After thinking about it for several days, I suddenly realized I actually did have a couple of those long beds that didn't have any dirt in them. By golly, I'm going to get out there and dig out the red clay before I start filling them! First I had to pull the liner out, and at this point, I'm kind of wondering why I put it in in the first place.
I didn't know what I was doing. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Now that I know some plants need a deeper root structure, I won't be putting that liner into the rest of my beds. And I will be digging the red clay out before adding compost and dirt.
Anyway, I had to shift the bed a bit to get the liner out, and once I got it back into place, it didn't take long at all to get the clay dug out, even with the copious amounts of breaks I took.
I don't know what it is with this corner of the yard, but it simply will not drain. We haven't had any rain in 10 days, and all that red clay was still soaking wet. I'm going to put down a lot of compost before I start adding dirt to these. I'm not in any big hurry, because I only bought these so I could better gauge where my 4 x 4 beds need to go.
I mean, that's not the only reason I bought them, but it is the reason I bought them now. I don't even know what I'm going to put into them yet. I'm considering moving the dirt from the other two beds on that side -- which are currently empty of plants -- into these two beds, then removing the liner and clay from under those. Then I can re-fill them and they'll also be ready for whatever I want to do with them.
OK, I'm rambling now. Let's move on.
Today was also the day I took on the somewhat unpleasant task of thinning my basil.
They're all down to one plant per cell, except for a couple of the smallest seedlings. I've notice some of the larger plants have flopped over. I'm hoping it's just because they were leaning on their cellmates and will perk up in a day or two. But, even if I did accidentally kill them, I've still got plenty more. So many more, I'm wondering where I'm going to put them all.
Eh, I'll find a place for them.
You know, someday something that is blogworthy will happen and I'll write an interesting and fascinating post once again, and stop boring you with my garden news. Today is not that day.
Thus, you get boring garden drivel. And I'm going to go knit a bit.
Laters.
4 comments:
:-). I wonder if that corner needs some kind of tiling to help move water away. Can you tile in clay?
I had to look up tiling, because I'd never heard of it. I'd thought about putting in a French drain, but it seems more trouble than it's worth. I think -- I'm hoping -- that once I get all the red clay taken out of my back yard, water will drain more evenly and won't collect in that corner so much.
The problem is the lady that used to live next door absolutely hated it if there was a single drop of water in the ditches. Seriously, I came home from work one day in a driving rainstorm -- it was raining so hard I could hardly see the road in front of me -- to find her with some men from the county in her front yard, complaining that there was water in the ditch. So, she had them digging out the ditches two or three times a year. Naturally, the next time it rained, without any root structure there to hold the dirt into place, half of my front yard would wash down into the ditch, filling it up. Over the years, this resulted in what amounts to an arroyo developing in both of our yards.
She didn't seem to understand that ditches don't drain like bathtubs, or that constantly digging the ditches out was only making the problem worse.
Now that she's gone, I finally feel like I can start trying to fix my yard, which is what I hired that land scammer to do. Of course, he didn't and now I don't trust anyone else, so I'm going to try to fix the low spots myself, with some of that clay I'm scraping up. I'm not going to put six inches of it in my front yard, though.
And then I had to look up a French drain because it had been so long since I heard it mentioned that I forgot what it was, lol.
That neighbor sounds like she was a real peach.
She was, but I tried to show her some grace. She was a lonely, bored, cranky old lady -- kind of like what I'm turning in to as I get older.
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