Day 3. I was pretty confident in my abilities to garden as the last two days had gone so well, but I spoke too soon.
The area I wanted to plant the perennials is riddled with weeds or at least what I thought were weeds. So naturally I need to sort out this issue first before I started planting. For the last two summers, I have ruthlessly pulled out these weeds because they looked so bad and so out of place as there was no rhyme or reason to their placement.
But every single year they came back in full force. So I did some Googling and found the app PictureThis and not to be dramatic… IT SAVED MY LIFE.
The app allows you to scan pictures of the plant in question and it will identify it for you and provide you with all the information you need from care instructions to fun little facts.
I got to scanning and learn that the “weed” that kept returning was Lily of the Valley, a somewhat invasive plant that spreads rapidly and is nearly impossible to get rid of. So back to Googling – where I learned that you have to dig out the roots and then douse the area is weed killer.
Now this part is where it all goes off rails. It took me nearly two hours to get out the roots of the plant.
Lily of the Valley RootsFour Buckets of Roots and Weeds
It felt like the roots just kept coming. No matter how deep I dug there was more and they were all over the garden bed. But alas, with some patience and blood, sweat, and tears I got them out. Or at least I think I did, we won’t really know unit next year. And for good measure I sprayed enough weed killer to eradicate a valley of weeds.
After the whole ordeal, I decided that I need to take a break and plant the perennials the next day.
Butterfly Garden Perennials
The next day, it was easy work. I watched a quick video before I got started:
And I did the work. Planting them was the easy part. The hard part will be seeing if they actually growing. Fingers crossed.
Note: Just a note of caution here, please don’t buy these planters until you read ahead because disaster struck.
Then once my garden boxes were built it was time to plant the vegetable and herbs. So naturally, step one was to build the garden boxes. In my house, I’m nicknamed Bob the Builder so I got to work and after an hour or so I had two beautiful wood planter boxes – or so I thought.
To achieve this task, I downloaded the app Planter: Garden Planner to help me sort out the distance of my plants. I decided the best choice would be to put the chives, parsley, and dill in one planter and the lettuce by itself in another. So I poured in my dirt, got out my mini-shovel (I am sure this has an actual name, but mini-shovel is cuter), and started planting. I have found the actual process of planting to be quite easy. I have learned a few tricks though that have been helpful for a beginner like me, but the most important was to rough up the roots before planting.
And I was done! Or so I thought. Even my lovely elderly neighbor came out to tell me how happy she was to see some growth in our backyard finally. I was on cloud nine if you will. After such a hard day of work, I went inside to relax.
Garden Boxes with Vegetables and Herbs
That afternoon, I went outside to admire my work to come to find one of my plant boxes collapsed. Thankfully, the herbs survived the calamity and the lettuce box was entirely unharmed, but my bank account cannot say the same.
Prior to this project, I had contemplated buying a garden box from Costco. It was a beautiful plastic Keter brand garden box that would have looked so nice in my yard, but in an effort to be more financially responsible, I decided to go with the more budget-friendly option. But look where that got me? So I took this as a sign from a higher power and got in my car and headed to Costco.
One garden box, and one hotdog later, I was home and ready to build my third garden box of the season. With the new garden box built and the plants replanted I was ready to watch my little babies grow.
The Surviving Garden Box with Romaine LettuceThe New Herb Garden Box
I gave them a good water, tucked them in for the night, and went to bed and had nightmares of every garden box in the 20-kilometer radius.
The time has come to transform my yard! I decided to spread my planting over three days:
Day One: Hostas, Hydrangeas, and Junipers
Day Two: Vegetables and Herbs
Day Three: Pernennials
So I began right where I planned. I started by watching a few YouTube videos to get the gist of what I needed to do.
So armed with my newfound knowledge and my shovel and dirt, I went out and got started. And honestly, I don’t have much to report. I started with the junipers in the front, dug the holes, filled it with some dirt, put them in, and done!
Then I headed to the backyard and repeated the process again with the hydrangea bush and the hostas.
