Gardening is an interesting hobby. With other hobbies, you can be pretty sure of what the result will be in the end. With gardening, after months of research and planning, you plant and then . . . hope.
After spending the winter months planning, the plants that I purchased in February finally arrived. My friend Steph came over and spent the day with me turning the planning into reality. We started off with an adventure trying to find a wood chip pile that a fellow Chicago gardener told me about on Facebook. We knew that it was somewhere near the Levy Senior Center in Evanston. Despite two different maps, finding the pile took a fair bit of wandering. While Steph retrieved and reparked the car within walking distance, I filled six garbage bags with wood chips, trying not to make the bags too heavy to carry.
Once back, gardening layout in hand, we dug out last year’s plantings and turned the first few inches of soil, pulling out concrete and other litter as we went. Steph found a pipe which was probably the original location of the street sign and we marked it off to avoid injury. Sadly the cute little fence I had purchased to deter littering had been run over at some point and is looking a little worse for wear. I’m hoping to replace it later this year. The newspapers a neighbor had brought over last year and suggested that I lay down to suppress weeds had done so but left the space looking quite tattered and sad. We’d often hit something hard and guess whether it was concrete or clay. It was usually a thick clay that stuck to our shovels and shoes. It was hard work but thankfully the day was a bit cool and we remembered to take breaks and switch off often. Now for the spreading of the wood chips. Which is when we discovered that six bags wasn’t quite enough. But it gave us a good enough layer to move forward.
As someone with social anxiety but also proud of my work, it was lovely and awful whenever someone walking by would stop to talk about what we were doing. I love that I live in a city neighborhood where people feel comfortable enough to talk to strangers. Especially poignant for me was an older woman with a walker who spoke wistfully about how her years of gardening were behind her. As someone who struggles with chronic pain, it was an uncomfortable glimpse into the future while a nice reminder of what my body can still do when I respect its limits. Later on, a neighbor who has taken on the care of the corner across from mine came over. We compared plans, complained about the concrete bits and the hard soil, and shared ideas. He, very smartly, had a sifter that he was shaking his dirt through and I internally cursed myself for not thinking of doing the same. Well too late now.
Last year I purchased copper plant labels that I thought would weather nicely over time. Sadly, the weathering was more like rust and the permanent marker was pretty indistinguishable, which made it difficult to determine which plant was which plant when we were laying out the new setup. In addition to the milkweed, aster, bee balm, Black-Eyed Susan, purple coneflower, foxglove, strawberries, yarrow, and tickseed from last year, we added lavender hyssop, blue false indigo, hoary vervain, marsh phlox. Two weeks prior, bare roots for common blue violet and anise hyssop had arrived from another native nursery and I had planted them and I thought marked them well. Oops. We were able to recover and replant the common blue violets but goodness only knows where the anise hyssop ended up. Hopefully, it will pop up on its own in the next few weeks. Some of last year’s plants look more dead than alive but were replanted just in case.
Each plant has been tucked in now to a nice bed of dirt and wood chips. Despite all of the hard word when i stood back the space didn’t really look like much. Fingers crossed that the hope we planted will grow nice and strong in the months ahead.
Birchwood Butterfly Corner 