Composting, Or Why We No Longer Have an Open Pit in Our Back Yard

Today Chris and I spent about 3 hours in the backyard doing Spring cleanup.  We have had a compost pile since we arrived in Bellefonte, but have not managed to organize it very well.  Basically, there was an abandoned kids' sandbox, so we filled it with compostables.  And it worked fairly well.  But there are a lot of reasons specific to our situation that the open-pit compost  pile just wasn't working for us any more.

1. Bellefonte (the whole region, actually) has skunks.  And we have an enclosed yard, but it's still not really ideal to taunt smelly animals with delicious, smelly food.

2. Speaking of which, our dogs had begun to treat the compost pile like their personal buffet.  

So today we bought this contraption and spent 3 hours building and siting it while also conducting a bonfire in the old compost pile consisting of scrap and fallen wood, woodbine from the hops vine that was all over our fence last summer, and miscellaneous woodlike junk that will compost a lot faster in ash form than regular form.  During that process we cleaned up absolutely every type of junk lurking in our yard (which was quite a bit after a long winter with three dogs doing as they please out there), inventoried the plants and pruned a few back, and discussed our gardening plans for this year.  

So, here's to a great season of gardening -- it feels good to get started.

Plants I'd like to Plant

A list, in no particular order, of plants I'd like to work into my kinda bare back yard, as soon as I have some free time:

• Viburnum "Mohawk."  These smell really heavenly right now.
  
• Viburnum "Dawn." Likewise.
  
• Helleborus foetidus.
  
• Helleborus nigrens.
  
• Helleborus whateverus.  I just love them.  All of them.
  
• Blue Flag Iris.
  
• Hammalacidae, Forthergilla Major or "Mount Airy"
  
• Lilacs?
  
• echinacea purpurea.
• Oak Leaf hydrangeas.  And maybe a Lady in Red, if I can get beyond all the time and effort I put into the last Scarlet Strumpet that cursed/graced my garden.
  
• Hostas -- sum & substance, blue angel.
  
• Trillium.
• Stachys.
• Ghost ferns or painted lady ferns.
• epimedium.
• dicentra.
• Hens & chicks.
• wood poppy.
• Some native azaleas, maybe a rhododendron or two.
• forsythia

Really, this is just a list of my favorite botanical things.  But I have excluded those that won't grow this far north, such as my beloved tea olives.

Reclaiming the Hell Strip and More

Whew. Let's see...

I had this great idea. I thought "hey, I'll pull up the slate in my hell strip and have a hell strip that's all cool like the one I linked here a few weeks ago. No biggie." Except it IS a biggie. It is a very biggie. The slate varies from 1' X1' to 4' X 3'. I had to have Chris's help. And Chris couldn't really do it easily, either.

So we pulled it all out. We put in 25 bags of topsoil, peat humus, and composted manure. And we planted and mulched. And I don't even have anything really awesome to show you guys for all of my work, either. Except a plant list and stuff. And this photo, which is of just some of the slate that we pulled out of two 6'X6' beds.

So...I'll put in some photos later. Meanwhile, here's what I planted where the slate used to be:

• Red tulips
• creme daffodils, yellow daffodils, and "old fashioned" daffodils from my Georgia neighbor's yard.
• blue flag iris from my old yard
• "Homestead" verbena -- scored from the rescue pile at Lowe's -- 18 plants, 17 in tiptop shape, for $3.
• "Champagne Bubbles" poppies
• "Blue Spruce" sedum
• "Bee Balm," a.k.a. Monarda didyma.

I also tidied beds out back and planted three varieties of blueberry, some rescue strawberries, and hellebores from my old yard. Then I mulched like nobody's business and now I'm in the public library looking like a vagrant and typing about it to you guys.

(Oh, did I mention I don't have internet at my house right now? Comcast is a sad, sad company with really poor customer service.)

The "Hell Strip" and the Daffodil Thing

The "Hell Strip"
Originally uploaded by Athens Nikita

Currently, what I have is this sad thing that you see to the right. What I want is something more like this. Oh, well. Maybe once I dig myself out from all the house projects and the temperature goes up by 10 or 15 degrees, I'll pry up those slate pieces and go to town.  

I just found out, though, about Bellefonte's daffodil thing.  I say "thing" because it's a fairly complicated happening.  Project Daffodil was originally done in 2004 as a community planting that would function as a sort of tourist driving tour in the Spring.  Roughly 100,000 daffodils were planted from State College to Bellefonte.  Since then, innumerable daffodils have been planted.  

Anyway, now there's a daffodil game and other tie-ins.  But I have no daffodils whatsoever.  So, as soon as is practical, I'll be fixing that.