Planted Hydrangea BushPlanted Hostas
I guess the planting part is the easy part? Hopefully, I can keep them alive, and pray for me that the next two days go just as easy!
Can anyone out there do anything without music? I sure can’t. So naturally I needed to curate a Spotify playlist to listen to while I am out there gardening my heart out. Feel free to check it out:
While I love my gardening playlist, I am sometimes not in the mood for music but rather a podcast. Check out some recommendations below:
Yesterday I descend on, what felt like, every plant store in the city to get plants and herbs for my garden project. I am somewhat of a house plant aficionado, but when it comes to outdoor plants I know nothing – quite literary nothing. So equipped with nothing more than my phone and the internet I started buying.
First I started at Costco. This seemed like the cheapest place to get plants. And while I was right, everyone and their mom were out buying plants. I have a bit of an issue with crowded places, but Costco especially gives me immense anxiety. I don’t know what it is; maybe it’s the giant carts (I am only 5 feet), the neverending isles of products, or something they pump into the air, but I knew we had to get in and out quickly. Thankfully, I went in with some sort of game plan – I needed 3 creeping juniper plants and a Roma tomato plant.
Table Basil
The Roma tomato plant was easy. It was sitting right at the front waiting for me. The biggest question was which one to get. I don’t know what makes a good tomato plant so out came my phone – check for bugs, check the leaves and stems, and go smaller. Then I read I needed to re-pot it so I added Walmart to my list. Next to the creeping junipers, and this is where it all went astray. Did you know there are about 7 million types of cedar-like bushes/trees? So after shifting through what felt like the entire boreal forest, I found the creeping junipers. Thank god for good people because this WONDERFUL lady must have seen my struggle as I pulled out every single creeping juniper that Costco had to offer and stared at them. I tried to Google how to pick one, but the internet just kept showing me results on how to prune them and what to do if they go brown. I was close to leaving and not achieving my dreams of a beautiful lush front yard with cedars plenty. But the angel from heaven helped me pick three of the best plants and gave me some tips for care including watering them multiple times a week until the winter and covering them with burlap before the first frost. So check! Costco done.
On my way out, I impulsively bought a Table Basil (which I don’t think is any different from regular basil) and a bag of 9.97$ perennial that is labeled “Butterfly Blend” because who doesn’t like butterflies? So now add that to the list.
Next was Superstore, as I heard (from my sister) that their herbs and plants were the cheapest. So off I went and found what I needed. My experience at Superstore was easy compared to Costco. grabbed parsley and chives for my garden boxes and a couple of bags of soil as I can only assume I’ll need that. I also wanted to plant hostas in my backyard, but I wasn’t 100 percent sure where to get them, but as if it was meant to be, the Superstore employees had just put out a whole pallet of hostas so I grabbed three.
Hydrangea Bush
Next, I need to find a hydrangea bush. Finding it was easy enough, but the tag was about as large as a high school history textbook and it had a whole lot of lingo I didn’t understand. Hardiness? No clue. Zone? Like school zone? Unfortunately for me, Superstore was all out of angels from heaven to help me, but thankfully I had Google. A quick search of “how to read a plant tag” showed me everything I needed to know. I decided to go with the Limelight Hydrangea for a few reasons:
With barely any more room left in my SUV, we headed for one more stop – Plant Ranch, a locally owned plant nursery in the city. Here I wanted to get some romaine lettuce and dill weed. I grabbed what I needed and I was out of there. Armed with my goods I was ready to plant, right?
HerbsRomaine Lettuce
As a side note, to create this blog post I ran into one issue – my images were too big. Who knew? After some Googling, I came across TinyPNG, an online tool that compresses photos. So if anyone out there has these same issues, rest easy TinyPNG has your back!
As a Cusper, I feel that I had the benefit of growing up in two world. In my early years, social media was particularity non-existent. As a family, we had the very typical early 2000s computer room with a monstrous desktop computer that connected to dial up internet. On this computer was nothing that 5 year old me ever cared about outside of Microsoft Paint and Minesweeper, which I had no idea how to play, I just liked the idea of it. But as the years wore on, it became clear that I was growing up along side and with technology and social media.
