I read a little about lasagna beds yesterday (essentially, you put down cardboard or newspaper, cover it with organic material, and then you water), which seemed like a lovely, lazy way to start a garden.

We picked a site that was covered in weeds to test just how lazy we could be with this method. Then, we ripped apart some boxes and dumped the contents of our compost bins, which we’ve been adding to all summer, on top.

We’re going to let the patch sit for a year, and then plant oregano or thyme as ground cover. If it works (i.e. doesn’t totally turn into a revolting, cardboard-y gardening failure), we’ll cover up the rest of the space with lasagna beds and enjoy eating things grown in a space that was previously covered in weeds, followed by trash, which is just cool.

It was a fun but dirty job – you know you’re really making a mess when your three year old insists on a bath after an activity!

The first cherry tomatoes are coming out (although the larger tomatoes are still green):

And our lettuce is still growing, even through the heat – mmm! That is probably the plant we’ve eaten the most of this year, going through a whole packet of seeds (we just finished it up this morning).

(The stem next to the lettuce is a giant sunflower, that snuck into the container back in the spring):

I think our raspberries are done for the season (aww) but hopefully, they’ll be back, along with our new strawberries:

We tossed in a few cucumber seeds this morning, to see if we could still get a few going before the end of the season. It’s been a nice long summer for growing (at least for what our family can eat!) and we’re looking forward to next year. Fall is probably coming just in time, as Maddox, after planting a dozen seeds this morning, told me that he was, “tired of growing food with Mommy” for the day. And it’s only 11am. He’s done so much gardening this year that he’s earned a break! Also, without the motivation of fresh raspberries (he doesn’t care for the tomatoes) it’s not quite as much fun.

I’ve had to admit a few truths about what I will and will not maintain in our garden, and which plants will be better in containers again next year vs. in the yard. I’ve also got to solve our gnat population problem (whenever I bring in houseplants, we get an army of fungus gnats) and am excited to do some seed shopping for the winter and spring for my new birthday grow lights. More on all that later – we’re going back outside to throw water at things and to play with sticks (which, come to think of it, sounds a heck of a lot like what gardening is, too).

Or, Slowly Making My Backyard Completely Edible

I’m making a move on our yard.

I’ve slowly started to clear out patches of garden bed – mostly of four years worth of weeds, moss and clover that have grown and expanded until they completely cover the dirt. Container gardening has been so much fun (and I think I’m sincerely going to miss being able to water in just one concentrated location) but I think it’s time to start planting things in the rest of our yard.

Our Yard Now

We have a ton of huge perennial bushes that do all right with no care whatsoever. There are two enormous hollies, countless leafy plants with pale purple, bell-like flowers, riots of daisies, and so much ground cover, mini trees and grass plants that it is absurd. I’m going to start with the ground cover, since it’s so good at expanding and, hopefully, would be able to grow back and cover my mistakes if the new plants don’t survive the winter.

Our Deck Vegetables This Year (April, June, July)

We have lettuce, tomatoes, beans, and herbs in our deck container garden. The basil in particular is extremely happy, and we just added two strawberry plants as well. The first move I made (Maddox, too, since he diligently helps me to weed and loves repotting plants and spraying them with water) was to transplant the raspberry bushes from two holes that I’d randomly dug in the lawn, back when I didn’t have a shovel. Needless to say, the spot was shady and the plants were choked with grass, and while they survived, they didn’t seem very happy.

Pissed-off Raspberries After Transplanting, then Happier, Settled-in Raspberries

The raspberries are flourishing in their new, sunny, actually-in-a-garden-bed spot, and have rewarded us with a handful of berries this year. Next year, I might fence them off to give them additional support, and if they do well, I’ll let them slowly expand to the right, pulling out ground cover to make room.

This morning, we started clearing out one of the beds by the fence to the left side of our property – I let Maddox pick the bed we would work on, since pretty much everywhere needs some help and weeding anywhere would be a good start. We only weed for about 20-30 minutes at a time (it’s pretty hot and buggy out, plus I’m 7 months pregnant) plus I use lawn chairs to avoid continuously crouching on the ground. We toss weeds onto another lawn chair to dry out so I can compost them on top of our 2 years-dead Christmas tree Barry (did I mention that we haven’t done a lot with our yard?) in the corner behind the shed.

