Sunday, and a Side Yard freshen up.

Sunday mornings are for cleaning out and refilling hummingbird feeders.

If you happen to have a feeder with a narrow neck that won’t fit a bottle brush, there’s a simple way to scrub it out. Fill with enough crushed ice to swish around and add salt. Swish the bottle around, the ice agitates the salt and the salt scours the inside of the bottle.

Decent weather finally meant two loads of compost from our local landfill. At $13.50 a cubic yard you can’t go wrong, even if your back would beg to disagree. If it weren’t for compost, I would not garden. The ground in my yard is horrible clay, if I plant gardens direct in the soil there’s no chance of keeping up with the weeds. The compost stays loose so it’s nothing to walk by a flower bed and pluck out the weeds.

This was the first thing I tackled. Most of what you see is not my property, I have an alley way that runs up the side of my house. My oldest parks there and has a habit of offloading his junk in that area. Something that drives me bonkers because it’s what you see as you drive up to my house.

So I hauled off all the crap and added a new garden. I used newspapers as a weed barrier. Truly you should never use the rolls of landscape fabric you can buy. It usually works well for a year or two, but then it causes nothing but headaches. Gardens are not static, things die or get too big. You need to be able to get a shovel in there and move things around as time passes. Not so easy to do if you’ve got a layer of landscape fabric in there. Worse, weeds will start growing above the fabric and it just ends up a mess. Newspaper makes a good barrier to the weeds below, and with good loose soil above weeds aren’t such an issue.

So this is just a narrow bed, tucked under the eaves. It has just one kind of hosta planted – Golden Tiara. Once it fills in over the next couple of years, it will create a lovely bank of foliage. And when it flowers all at the same time it will be gorgeous. You can get an idea of the effect I’m going for >>Here<<

They don’t look as if they are all the same variety at the moment, but as they grow it will come together. I might add some Red Dragon Wing begonia for color this year – if I get to it.

Back to spreading compost!