Big time yardening

For the last two days chances were high you'd find me in the backyard. The weather was really beautiful and inside it was still chilly, so really, what is the best thing to do? Yes, taking care of mother nature. - Well, she's able to take care of herself pretty well I guess, but providing her with a little space and profiting by extending "my garden" goes hand in hand.

First I removed our little water hole (a plastic box that Sisto and me had put in the ground last summer to rescue a couple of tadpoles we had found in a shrinking roadside puddle) - a pledge to remove it because of the mosquitos was out by my mother in law for a little while now.

Then I took care of the compost bin. The compost wasn't good, it was gooey and had a lot of larvae, but just a few worms. I don't know why. The last time I turned it it was the same. Only the first time did it smell good. But since it wasn't completely broken I put it back then. So I never really got my own compost into the ground.

This time I didn't wanted to put it back in the bin. So I used some of it as organic matter to fill that big hole in the ground. Worm cantina. When I went through the dirt I found two nicely sprouted avocado pits. I saved them, planting one next to the dead tree in the yard, so it cannot be mowed over. 

Mowing is a big time problem here. Just a day after we talked about the wild blue flowers in our front lawn looking so nice because it hadn't been mowed for a while, the guy who does it came around and I was too late to ask him to spare the spot. 

Only one small spot still held blossoming wilderness. The space around that former water hole. A couple stones plus the dug out dirt from the hole separate it a little, making it hard to mow. 

I had already planted a couple of garlic cloves that had sprouted over there. Some of them were lucky, others got shorter. To protect them and some to be planted sweet potatoes I made a little brick outlining. Then I wrote what I had planted - garlic, sweet potato and  one of the earlier found avocado pits - onto palm leave stems and made it even more clear: this is a no mowing zone! Flowers saved. Bees welcome. 

Today I further transplanted two kale plants and a couple of the small lettuces of which I still keep a lot in empty salad shells. A work in progress...

 

You're not tired yet? Here's more: Protecting my mallows after the mower had cut of the biggest of them with a little wall. Dug out the stones for that wall between some palm tree roots behind our room. Sowed amaranth and flax, some in the back some in the front. Finally, I guess, that was it...