A good start

(Heh. It makes me think of the old zombie-invasion joke: What do you call wiping out 200 zombies in a day? A good start. Or maybe that was space invaders, I don't remember...)

Anyway, I worked more on the garden when I got home this afternoon. (Can the key to getting stuff done REALLY be as simple as not watching television when I first get home? Somehow I feel like this is a charmed week and I will not get as much done some other week...)

I spent about another hour ripping out all the darn tree seedlings (and the blackberries) and also clearing out leaves.

Here's where I am so far:



The few plants I left in the cleared area are either fennel that seeded in (and I don't have the heart to kill...I ripped out a few of the smaller ones) and some sedums that have been in there for a few years. There are also a few small remnants of balloon flower and dead-nettle that I'll have to work around once I get up further. (The big patch of dark-green foliage way in the back is one of several very large rosemary plants...they were one of the first things I planted when I moved in here, because it delights me to live in a climate where rosemary is a true perennial and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger each year.)

I think another hour's work (I should be able to do that Friday afternoon, if it's not storming) will get me to the point where I can really think about planting. I think I'm going to do a mixture of seeded things (buy seeds of basil, which grows fast, and the scarlet-runner beans, and nasturtiums, which don't transplant well) and a few already-started plants (whatever kind of pollinator-friendly flowering things I can find that will do all right in a situation where most of the sun they get is early in the morning, and it's not a LOT of sun).

There is something satisfying about working in the garden...it's destruction in the service of creation, so you can be all "RARR SMASH KILL DESTROY" and work your frustrations out, and then you can look back at what you did and think, oh, this will look SO good when there are pretty things growing here.


And another "good start":



I started sewing the quilt together last night and added a couple of rows today. You do have to pay attention to what you're doing: I made a mistake on one row and had to take it apart and insert a missing block before I could get it to fit on with the previous rows.

I think the background fabric was a good choice. It was hard to know what to use as there are so many different colors of fabrics (one of the drawbacks, sometimes, to using jelly rolls: if it's a fabric line that comes in several "colorways," you get all the "colorways," and they may or may not work that well together). I planned the quilt to as evenly as possible space the colors: there are more blues and greens than everything else, and there were two sets of red blocks and two sets of pink blocks, and only one of yellow....so the yellow will be the very midpoint row, and then the other colors will be in order, "reflected" around that row, something like brown-blue-green-pink-green-blue-red-blue-green-yellow-green-blue-red-blue-green-pink-green-blue-brown. Or at least that's what I think I have; I wrote it down so I wouldn't mess it up.

It's an on-point setting, which makes it a bit more challenging to sew together....