Project du mois.

I would’ve called this the project du jour, but no project at my house gets done in a day unless we’re paying somebody else to do it.

I really admire gardeners who have a landscaping to-do list and breeze through it in businesslike fashion; me, I just can’t. It’s not that I don’t have a list. I just don’t pay much attention to it. A lot of what happens in my yard is ruled by whim and caprice, and what I happen to be in the mood to tackle—an organic approach, if you will. When the project is ready, the gardener will appear. Any time I walk outside with my disposable gloves, a muck bucket and a trowel, it’s anything-can-happen day.

So this project started like most of mine do, on the spur of the moment. This bed of sweet woodruff is determined to make its way into the grass, and I’ve given it a wide berth; it’s probably expanded by a foot or so since we moved here. But enough already. A border will help me stick to my guns about limiting its spread, and it’ll help our sons figure out exactly where the bed ends and the grass starts when they’re out there with the mower.

I decided on a rock border after puzzling for the millionth time over the abundance of rocks on our property. They aren’t artfully arranged or anything—they’re just there. Some are in strategic spots around the foundation, so their placement makes some sense from a water-diversion standpoint. It’s the random scatterings in the gardens that baffle me. (The previous owners were not random sorts. Before we bought the place, we did a walk-through with our inspector, then sat at the dining table to go over the results of his inspection. The next day, Mrs. Homeowner called her Realtor and had a hissy fit because we didn’t leave the dining room chairs exactly where we’d found them. So.)

I decided to just experiment a bit and pick up each and every random rock I spotted in the course of an hour or so of gardening, and this is the result: an hour’s worth of rocks, and I was hardly even trying. So there should be plenty of rocks to finish this project. I’m shooting for the end of May. No sense in rushing things.

Posted on Saturday, May 8th, 2010 at 7:40 pm. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are 2 comments on this post.

  1. Judybusy says:

    I love the random sizes of the rocks! A couple neighbors have gardens in the boulevards (between their front yard and the street) and use rocks to edge them. I’ve always thought they were very charming. One put in a new tree and is using rocks about a foot high to edge the bed.

    I’m also glad to hear I’m not the only one to determine garden chores by mood. Some stuff I’ll priortize–getting compost on the beds, weeding–but others just happen when I’m ready.

    Posted at May 10th, 2010 at 9:58 am

  2. jcburns says:

    I’m thinking where there were glaciers, There Will Be Rocks.

    Posted at May 12th, 2010 at 12:26 am

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