My friends and I often call this era of social media the “wild west” – an experience that isn’t just unique to my friend group. When I say social media in this context, I am not talking about Instagram, TikTok, or even Facebook. I am taking about open chat forums and questionable websites. But nevertheless, we survived to see the rise of modern social media.
The first form of social media I remember using was, of course, MSN Messenger. MSN played a significant role in my early childhood, but particularly from the ages of 10-13. I remember these days with mixed emotions. I often joke that I would pay the MSN gods any amount of money to get my old chat logs back, but as I reflect on my actual true experience, I remember is just how ruthless we were. It was in this era of my life that I truly began to understand cyberbullying. MSN was the first time I was able to speak to my friends behind a computer screen and this opened up an uncharted world. While I do look at this era of my life in relative fondness, I do believe that it would be a disservice to not at the minimum acknowledge that damage that undoubtably came from the platform.
Social Media and Likes
It wasn’t until I was in high school that I feel social media, as we know it today, really began to take off. It was during my high school years that platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and AskFM began to take off. It would again be a lie for me to say that social media, especially during these years, was only positive. I spent far too much time as a teenager worried about what I posted, if I sounded cool enough, and fixate on how many likes I did (or did not) get. In many ways I was consumed by social media and the serotonin it gave my from insist social gratification. At the time, I don’t think I saw an issue with this mentality. As an adult, however, I can very much see the negative impact that this had on myself growing up.
As I got older, however, I have very much seen a shift with my relationship with social media. Now I am the first to admit that I spend FAR too much time on my phone. I have every form of social media that one could possibly have. And, I have a particular proclivity to spend an hour (or multiple) scrolling through Tik Tok.
I, however, am a self proclaimed social media lurker. I rarely post on social media anymore. For example, my last Instagram post was from August of last year and before that I had not posted since August 2019. I do use Twitter and Instagram stories more regularly, but overall I like to take in what I see on social media and leave it at that. I have found that keeping a more private online presence has very much helped myself personally to shed the idea that I had to please everyone.
Professionally, however, I am more open to posting. I have had a Twitter account since the 2010s. During high school I would use Twitter to do whatever – I honestly can’t even wager a guess to what I posted, but I’d imagine it would be some sappy song lyrics and a joke I got on Google. When I started my teaching career, I cleaned up my Twitter and I have been using it semi-regularly to post student projects, school events, and anything related to teaching. In the day to day of teaching it is hard to keep up sometimes, but I do hope that in the future I can work to increase my social media presence.
TikTok has also played a surprising role in my career as an educator. Now, I have never posted on TikTok, but I spent an obscene amount of time scroll through videos upon videos. And in reflection, I have gained a great deal from the platform. I am 100% the person that says “I was doing some research” or “I just saw that…” when discussing global political, current affairs, or classroom pedagogy. In reality, my research was TikTok. I do, however, have to remind myself that not everything I see on the internet is true, but overall, I do honestly feel TikTok has made me a better person – but don’t tell my students that.
Overall, my journey with social media has been long and winding. It has had its up and its downs, but my life right now would be vastly different if social media didn’t exist.
Thanks for reading!
Write a blog post that addresses the following questions and/or statements: Describe your relationship with social media. How has social media affected your personal or professional life in positive and/or negative ways?
Three years ago, my partner and I purchased our first home. And over the last three years we have been consumed with learning how, and what it means, to be a homeowner. Year after year, we put a lot of focus on the house itself and we left the yard for the next year. Soon enough, three years had went by and our poor backyard, while nice enough, was lacking.
So what a perfect time to learn how to garden! Prior to the start of this course, I had purchased two raised garden beds, but I suspect if I didn’t have this class pushing me I wouldn’t have bother to build them until next year (and that optimistic). But now, I have too!
I have some relatively ambitious goals, but I’m an all in type of person so my plan (hopefully) will looking like this:
That is all for now, but I am sure as the weeks wear on I will find more things to plant and grow. Now the next steps are to buy everything and plant! Wish me, and all my new plants, luck!
