Friday, September 26, 2008

Ten Bog Gardening NoNo's

At the risk of turning this into a bog blog, I am posting one more time about the bog garden.
The river rock arrived yesterday afternoon. We spent four hours spreading it as a rock mulch in between the plants of the bog. Most of these plants will get significantly larger. This will be a very full garden. Some pruning will be necessary.

The men thought I was crazy to want this big rock in the bog. Once they saw it sitting up on its end and showing all the pretty lichen, they were happy. Of course it turned into an engineering problem because they didn't want it to tip over when some child decided to climb on it. I left the men to their own devices with concrete, rebar, and math. That rock is going nowhere.

Here is a picture of the whole thing with my fellow master gardener Ann and Sharon from the extension office. Sharon does a lot of record keeping and general wrangling of our master gardener group.

Here is a view of the bog from the cactus garden.
Ten Bog Gardening NoNo's
1. Select all the plants out of season.
2. Go find good research based bog garden making instructions and ignore them.
3. Make sure there is absolutely no drainage and then wonder why it stinks so bad.
4. Hide from the health inspector who wants you to shut down the mosquito hatchery.
5. Put the flagstone down without putting sand underneath it, pull all the flagstone back out, put down sand, replace flagstone. Two extra steps are absolutely necessary.
6. Set a large rock up on it's side as a trap for climbing children.
7. Put containers with no drainage in the bog to control invasive plants and help with water usage, then be puzzled when the containers float after a rain.
8. Send out an email for a work schedule 12 hours before the actual work begins and then be surprised when nobody shows up to help you.
9. When the bog floods be amazed that you have created a perfect home for crawdads.
10. Answer the question, "Where are you going to put the waterfall?" 300 times.
PS..Ignore the bomb squad. They are not here for you.
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