A Dirty Weekend

Friday, as I mentioned, was my and Debbi's 3-year anniversary. We went to our favorite Italian restaurant, even got dessert!, and had a nice pleasant evening. But not, that's not why this was a "dirty" weekend. Sorry!

It was dirty because we spent much of this weekend gardening. My garden has been sadly neglected so far this year due to lack of time, so we did a bunch of shopping and put in a bunch of time to rectify this problem.

My main goal was to get my planter in good enough shape to put in some tomato plants. Unlike my Mom, who grows her tomatoes from seed, I buy small plants from the nursery. I bought three of them, but first I wanted to stain the back beams of the planter (which is made of redwood), which we couldn't stain last year because last year's tomatoes were in the way! And before we could do that, we had to transplant the two daisies remaining from last year. So we transplanted the daisies into pots which now live up on my porch, and stained the planter. Then today we turned over the topsoil in the planter, mixed in some Miracle-Gro soil, and put in the tomatoes and the new, larger cages I bought for them.

But that was only part of this weekend's gardening extravaganza.

We bought two half-flats of groundcover, and put one flat in the front strip between my driveway and the neighbor's garage, where hardly anything grows. It will get morning sun and plenty of water, and hopefully do better than the ill-fated snapdragons and violas which have gone there (though two violas from last year have survived to this). The other half-flat went into my patio area, in an area with tough soil and not a lot of sunlight, where not much else has really grown. I'm hoping they'll take to the soil and start spreading out.

I also did a lot of weeding and fixed up some patio tiles which adorn the base of the fence around my yard so they weren't all falling over. The groundcover should thank be on both counts!

Debbi and I put in 18 impatiens in the vicinity of my rose bush. Last year impatiens did well in part of that area, not so well in another part. I'm hoping the more mature impatiens we put into the latter area will do well. The soil all around the patio is pretty frustrating; I suspect the previous owner went for cheap and even rocky soil. Of course, a lot of the prevailing vegetation are drought-tolerant, and probably actually like the tough soil. But that's not the way I would have done it, and wholesale soil replacement isn't really feasible given the landscaping.

Lastly, we went by Cost Plus yesterday and checked out their patio furniture. Last year and the year before they had nice 54" round tables with folding legs, which I'd wanted to get. No more; now their large tables all have non-folding legs, which is not so convenient for my patio. So I'm not sure what I'm going to do there. On the other hand, I did buy three small tiki torches and put them along the edges of my planter, where I think they'll be a nice evening addition to the patio. I do need to shorten their wicks, though, since their flames are rather higher than I'd planned.

We topped off the evening by baking my grandfather's recipe for corned beef, which mostly means just the combination of spices we put on it, but also the fact that the beef is basically steamed in the over rather than cooked or boiled in liquid. It actually does not come out dry, and has a much stronger corned beef flavor than the boiled variety. Very yummy! We also grilled potatoes and - on an inspiration - carrots. The carrots turned out surprisingly well, with a sweet, caramel-like flavor.

A hard-working and tiring weekend, but the only real disappointment was that the Red Sox got swept in a 3-game series in Texas. Otherwise we were extremely productive and had a good time! Yay!