Experiments

A couple of weeks ago on a Sunday, when it was ninety degrees and 100% humidity, I spent a delightful half hour or so wandering around the yard playing with the macro button on my digital camera. The results were better than my wildest expectations! Plus, many of the flowers I photographed were the result of last year's winter sowing experiments. If I get ambitious I will write about winter sowing, but meanwhile, if you are curious, check out www.wintersown.org. The method appeals to my lazy and cheap nature, and the results were well worth the time I invested. Also, the beds along each side of the paddock fence were created using the lasagne method. What a time (and back!) saver. I sure wish I'd heard of it years ago. Anyhow, put very briefly, it is a method of creating a garden by laying down a barrier (in this case, 10 sheets of newspaper) right on top of existing lawn, coverin that with layers of soil and mulch, then planting. Voila!!! I now have sixty feet of garden, about 3 or 4 feet wide, running down both the north and south sides of our paddock fence. I did the north side 3 years ago and the south side last summer. It sure beats digging and beating soil out of sod clumps. Ideally there would be several layers each of soil, compost, and mulch, but even my scaled down version worked just fine.