Now that the pond tour is over, I decided to finally remove the invasive Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) that I mistakenly planted a couple of years ago. I was planning to do it at some point, but Beth Botts’ post about invasive species recently banned in Chicago – including C. orbiculatus – got me moving. [...]
Archive for the ‘Lazy Urban Composting’ Category
10 Apr
Lazy Urban Composting, Part 5: Not *That* Lazy!
As demonstrated by the dearth of posts in the past year under lazy urban composting, all I’ve done in the past year is to toss stuff on the pile, including a lot of rotten vegetables. That…was not the best idea I’ve ever had. I finally dug it out, and there was precious little that had [...]
5 Mar
Cleanup season
I was going to post a picture of some early sprouts coming up, but there aren’t any. However, a stroll around the backyard revealed that there were other things that I could do: pull more leaves and twigs out of the pond (and pat myself on the back for the lack of string algae), pull [...]
27 Nov
Leaves + Pond = Water gardening in the cold
Alas, no pictures today because it’s been cloudy and the days are so friggin’ short now! Fall is one of the busy times with the pond. Not only are there lots of trees in my yard, but there are lots of trees in all the surrounding yards, and the fallen leaves will blow around until [...]
31 Oct
Lazy Urban Composting, Part 4 – Two Buckets!
Some of the recipients of the compost pile output. I finally dug out the compost pile over the weekend, and got two buckets of the good stuff for the bed beside the garage. I probably could have gotten more if I had really dug the whole thing out, but it was too easy just to [...]
8 Aug
Starting a rain garden
We’ve been having a little water in our basement after heavy rains, and we noticed that water from our neighbors’ downspout was pooling right outside our basement where we’re seeing the water. Sounds like a job for a rain garden! One of the neighbors and I dug out the outline of it last weekend and [...]
24 Jul
Lazy Urban Composting: Part 3 – Bucket o’ Compost!
The compost pile hasn’t settled much in the past couple of weeks, so I decided to dig it out and see what was going on. The compostable plates are showing signs of breaking down, although perhaps regular paper plates would show the same behavior. Despite my decision to keep sticks out of the pile, there [...]
4 Jun
Composting: Part 2 – Nothing to Do
My new acacia bench, with peonies and the pond. The compost heap is behind the bench, between the row of arborvitae and the Siberian elm. Pickerel weed (Pontederia cordata) is planted in the bottom of the pond. I’m continuing to compost not just the eternal amounts of daylilies and goutweed that I keep liberating from [...]
11 May
The creature from the Black Lagoon
You should really divide your water lilies at some point before not one but two rhizomes start crawling out of the planter basket (click on the photo to see this in more detail). Oh, and before the roots grab onto every single rock at the bottom of the pond. The goldfish seemed rather amused by [...]
18 Apr
Lazy Urban Composting: Part 1 – It Ain’t a Brush Pile
After an inspirational composting workshop at Cheney Mansion, I started composting in earnest. I was always a bit intimidated about getting the right ratio of green to brown correct, etc., but the head gardener at Cheney convinced me that the important thing to do was to just start composting and not get all perfectionist about [...]
