Blogger a bit too busy to blog

This has been a busy summer so far and I expect it will continue to be the same until it's over and beyond.  Readers who have been with me for a while saw that last summer was what I think of as a "building year". I spent a lot of time digging out paths and covering with landscape fabric and wood chips, building my $40 patio, described in a few of my earlier posts, and of course starting my beehive.

This year is being spent maintaining!  And this year, I am needing to maintain two homes and a school garden.  Sadly, I need to spend several hours to get the school garden in shape for September.  I've gotten there about as often as I can, given the other maintenance that I've been doing but still feel like it's my orphan garden. The maintenance I'm speaking of has mostly been in gardens although I've spent time getting my Maine house back in shape and getting tasks done that it needed. 

My Maine home, rented the last few years, became vacant at the end of June.  That is two years of virtually no garden work occurring so I have spent time each weekend bringing those gardens back.  I also had the front porch refinished and trim painted so that it looks inviting again.  I'll snap some photos next weekend.

I bought this house in 2004 and it had no landscaping at all except for a few piddly shrubs.  It had an above ground pool there which I had taken out when I bought it.  That left me with this big bare grass-free circle area in the back yard.  I turned that into a pond and garden. Here is the back yard the next year where I used two existing trellis's and a board to make an archway, put a few chairs there and a birdbath and a few shrubs and called it a patio.

Back yard, year 2005

Back yard, year 2007

A few years later, the area looked like what you see above.  The pond is about 8' in diameter and about 3-4 feet deep, which I dug myself.  I had a load of field stone delivered because southern Maine, in my area, is all sand so it's easy digging. I used the field stone to trim the pond and get somewhat of a path from the side door down to the pond.  The path was never finished though.  I ran out of field stone and just never got around to it. Then I got some pea stone to make a walkway around the pond and added the outer plantings.  So there are plantings around the pond, a path and then more plantings.

Back yard August 2013 --  slightly tilted shot...not the garden's fault

This weekend, I will take another photo from the same spot so that you can see how things have matured in this section of the yard.  It really looks like I imagined it would as I was building it, forming a little private retreat in the midst of nature.  With the addition of a little waterfal to the pond, it's so peaceful to sit and watch nature all around. It's a lovely spot.  A glass of wine; a plate of cheese...frogs croaking, bees humming, butterflies circling...what could be better?