The space around one of the purple flower plants is 3/4 of the way cleared, and I explained to Maddox how happy the plant was to be able to breathe now. We found a cool green grasshopper and oodles of moss, and uprooted a tree that had started to take over the fence. There were a lot of brown leaves in the bed, and big sticks that I’d tossed in there for convenience while mowing, and once we cleared some of that out, we were able to find actual plants to pull out – mostly clover and wild strawberries, which I’d keep, but they don’t produce fruit in that shady section of the yard, and when I moved them to the deck, the fruit that they did produce was mealy and flavorless.

Operation Stealthy Mint Attack

Once this area is clear, I’ll pull back a little bit extra ground cover, remove the maple seeds that become huge surprisingly fast, and sneak my mint plant into the ground. I hear that mint does well in shade, and if it does TOO well, I can pull up the rest of the ground cover and turn that bed into a yummy mint haven. I find nature to be incredibly beautiful, but have not yet progressed to the point in my gardening where I can grow flowers. I would much rather snack on my yard.

It’s thundering now, which is a complete tease because my tomatoes need water. I haven’t decided whether to add these to the actual ground or not – these have done so well on the deck that it’s almost a shame to move them – plus it might be more fun to do a raised bed for tomatoes, beans and cucumbers next year in which case, clearing spots in our beds for tomatoes might not be worth it.

Making Some Room

I do want to find a place to hide my basil plants (two are doing well, one had a fruit-fly altercation and is still recovering) but haven’t yet unearthed a sunny spot that is just right for them. Someone on freecycle asked for yellow and white flowers, so maybe if she comes by and clears out some of our daisies and brown eyed susans, I’ll have space to pop in a basil plant. I’m not optimistic, though – the daisies are over three feet tall and are crowding onto the lawn, and the susans are cropping up in random places all over the yard, even crossing stretches of grass and weeds.

So far, I’m not brave enough to mess with the front yard – we have two Japanese maples and a lot of green plants that look good even in the winter, while requiring pretty much no maintenance. I’d like to replace the patch of ground cover next to our steps with lavender eventually, but Jon is attached to it, plus I need to see what lavender looks like through the different seasons before doing anything drastic to our neighbor-facing landscape areas.

Yard-Farming in the Future

It would be funny if, in 5 years, our front garden beds were entirely tomatoes and basil, and our side and back were squash, cukes and beans. All of our ground cover would be replaced by herbs and berries, and the asparagus plants that I’m tempted to try (even though it’s a long term labor of love, at least three years for the plants to get ready) would be growing alongside our deck, instead of our gigantic hollies.

We have a row of poplars that provide shade and privacy from the neighbors behind us, and they are somewhat impossible to mow under, due to how the lawn tilts down to where their roots are. I’d love to replace all those weeds with shade-friendly (poplar-friendly) wildflowers, but lack the motivation to crawl under low-hanging poplar branches to clear them out. Pretty, delicate ones, like morning glories (the non-poisonous variety) so long as they can take the shade.

It’s fun to plan a yard. I frequently envision the rooms of our house in my head, mentally rearranging and then leaping up to try it out. I hadn’t tried it outside before, but it’s kind of similar, and has the added benefit that gardening is kind of zen, and it’s a very peaceful task to do on a day-to-day basis. There’s a chance that I may be receiving a grow light set for my birthday (cross fingers!) and, while I’ll be sorry to scale back for the winter, it will be fun to plan, order and start seeds, and to see how many of my herbs I can keep alive over the long New England winter.

(My plants: You can tell that they're new because they're still alive.)

Today, he mentioned his new worm compost bin, which got me thinking about composting again.

I love the idea in theory: you save on lawn and garden materials (we just bought 8 bags of black mulch), it’s pretty easy to use, and you have a healthier yard. We could use all the help we can get in this area, as we have this huge patch in our backyard that looks like we recently raised several undead, due to the area being totally sun-scorched and completely unshaded.

It seems pretty cheap to start and you can put in all kinds of things into it, which for me is the major perk – I can see myself and Maddox having way too much fun pitching organic food waste into a big bucket on a regular basis. Also, I have this thing about laundry lint, which can go into the compost heap – I feel like it should be useful for stuffing bunny toys or insulating walls, but you can’t keep it around inside the house or you’re just asking to be set on fire.

I would probably start pretty small, since buckets around here aren’t $15 (they are like $40 at home depot) and I already have a few medium-sized plastic containers that are just dying to have drill holes in them (read: I am dying to use my drill to ventilate them).

