Digging in the Dirt

Kate and I are finally planting and landscaping our yard! No more dirt pit. No more weed farm. I've been looking forward to this for a year and a half. Why that long? Other things to do. Plus, we find it really easy to get mired by the details. Planning our plantings was such a mind-blower, the doing of it never made it out of the gate. I think we finally said to ourselves, let's just put something in the ground and go from there. Let's not try and get it right immediately. Let's let the system evolve, make some mistakes, and eventually end up with a nice front and back yard. Anything is better than our vast collection of nature's scraggly weed pals.

Which is exactly what's cool about landscaping. It evolves over time. It's a living system. It's not a static sculpture. It's a decorative ecosystem, one that's plastic, malleable, and infinitely hot-swappable. I don't know a lot about it yet. What can grow where. What types of soils support what types of plants. But I do know the basics, and that's all you really need. Water, sun, and food. Meet those needs, and nature does the rest. If a certain plant isn't supported by a particular planting location, it will be abundantly obvious very quickly. And, hopefully, that's how we'll learn. There's a billion books on the subject, but my poor brain will only hold so much information. Eventually you have to learn by doing.

We have a houseplant that has survived for almost a year. That's a first by a wide margin. Usually plants fear sharing a living space with me. So I'm feeling good. I think our yard has a shot at greatness.