They’ve been predicting lovely weather for this weekend for a while now, and I admit that I was half looking forward to it, and also half not. One of the problems of it turning from cold and soggy to warm and sunny is that we can no longer rely on Mother Nature to take care of watering all the plants for us, and that means that it was time to deal with the drip hoses and the raised flower beds in the back yard.

At some point in this house’s history, someone put in a great deal of effort and time to create some lovely raised brick flower beds that line one entire side of the back yard. There are all manner of green things growing in them – some we recognize, like the pomegranate tree and the grapefruit tree, and the (sadly deceased) peach tree – and some we do not. As winter has faded into spring, it’s been fun to look outside and see new color in some of the beds – bulbs that have obviously been lying happily dormant since this time last year; flowers on some of the bushes, new buds on some of the trees. Seeing all this new growth had made me even more determined to keep anything else from dying due to lack of water and basic neglect (in our defense, the peach tree was on its way out when we moved in last summer, but I suspect our rather lax watering probably hastened on its demise), and since installing automatic sprinklers is not even remotely in the budget while the (very expensive) kitchen renovation looms ahead of us, the only way this was going to happen is if we got out there and took care of it ourselves. So nice weather for the weekend meant that today was the day.

Luckily some of the old hoses just needed some minor repairs to become functional again, but there were some hoses that had to be yanked out completely, and others that we’re just going to leave in place because they’re half buried in dirt, or embedded in cement, and it just doesn’t seem worth the effort to try to extricate them. Amusingly, it is obvious that this is not the first time this has been done, as there are at least two ‘layers’ of drip hose in some of the beds; whoever did it last time left even older hoses behind as well. Between the two of us we figured out which ones could stay and which ones needed removing, and then Richard tackled the ones in the back yard while I rummaged around in the beds in the front yard, tracked down the capped end of the existing hoses, and laid out enough new line so that at the very least, all the beds in the front will get watered with a little less effort from us.

We’ve tossed around the idea of putting in some of those battery operated automatic timers, but since we’re going outside twice a week to water the veggies anyway, we opted instead for just the little manual timers – chances are more likely we’ll remember to turn the hoses on, but this way we won’t have to worry about also remembering to turn the hoses back *off*. And while we were at Home Depot picking up hose timers, we also picked up some frames for the tomatoes because they are growing like mad (there are even two little flower buds on one of the plants!) , and then since we were right there in the vegetable department anyway, we also picked up a selection of herbs and a red and a yellow bell pepper plant to add to the mix. We’re going to have a serious ant problem when the veggies start producing – that much is obvious any time I dig in the soil in the vegetable bed – but so far everything seems to be doing well. And now that we’ve got all the new hoses in place, the only remaining part of our yard that might still suffer is the lawn, but I’m not all that attached to having grass in the backyard anyway, and also we picked up a new three-head sprinkler system for the front yard, so I’m hoping even that becomes a non-issue. It’s all about baby steps when it comes to gardening around here – I am still not seeing the allure of puttering around in the dirt and prickly green things and ants and giant carpenter bees, but this is a lot more involved than we ever got at the old house, so surely that’s got to count for something.