Because I'm OCD like that

Okay, I'm going to start posting photo-a-day here beginning April 1. (No, I'm not joking.) Thanks for your input and I'll be sure to clearly label the photo posts with a date and subject so you don't have to look if you don't want to.

I do like things to be tidy and neat (usually, I'm having a little trouble finding time to clean my house lately), which is why I'm going to switch on the first day of the month.

The tidy-and-neat-and-wanting-to-finish-things-in-one-session character trait flaw got the best of me yesterday. It was another beautiful day here in the Middle of Nowhere, a perfect day to work on the new herb bed I'm putting in this spring.

Clicking on the link will take you to the beginning stages of the project, where we laid out the area and covered it with a kill mulch. We used a layer of cardboard, a layer of compost and a layer of straw, and then we used the area for composting over the winter. We stopped adding vegetable matter to it a couple months ago.

The herb bed yesterday morning at 11:30 a.m. The white things
are coffee filters, and there are several large dandelions in there.
My mission was to spade the entire area.

I knew I would be lightly tilling it when I was finished turning it over with a spade, so I got the tiller out of the shed and let it sit in the sun while I worked. A warm tiller is easier to start than a cold one. That's your gardening tip du jour.

One way to tell if you have decent soil is by noting how many worms turn up as you dig. The true worm test is to dig an area one foot square and one foot deep and place that soil on a piece of cardboard. Sift through the dirt and count how many earthworms you find – 10 is a good indication that your soil is healthy.

Since I was digging such a large area anyway, I just decided to see if I saw any worms at all. And I did! In every spadeful of turned earth I found at least one and usually three or four worms. Decomposed cardboard must be especially tasty to worms.

Two and a half hours later my crop circle was done. The next step is to ring it with rocks and create individual pie slice-shaped beds for various culinary, fragrant and medicinal herbs. There will be LOTS of basil, that much I know for sure. I've opened my next-to-last jar of frozen pesto.

Next step: Rocks!

I also tilled the vegetable garden again; weeded another row of onions; really, really, really thought about uncovering the strawberries, and mowed another big part of the lawn field.

I came in around 4 p.m., dirty, exhausted and wishing I had a cook. Oh! Right! I'm the cook. Here's what we had for dinner, and it was DELICIOUS. Sounds wacky, but the combination was really, really good; I had all the ingredients (except I subbed asparagus for the carrots), and it was easy to throw together. I rested after dinner and didn't stop resting until … this morning!

So that was my second day of spring, which is totally coming in like a lamb. How was yours?

Friday Quote Day

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another

with no loss of enthusiasm.

Winston Churchill

I love this quote! To me it says live life large! Or live it up! Or live la vida loca! I realize we start dying the day we're born, but we sure don't need to act like it, right?

In honor of World Photography Day, I give you … [drumroll] … pictures! Of the beginning of the new herb bed!

I had my husband stand in the center of the space with his foot on a piece of twine, while I walked in a circle with a can of spray paint. It's probably not a perfect circle, but it will work just fine. I didn't want an irregularly shaped bed because it's too difficult to mow around. (Learned that lesson with the recently installed landscape bed, which undulates prettily but requires weekly weed-whacking.)

"Drawing" the perimeter circle with spray paint.

We then began tearing down my cardboard box collection and covering the inside of the circle. (Too bad I haven't bought any major appliances lately, one refrigerator box might have done the whole job. Heh.) Cardboard is an effective weed/grass killer, adds no chemicals to the soil and is free.

Never throw away boxes. They might come in handy.

I ran out of saved boxes before we were finished, but I remembered I had some cartons of Priority Mail shipping boxes stored in the garage for future eBay yarn sales. My husband said using these qualified as a government subsidy.

Once the space was completely covered with cardboard, he started soaking it with the hose while I started filling the wheelbarrow with compost.

Soak, soak, soak.

I gathered all the compost from two open piles and two bins and it still wasn't enough to completely cover the cardboard. It will be late September before I can get manure mixed with sawdust from my neighbor. I figure now I have one big open compost pile, except ...

Not quite covered, but close enough.  

I thought it best to go ahead and cover most of the circle with straw. There's a little space in the middle where I can throw coffee grounds and tomato peels. We'll put all the fallen leaves there, as well. A final layer of straw will go down as winter settles in and the whole thing will slowly decompose until spring.

A layer of straw finishes it off. For now.

Creating a garden in this manner is called "no-till," because when spring does finally come again, the area will be easily turned with a shovel. And I can continue to keep weeds at bay with cardboard and mulch, which will further enrich the soil. I did the cardboard-and-mulch thing in the asparagus bed and it's working extremely well.

So there you have it. If I keep this up there won't be any front yard left to mow. And I have several months to decide what to plant where, whether it will be all culinary herbs or a mixture of medicinal and culinary, and maybe even to start some plants. I'm going to try to save my one little rosemary plant over the winter (it didn't work last year, but go back up and read the quote. I'm enthusiastically going to pot the rosemary!). The current perennial herbs, which are in a planter in front of my house, will be moved to the new bed.

Today also is National Aviation Day, in honor of Orville Wright's birthday. I wish I could take you all for an airplane ride, but photos to celebrate World Photo Day seemed like a better option.

Have a great weekend!