The Great Tidy

I tend to just leave weeds where they are when I pull them. Terribly messy, but it keeps the sand from blowing away, and acts as a light mulch. Anyway, I decided it was looking really messy so I raked them up into a big pile. Actually, five big piles, because each one ended up being too big to move.

Bear in mind that it's been really hot here lately: the mid-eighties, which is really hot. I mean, for here. OK, if you live in the midwest or Texas or something, just accept it on faith that that is really hot. Don't talk to me about your three-digit temperatures, because I moved here to avoid that insanity. So I made five big piles of dead weeds raked up, and was walking over to get the little wagon to load them into when I head a grunt and turned around. This is what I saw:

Rosie was rolling and grunting around in one of the piles. They must have smelled really nice or something. Anyway, that shows the scale of the weed-accumulation I was dealing with. Messy, messy gardener.

In other news, I've started seeds for winter flowers (asters) and winter cabbages (decorative). Today I started seeds for Cercis occidentalis, Western Redbud, which makes a nice small tree with absolutely spectacular pea-shaped pink flowers in the spring. I started six seeds, and we'll see how they come out. C. occidentalis is a native tree, and grows fine from seed if you follow the instructions. It is not generally recommended to propagate it any other way, because of the need to maintain genetic diversity in the population. I hope I end up with four or five trees to give away.

Technorati Tags: dogs, gardening, weeds

posted by ayse on 08/31/06