Honestly, We Like Digging

We'd appointed this weekend for moving the roses around, and so on Saturday we went out into the icy afternoon and beheld our problem children.

The roses were too close together, and they also desperately needed pruning. So I pruned the heck out of them while Noel did the digging. The first day we moved five or six roses and got a decent amount of pruning done before it got dark, then today we moved almost every other rose.

It was a lot of work, but we managed to spread the roses out decently and do a bit of earthworks on the lumpy ground out front. I'd still like to spend more time on that lumpy ground, but it's fine for now.

Still left to be done is a reworking and extension of the irrigation, because now there's more area to cover. But given that the initial installation took all of half an hour, I'm not too concerned.

We did unearth several more bricks in the process, which I'm going to use as edging in the back. Noel's been throwing bricks away in the trash every week, and had finally gotten rid of the huge pile by the sidewalk, so I wanted to save him some grief.

The real coup was not just pruning and moving all the roses, but getting our butts in gear and shredding all the trimmings and the huge pile of lavender from the back. It's so gratifying to take a five-foot pile of brush and turn it into a tiny pile of chipped-up bits that compost fast (you can see the pile in the middle of the photo). We did end up having to take the safety guard off the chipper to get it to work properly and not jam, but we're sensible people and no harm was done.

Technorati Tags: compost, landscaping, roses

posted by ayse on 01/15/07