My main concern is the grossness factor. We’ve had fungus gnats in our plants before, and although I’d have this outside on our sunny deck, who knows what weird things might grow in it? Also, what if it really smells? Then I’ll have to pour the half-digested contents of the bucket into a trash bag so we can dispose of it, or bury it silently in the night (or, more likely, cursing loudly) in our backyard.

Finally, worms are all helpful and good for gardening, but they are gross, and I don’t really ever like being reminded that they have a large role when it comes to growing my herbs and vegetables. Who wants to think about that? Thomas Rockwell, I shall cringe in thy general direction forever.

What do you think? Have you ever composted, or do you know someone who has? What’s it like and is it worth the effort?

Amendment April 21: We are off and running, on a small scale! Thank you to everyone online who posted with advice, and to my friends who chimed in with their own composting stories.

I think the only time I benefitted from a mail order catalog was when I taped a large poster of a sexy girl into our shower to freak out Jon when he opened the curtain the next morning.

In actuality, the only reasons I check my mailbox at all are A) because Maddox likes to check the mailbox B) sometimes my Mom sends me holiday cards, and obviously, C) so squatters don’t think our home is vacant and move in.

DMA, All the Way

(Catchy, no? You’d think, as an association of marketers, they would have thought of this one.) Anyway, in an attempt to cut down on the amount of postal mail we receive, I checked out greendimes.com, which directed me to the Direct Marketing Association.

Using DMA, I did the following:

• Removed my name from credit card offers
• Removed my address from catalogs
• Removed my address from magazine offers
• Removed my address from other mail offers
• Removed my emails from national email lists

It’s cool (is it, Leanne? Is it really) because you can also manually opt out of places you’ve purchased from, since I guess those places are allowed to spam you once you buy. You can also report companies who haven’t stopped sending mail after 90 days, which appeals to my sense of justice and also my need to make trivial matters personal crusades.

Other Neat Tricks

While I was down this particular internet rabbit hole, I also reregistered with Do Not Call and read a Consumer Alert on How to Protect My Identity from Being Stolen.

This lead to checking my credit report after finding out that, by law, you get a free report each year. Way to feed my paranoia, FTC.

This was actually pretty helpful, as I found out that my Victoria’s Secret Angels Card had never been canceled, despite a request filed a year or so ago, which brings us full circle, back to sexy hotness.

Still More, But Not As Neat, Tricks

From here, I realized that I needed to renew our passports and get one for Maddox, which lead to a pile of unsexy paperwork and several OCD lists of all the documents I have to fill out or gather. But let’s pretend that’s just as hot as catalogs and Angels, shall we?

About 6 months ago, I decided to stop doing really extreme things that absorb my attention entirely for a span of 6 weeks then become so repugnant that I give them up entirely and subconsciously rebel against these activities from that day forth. To name a few:

• Horticulture. I used to have gorgeous container plants that bloomed even when they weren’t supposed to (purple flowers!), the product of intense research of optimal plant conditions, matching photos to identify of label-less plants, and mixing huge quantities of soil on my living room carpet (Jon is a very understanding house-mate.) Fast forward to now: there are several dead or dying plants in my basement (next to windows, I’m not a sadist!), our own yellowing, chlorophyll versions of Mrs. Rochester, but thankfully, without the benefit of matches and opposable thumbs with which to light them.
• Real Estate Closings. As part of my first post-college job, I learned all about title processing for mostly residential properties, tax certifications, and peculiar state laws for refinances. This stopped when I was enrolled in a Notary Public course so I could conduct closings, and I realized that the part I was most looking forward to was getting one of those cool seals that made the paper stick up in a circular pattern.
• Sewing. To this day, I enjoy running off very simple sewing projects (hemming, no-nonsense curtains, basic pillow patterns) but at one point, I was making dresses and shirts, and stockpiling old patterns like a couture-obsessed squirrel.

Anyway, you get the picture. I have more or less done this since childhood, when my very tolerant parents used to allow me to fill my bedroom with paper chains (literally fill, you had to crawl through it to the bed) and spray paint in my room (a habit that persisted until college, when the size of my dorm room exacerbated the fumes, knocking me out).

So, instead of being all intense about this new thing, my Zero Trash But Anti-Hoarding Project, I’m just picking a few things to try, and seeing if they have any impact on our lives and those of polar bears. It’s conveniently complementary to my nature, as I frequently go OCD on my house and dump piles of things on the curb – or, in the case of the last time our friends Chris & Lauren visited, surreptitiously  fill their bags with items from my pantry in hopes that they’d carry them off when they left. (They did. Muahahaha hope you guys like carbohydrates.)

