Sorry to be a little past due with the blog access this week, parents, however the past week has been truely nuts. Or perhaps, to be greater accurate, I ought to say it is been sincerely berries.
Last weekend, as I mentioned, we spent most of Saturday hacking, slashing, pulling, and in any other case tearing down the big forsythia hedge on the north thing of our again backyard to make room for the brand new honeyberry wooden we might ordered from Honeyberry USA. We'd envisage to forestall via the Belle Mead Co-Op after our dentist appointment on Sunday (due to the fact it's far proper in the identical community) to select up a few mulch for the new flora, but the climate have become too wet, so we had to cast off that errand till Monday.
Brian had already arranged to take the time without work from art work, and I become able to rush thru my work and go with him to load 1/2 a backyard of bulk mulch right right into a motley assortment of bags and trash barrels filled into the back of our little Honda Fit. We moreover picked up any other 50-backyard roll of groundcloth to protect the brand new flowers from weeds. After unloading all this, we ate lunch and spent most of the afternoon stripping down and bundling up the massive pile of forsythia branches. By midnight, we would decreased it to best a small pile of untrimmed branches, plus 23 bundles of sticks for bulk pickup and a mass of leaves for the compost bin.
However, even after spending maximum of the day on planting-associated obligations, we nonetheless have been no longer as some distance alongside as Brian had hoped to be. He'd inside the starting supposed to get the floor all prepared for the today's timber, digging the holes and amending the soil with compost, so all we would ought to do on Friday would be to position the flowers in the floor and cowl them up. But at this element, it gave the look of we nonetheless had a whole day's artwork left within the front human beings to prep the floor, plant the wooden, and cowl them with floor fabric and mulch. And for the reason that we have been presupposed to be heading all the way all the way down to Virginia on Friday to visit friends for the weekend, he did not suppose we might have sufficient time that day to get the technique finished. So, whilst we came in from our paintings and decided the modern day trees themselves looking for us in a large cardboard area out the the front, Brian right away contacted his administrative center and organized to take Wednesday off as properly, so we might ensure to have sufficient time to get them into the floor in advance than our journey.
So Wednesday saw us yet again suiting up in our gardening garments and heading out into the lawn. Following the rule of thumb of thumb which you ought to
Next, we started adding compost to the holes. We didn't have enough compost left in our bin for this purpose, so we used some "Black Kow," a cow-manure-based compost that we picked up at Home Depot. Brian bought it right after we ordered the new bushes, and ran a compost test on the contents of both bags to make sure they wouldn't hurt the plants. The package said to mix the compost with soil in a one-to-one ratio and fill the holes halfway up with this mixture; rather than get out a separate container for this purpose, Brian just added a shovelful or two of compost to each hole, topped it with a roughly equal amount of the dirt he'd dug out earlier, and mixed it together in situ.
The next step was to lay out several sheets of groundcloth and cut a big "X" in each one over top of the planting hole, so we could fit it in over top of the bush. (We originally thought we'd put the bushes in first and then add the cloth over top of them, but we quickly realized it would be hard to get the holes in the right position if we couldn't lay the cloth out flat on the ground.) We laid them out, weighted them down with chunks of concrete so they wouldn't blow away, and cut the holes with a utility knife.
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However, we realized there was a flaw in this scheme of putting down the cloth first and then picking it up again to put in the plants: what if the holes weren't all in exactly the same place? What if we put the pieces of groundcloth down in different spots from where we originally laid them, and the holes didn't line up? It might not be a problem, but Brian didn't want to take any chances. So to make sure, he labeled each piece of groundcloth by cutting a series of slits in the bottom, from one to five, to show which position it belonged in.
We then removed the pieces of groundcloth again and, at last, got to the main event: putting the bushes themselves in the ground. The five bushes we'd bought were two Tanas and two Keikos, which could pollinate each other, and one Solo, which was somewhat self-fertile but likely to do better with a companion. So, to ensure the best cross-pollination, we laid them out Keiko-Tana-Keiko-Tana-Solo, which we can remember by the acronym KitTy-KaTS. Each plant went in with its roots spread out as best we could in the hole, just below ground level, and got a mix of compost plus dirt filled in around it.
After a quick break for lunch, we got back on the job, laying out all the sheets of groundcloth that we'd previously cut over top of the plants and then cutting additional sheets to fit in between them so the entire slope would remain (we hope) weed-free. (We had to cut out a few holes in the cloth to go around some particularly large rocks and concrete chunks that were embedded into the slope, which there was simply no way to move.) The groundcloth didn't come with any metal stakes to hold it down, but we weighted it down along the top edge with the concrete squares we'd pulled out from around the forsythias and along the bottom with some of the more intact timbers left over from our old garden bed frames. We also had a few stakes left over from a previous purchase, so Brian added one in front of each concrete block that was directly above a bush, hoping this would reduce their chances of sliding down the slope and crushing the plant below.
The final step was covering this entire slope with mulch, which proved to be tricky. In the first place, the big barrels were too heavy to simply dump out on the slope, and getting a shovel into them to scoop out the mulch was rather awkward. And even once we managed to get all the mulch from the containers onto the ground, distributing it to cover that vast expanse of ground cloth wasn't as easy as it looked. Although we'd bought all that we could reasonably carry home, there was still just barely enough to spread across the entire area without leaving patches of ground cloth exposed. We certainly weren't able to put down anything like the three to four inches of mulch the manufacturers of the ground cloth said it really should have to protect it from sunlight so it doesn't degrade. So chances are, we'll have to go back to the Co-Op for yet another load of mulch some time later this summer. But for now, we at least have five honeyberry plants in the ground with a layer of ground cloth and mulch over them—not a trivial achievement, considering that just two weeks ago this whole slope was a wilderness of forsythias.
Now, I guess, all we can really do is keep these babies well watered and weed free, and hope that they thrive in their new home. Grow, little berries, grow!
