Garden, month #1 (May 2013)

In my previous (and first!) post I wrote about our pond and its initial maintenance after eight years of almost total neglect.

Likewise the property here has been generally neglected. If you were not a horse or had stuff in the barn, you were pretty much neglected over the past eight years. We have almost eight acres with a house a barn and shed that we purchased in June 2005 in order to bring home our horse, Dax from the boarding stable.

Immediately after our arrival here we added several good riding horses:
Clyde a trail horse for Michael, Lucy a Pony Club pony for Grace, and Dodger a trail horse for Kane. Suddenly we had four horses not just one and two girls in Pony Club.

What happened next is five years flew by ... we lost Dodger to old age and then Lucy to cancer. My older daughter brought home a lovely thoroughbred cross for eventing and then my younger daughter brought home a large pony for dressage and a smaller pony for games. I brought home a finely bred Hungarian WB gelding for training in dressage and eventing. Finally we brought home the most wonderful rock star rescue pony ever, Junior, for Kane.

For eight years when we weren't cleaning the barn, cleaning tack, stacking hay or picking up manure around the paddocks and transporting it to the manure pile we were trailering to Pony Club events, riding, schooling, trail riding, showing and just generally enjoying being riders and barn owners. It was really fun.

But, boy, the poor property. I loved gardening when we lived in Des Plaines in 2000 to 2005. It was so pretty and we had probably 100 different species of plants. Here we had weeds, and thistles and dandelions and weeds. Tall weeds, short weeds, lanky weeds and mat-forming weeds.

Something needed to change and change it did. Spring 2013 came and both of my daughters were off to college. Kane's pony Junior has passed on from very old age. Things are loosening up around here and it's time to get back into the garden.

After a week off work the first week of May here is what I accomplished in our garden by the goldfish pond.