I don’t know what came over me that, after starting The Porch Gardener, I immediately engaged in a flurry of landscape initiatives.
Remember the solar-powered drip irrigation on my porch garden that gave me the idea, after I came back from D.C. and the flowers had doubled their size in just five days?
It’s all gone now. After I completed the whole nine yards irrigation on my main garden (more like the whole 90 yards), I decided to “attack” the porch and replaced that solar-powered irrigation toy with a professional drip irrigation system that included all the plants in the porch without that irritating red bucket that needed to be filled with water every other day.
While this was happening, I decided to build a new concrete-paver pathway to partially replace the long gravel path between the front deck and the garden, with the intention of making it easier for my husband to walk along the flowers and even reach the “observation bench” and enjoy the butterflies having lunch in the wildflower meadow (he hates it when I call it a “meadow”, as it is in fact just a 900 square feet plot).
I’m not going to tell you that both my husband and I are no longer young, but know that I am 5 feet tall, so it seemed quite an impossible task to do it all by myself.
I started it anyway.
I thought it was funny that earlier today, while watching a podcast with Dr. David Sinclair, the tenured professor of genetics at Harvard, I heard Dr. Sinclair explain that his favorite sport is gardening, including carrying heavy plants and bricks around… you get the idea.
I started ordering 11 pavers from Home Depot — their limit for cheap delivery — and rapidly established a method, which is something I usually do: scrape the gravel with my small trowel, level the ground, lay the pavers, fill in the joints with gravel, once or twice a week. As the end approached I got impatient and added an extra session, so I’m finally completing the enterprise this weekend, ahead of schedule. For each batch of eleven delivered on the driveway I had to carry the pavers progressively farther, up to the point that now, on the last week, I will need to walk 100 feet carrying the bricks.
I’m not saying that the pathway will be perfect, but it will be mine — my pledge of love to my husband of 20+ years. And this makes me feel very proud.
I will also confess that, before I started this crazy, ambitious landscaping project, I did dedicate a few minutes looking for DIY videos on YouTube, and was mesmerized by how easy it was to remodel your yard by yourself. The stones were so easy to carry, and shoveling away whatever was there on the ground to prepare the terrain was so fast, everything was so much family fun! Even small children could do it, so why wouldn’t I?
Little did I know that all those beautiful videos are in fact super elaborate productions with professional crews behind the scenes; the “happy family” members were actors and the heavy stones were props, or so my AI assistant told me the other day!
Well, that’s not my thing, my friends, and I hope it’s not yours either. You can rest assured that every picture I publish, every story I tell you here on The Porch Gardener is absolutely written and executed exclusively by me and me alone, with the wide reach of my whole five feet.
Happy gardening!