Also, if I don’t ever collect this stuff in the first place, it’ll free up my time for other OCD tasks, like arranging my books alphabetically by author (then title) and moving all the living room furniture around when Jon’s out of the house. (Which is kind of how I clean – cleaning is boring, but if you combine cleaning with moving furniture that is taller than you and three times as wide, it’s a lot more entertaining.)

So, stay tuned for updates as I give this a shot – I’ve already tried writing a holiday eletter with Mailchip instead of sending a postal letter (like I would have bothered to do that anyway) and my next task is to sign up for  a service like the DMA’s opt out of junk mail or greendimes.com. Or, I might just call a bunch of the companies that send me mail and pretend to be a leftwing nut who believes aliens live in the post office and getting off the mailing list is the only way to stop their communication with the mother ship, which of course, wants to eat our brains. Wish me (and whomever I call) luck!

I’ve always scoffed at this interpretation of reality, possibly because my belief structure has always been more like “worketh your butt off and ye shall be rewarded with social happiness, financial security, and lots of Apple products.”

I’ve always had problems setting limits at my job, working nights to please and killing myself over small issues to make sure they came out right for the company. When I was a mortgage processor, I’d go over hundreds of pages of potential liens for each refinance line by line, trying to track down any potential threat before we issued title insurance papers (which, by the way, included an affidavit saying that we weren’t responsible for said liens in the case that we missed one). I once freaked out that a food order for a staff-appreciation lunch wasn’t going to be 100% perfect at a job that paid me $8/hr to count change. Over and over, I’d drive myself to extremes that were great for getting me recognized and promoted, but in the grand scheme of things, were pretty pointless.

It took the following to change my definition of professional success:

• 14 years in various workplaces
• having a child
• honestly examining the best case scenario of where my career was heading 10 years down the line

I still agree with the 8 hours of work thing, because I always need to have a problem to solve and a next step to plan in order for my brain to be happy. But, I’m learning to set limits, and am grateful that my various bosses respect them.

Instead of automatically saying YES YES YES I WILL DO ANYTHING (that is not morally repellant), I try to work hard every second when I’m on the clock, and to not answer my work email when I’m not. It’s hard not to check in, especially with all those apple products around, but it’s an infinitely better life.

A big motivator is that I’m trying to share the playtime with Maddox whenever possible. After a few months of taking Maddox out of daycare on random days to see how much free time I have with this new work schedule, we’re decreasing his days at daycare from 5 (full week) to 3 1/2.

Since it’s been summer, he and I have been doing a lot of playgrounds and walks, which mostly consist of him stuffing things down sewer grates while I listen to the latest “stuff you missed in history” podcasts in one ear, both of us exclaiming over sticks and fire hydrants (by the way, good job, city planners of Newburyport, there are a TON of hydrants in my neighborhood).

With an early-to-rise 2 year old and an addiction to late-night reading, the 8 hours of sleep thing is just never going to happen, but that, my friends, is why they invented Keurig machines.

I took a walk outside today, and I don’t think I’ve done that alone since Maddox was born, because if I have free time it’s more fun to do things as a family.  But, I had some time today in between projects and I needed to pick up some cat food at the local veterinary clinic (our cats demand special food, lots of petting and the occasional haiku extolling their furry little charms).

So, after I made the uncharacteristic decision to walk to the clinic, I looked at flowers, enjoyed hearing my neighbor’s wind chimes and basically reveled in the fact that I was not in a meeting.  I truly have four hours of meetings a day, so this was particularly nice.  I think my work has me confused with a conference room table or some other essential bit of meeting equipment.  One time, I sat at my desk and concentrated very hard on blending in with my cubical wall, but sneezed and was, alas, discovered and invited (read: compelled) to attend.

Anyway, halfway through my walk (which I have just learned was two whole miles) I realized a few things:

• I am out of shape.  Two miles is a lot!  Marathon runners are admirable, but completely crazy.
• I had to keep stopping to remind myself that I should slow down.  I am so used to having a packed schedule where every moment that passes has been triple-booked with assigned tasks, and not having an immediate deadline to meet was very strange (read: impending heart attack).
• I need to hang up my wind chimes.  They’ve been in the garage for the winter, but there’s not a lot of wind in there.  Which is just as well, because if I heard clanging from the garage, I would, of course, assume we were being attacked by ghosts and hide in the pantry.

