Underground Pathway

Today I dug out the dirt in the pathway up to the front porch, laid a brick pathway, and then, in a fit of brilliance, buried it.

It's all the fault of the big pile of bricks out front: we need to get rid of them and attempts to get people to steal them have been failing. So I decided to use some of them to make a nicer transition from the sidewalk to the front walk, as the path had been broken up and filled in with gravel and dirt, and then Bermuda grass grew all through it, which is the surest way to my heart.

This morning, I set out with a shovel and a rudimentary sifting tool, and when Noel came out to help me, he watched me work for a while then went under the house and made me this:

That, my friends, is the most obscenely overbuilt dirt sifter ever. But, you know, it works good. It fits over the wheelbarrow so I can just shovel dirt into it and slide it back and forth to sift, which was pretty nice compared to my previous method involving crouching on the ground picking rocks out of the soil. I had to do some pre-sifting, removing the entangled Bermuda from the rocks, but it was easy to do that standing up. Not bad.

So I dug out the area, laid the bricks in it, then thought, "Hey, I have all this nice sifted sand. I bet it would fill in those gaps in the brick path really nice." I've fallen into this trap before, but apparently without learning my lesson, because a minute later I had completely buried the pathway, and now you can only barely tell it is there.

We went to the nursery down the street to get some wooly thyme to plant over the bricks and hide my buried pathway, but they were out of it and I was feeling all specific about how I needed wooly thyme, not ordinary thyme, thank you, so for now it will just look like a big barren patch of dirt that might have bricks buried in it. In other words, like much of our yard.

The other big news of this weekend is that the roses are covered in buds. And aphids, of course, but we have a minor ladybug problem here, so perhaps this will keep the little buggers out of the house. One of our neighbors releases ladybugs every week, or maybe every week one of our neighbors releases ladybugs, and they all come live with us, sometimes massing on the trumpet vine or just sort of meandering around in the sand. It'd be irritating but they are so cute.

I was also shocked to discover that the calla lily bulbs I planted out on the shade bed/dog romping area have survived being stomped on and wrestled over. I guess I will let them do their thing this year then quickly move them to the Fern Walk.

Technorati Tags: bricks, gardening, roses

posted by ayse on 05/07/06