It's been a really busy week and it is a busy weekend to boot. Sorry I haven't been on here much.

#Gardening really has been my major activity this past week.

On one of the days that I was outside working, the air quality was horrible, and I paid for it that night and the next day. It is uncomfortable to garden in the heat in an N95 mask, but yowza. Lesson learned. It was also super-dusty at the big garden before the rains this week, which is not good to breathe in, either.

I'm trying to stay on top of the poison ivy crop, which is a constant battle.

It's just starting to poke leaves up, so I designated a clipper, sheathed myself in plastic, doubled up with nitrile gloves under my washable garden gloves, and put on goggles to carefully clip and dispose (into a trash bag) what was peeking up out of the leaf litter. Then I scrubbed the clippers and garden gloves with blue dawn. (It's really the only reason I keep that around.)

Clipping is not a solution; it's a stopgap measure. My goal in that area on the hill out front has been to continue to shade/smother/push the ivy out with plants that I want there, which is a multi-year process and kind of like playing whack-a-mole. I can't dig out the ivy without destroying the plants that I have worked so hard to establish there.

I have wild herbs and a food crop in that area (native strawberries that are very slowly taking over the hill, yay!) so I also can't use an herbicide, as that endangers the plants I want to keep alive, some herbs I eat and make medicine from, and I wouldn't be able to eat the strawberry crop for three years or more if I sprayed poison this year. So… repeated manual labor it will be.

I pruned all the deadwood out of all of my small fruit and decorative trees and did some editing cuts with an eye for future growth.

I probably have the most obsessively-managed eastern redbud tree in the entire state. They tend to grow all weird and gnarly if you just let them do what is in their nature.

Through judicious pruning since planting, I've managed to encourage this one to become a single-trunked, round, tree-shaped tree rather than a gnarly, wacky, random-growth tree with a double trunk and weak joints and crossed limbs and all the things that redbuds tend to do when left to their own devices. Their V-shaped joints usually rot out, then half the tree will fall over in a storm when it's 15 years old, then look unsightly and be all lopsided and... I could go on but you get the point.

I did a little bit of pruning on the street tree that the city put in after they took down my sycamores in 2018, so I got to know that tree's preferred growth pattern, and it is also a little wacky.

The small amount of editing cuts I have done on it (a half-dozen over the last 3 years) should help it grow into a nicely-shaped and manageable street tree. I probably won't have to make any more editing cuts on it for a few more years -- if ever. I can't remember if it is a hickory or a hornbeam, though. I don't have the paperwork from the city on my fridge anymore. (It's a native... flamebark... something?)

Pruning trees is my happy place, but it is also possible to do too many editing cuts, so part of the Zen of it is knowing when to stop. There's an art and a science to it. I really get into my zone, though.

I figured out where I want to put a peach tree, finally. Now I just have to source one and dig a big hole!

Today after clipping the poison ivy bits I rewarded myself by planting bare-root native geraniums (geranium maculatum), getting most of them onto the hill that I'm trying to manage (where the poison ivy lives), and two into pots to see how they do in captivity. It was cold and overcast today, and we are supposed to get rain again tonight and tomorrow, so it was the perfect time to plant them. It had been too hot and dry to do that last week.

I did get all of the flowers and herbs that I got at the nursery last week into the ground, but I still have to build another raised bed to get the tomatoes and peppers in. Hopefully I'll be able to do that early next week and pick up all the soil I need for it.

Also, somehow, my potato starts are not sprouting. I don't know what I did wrong this year. I'll have to start over!

Today I realized that Baltimore Oriole migration season is very soon, too -- probably the first week of May. I need to put oranges and jelly on my shopping list.

Tomorrow, between dogsitting duties, I will be making violet flower jelly and redbud jelly, then water-bath canning those to share with people again this year.

I think my violet jelly is going to turn out a really gorgeous purple. Last year it was light pink. But last year I only soaked the flowers in hot water for about an hour. This year I soaked them for 24 hours, 2 on the counter and 22 in the fridge, so got all the color I could out of them.

Hopefully I'll post pictures of the jars tomorrow when they are cooling.