Everybody needs to go outside sometime, even if they’re like me and have sad, dark thoughts when forced to carry less then two apple products at any given time. On that note, my last observation that I’ll share from my walk is that far too many of my neighbors need to learn to password-protect their wifi – every time I stopped to take a picture, a wifi invite would popup on my iPhone with an open connection.  Possibly, they were celebrating the fact that I made it out for a walk today, and were trying to be considerate of the fact that I would be away from my home wifi for 30 minutes, and were trying to ease the pangs of separation.  That, my friend, is being a good neighbor.

I’ve been tweeting ever since I heard Chris Brogan speak at a North Shore Tech Council event in May of 2008, and have been pretty inconsistent with my tweets.  When I started, I was into learning about Social Media and starting friendly conversations with interesting people.  I was blogging a lot around this time, and completely bought into the whole social media connection thing.  I even looked at lists of the top followed people and added the ones who seemed interesting.  The idea that you could reach people who would otherwise be inaccessible to you due to distance, business role or anonymity was pretty intriguing.

I’d follow people who followed me to be polite, unless they were bots.  I went through a brief obsession with qwitter and felt personally offended when people stopped following me, even as I recognized the absurdity of it all.  The quitter email notifications included the tweet right before the person stopped following, implying that yes, indeed, it was something I said.

When Twitter came out with Lists, I tried grouping people into categories to make keeping up more manageable.   Eventually, I just stopped caring about the content because I was following too many people who used Twitter as a business self-promotion tool, as a diary, or as a place to spam others with links.  These are all arguably valid forms of using Twitter, but not really very interesting to me personally.  I had built an arbitrary list and the result was my complete lack of interest in 90% of the content.

Tonight, I decided I’d like to start using Twitter again.  So, I’ve been unfollowing everyone whose name and website I don’t recognize, or whose description is irrelevant to my interests.  I’m focusing on local people who I might actually meet and interesting people who post things I want to read.  I imagine there will be a drop in my twitter followers (resting now at 371) but I will try to muster the strength to not sink into despair now that Snackfan Japan (the latest snacks and drinks from Japan!) will no longer be my friend.

Part One: Get the Code

Go to Sharethis.  Click on Get the Button:

ShareThings has done a great job of making an easy interface. Just follow the wizard steps:

First, you can customize Your Widget by choosing the buttons style:

Then, pick your header text and colors:

Finally, select the social media services that you want to include:

When you make changes, the preview to the right updates in real time:

Once you’re happy with your widget, choose WordPress as your service:

Then, click Get ShareThis code:

*You may need to create an account to access your code.

Now you should be on Step 3 of the ShareThis wizard, “Install.”

Part Two: Putting the ShareThis code into WordPress

This section will guide you through putting the ShareThis code into WordPress. If you’ve modified the widget at all (buttons, colors, etc.), you will need to add code to your header and then some code to your footer.

To access where you need to insert this code, log into your admin account on your WordPress blog. Click on the Appearance tab, then select “Editor.”

This will take you to a page called Edit Themes. Now look at the menu on the right. You’ll see the option for “Header (header.php).” Clicking on this will open the editing window to your header code for your WordPress site.

Before you take another step, save your header code so you can have a backup in case this breaks something else on your site and you need to restore your original code. For example, when I installed this, the style overwrote my site’s body text style, which is fixable, but annoying.

Once you have a backup file (I would just paste the original code into a text editor program), paste the header code here, but be sure to place the code between <head> and </head>, or it won’t work. Then, click Update File.

Now for the second piece. In the menu on the right, you also have the option to change the Main Index Template and the Single Post. First, click on the Main Index Template. Be sure to back this up, too. Add the body code provided by ShareThis, between <body> and </body>, wherever you would like the widget to appear on your page.

(Hint – I looked for the word “Comments” to figure out where to place this code, because I knew that my comments were under each post on my main index page. Place the ShareThis code above the code including “Comments.” Click update file.

You may need to try a couple locations, checking your main index page to see if the widget is where you want it. I also added two line breaks <br><br> after the widget code to put some space under the widget.

When you are happy with how the Main Index Template page looks, repeat the process and add the code to the Single Post page.

And, you’re done!

Thanks to ShareThis for creating this plugin, and thanks to Jon for walking me through this. =) I owe you a calzone.