaves that had been covering my backyard all winter (see my mea culpa here).  I threw in a few kitchen scraps I'd been saving and, voila! My new compost bin:

A close-up shot of Geoffrey:

I should note that almost everyone recommends that leaves be "shredded" before composting.  At this point, I do not own anything capable of shredding leaves (I'm sure my lovely boyfriend would not appreciate me running our dead, slightly rotting leaves through his paper shredder).  So, I realize this material will probably take a lot longer to decompose than if I had shredded it.  That's okay.  I will be patient.  Meanwhile, I guess I will be buying any compost I need this season from the garden store.  Sigh.

My First Tentative Step

After months of research, I took my first cautious step into the garden a couple of weeks ago.  I decided to start my new veggie garden bed.  After much consideration, I picked a location on the south side of my house. It seems to get the longest sun exposure throughout the day, although the sun only hits a narrow sliver because of the shade caused by the neighbor's house.

The site of my new (very narrow) veggie garden.  Note the offending shadow from my neighbor's house.

I decided to use a method called "lasagna" gardening, where you cover the area with a layer of wet newspaper and build layers of compost material and soil to form a raised bed.  First, I measured out the space (6 ft by 3 ft) and marked it by sprinkling some flour around it.  Then, I dug a trench around the edges, layered the whole thing with newspapers, soaked it with the garden hose and covered the planting area with old leaves (which I had never bothered to rake up from my back yard the previous fall).  Yes, I'm a terrible neighbor, but keep in mind I had just moved into the new house and I was completely ignorant about suburban etiquette, like it's considered rude not to rake your yard.  All of my neighbors were very nice and said nothing about my offense, probably because I'm new to the neighborhood and home ownership.

The veggie bed in progress

Then I continued to layer and water, layer and water.  Finally I topped it off with some soil and black plastic garbage bags, weighed down by the numerous rocks and stones I had just dug out of the very dense, clay soil surrounding my new veggie bed.  By the way, this discovery convinced me that I made the right decision to create a raised bed, rather than trying to double dig the soil in my yard. Oy!

The new veggie bed, after several layers, but before covering with black garbage bags.

As the compost materials decompose, the bed will lose some height, so I plan to add some bags of soil today (purchased from Home Depot yesterday).  I also bought a bag of fertilizer, but haven't completely decided whether to add it to the veggie bed yet.  There seems to be some difference of opinion about whether to add fertilizer or not.  I also haven't decided whether to add some edging to the bed, such as bricks or cinder blocks.  I will put the question out into the universe and see what comes back.