2009 Gardening Retrospective

2009 was the first year in which I gardened throughout all four seasons. Last year I wrote a 2008 Gardening Retrospective which documented rather more failures than successes, but 2009 was a more successful gardening year.

Let's start with the before and after photos! Here is my garden at the end of December 2008:




And here is the same view of my garden today:




It's still far from being the garden of my dreams, but I do think it's a definite improvement. At least this time you can sort of guess from the sight of the yard that someone might be making some degree of effort here. And this is December, after all, so I can't reasonably expect it to look like May. I see three categories of improvement:

1. The yard is no longer almost entirely underwater - it had rained about equally recently in both these photos, but the drainage ditch I dug in early 2009 greatly improved the dispersal of water and stopped most of my plants from drowning. I don't think I'm going to lose any plants to drowning this winter except the white sage, which isn't native here and therefore can't reasonably be provided for.


2. I'm having far more success controlling the annual bluegrass this winter. This is because last year I didn't live here yet and only visited on weekends, whereas this year I do live here and also happen to be unemployed, which gives me plenty of time for weeding.


3. There are taller plants growing. More of them, really, than you can see from the picture; December makes a lot of deciduous plants invisible.

And I see four categories that need further work:

1. There's way too much bare dirt. This is hard to fix, because the dogs trample all low-growing non-weed plants to death except when the low-growing plants are within about six inches of a taller object, such as a shrub or a large rock or the house. So before I can turn any area of ground green, I have to first protect it with rocks or shrubs or something to deter the dogs from running through it at top speed. (Also, I haven't necessarily found a good low-growing perennial plant that's especially happy here to cover large areas of ground with. My springbank clover and clustered field sedge both seem like they could be good options, but neither can stand up to onslaughts of bermuda grass, so I have to make sure the bermuda grass is fully controlled before I can hope to get the clover or sedge well established.)


2. Closely related to the above, I need to define clearer walking paths - paths to direct the dogs onto as well as to use ourselves. I have the beginning of a path on the left side of the drainage ditch, and a rudimentary dog-trampled path around the entire perimeter of the yard. But path next to the drainage ditch sort of dead-ends in the middle of the yard - as does the drainage ditch itself - and it probably shouldn't.


3. Where does my mulch keep disappearing to? I've dumped a ton of woodchip mulch on this yard, and it all just vanishes within a few months. I'm sure the dirt is better drained as a result of having eaten up all that woodchip mulch, but I'd really like to have some mulch actually remain on top of the ground.


4. I don't think I really much like the look of deergrasses. I want to like them, because they've generally been pretty easy to grow, and they look wonderful when I see them in other people's photographs, and occasionally even in a few of my own photographs, when they're green. But I don't really like their flower stalks, and I especially don't like the fact that right now, they've all turned mostly brown.

( Further notes on gardening in 2009, mostly for my own benefit )