Ferns!

The raspberry bushes weren't the only thing I dug for today: I finally got my ferns! Polypodies (kallioimarre) and soft shield-ferns (kilpihärkylä).

I moved the little hydrangeas, which will probably kill them but they weren't really thriving in that spot anyway :/ Let's hope they do better at the other side of the yard.

Clearing the raspberry block

Today I've mostly been digging in the garden.

This morning I decided that this was the perfect day to move one of the raspberry bushes so that it wouldn't block access to the garden gate (once get a proper garden gate, that is). What made it perfect? Well, the fact that I was inspired to. Nothing in this household happens by design; if it's going to happen at all, it'll be ex tempore.

The gate corner before work started

 There was sooooo much soil and roots and soil and rocks and soil. Gaah.

I'd got to this point when H showed up and asked where I was planning to put all that soil. I made like I knew what I was doing.

 The hawthorn hedge on the other side of th fence keeps invading our side. The crabapple tree (just out of the picture on the right) has roots everywhere. Lucky thing H and his manly muscles were there to sort out the worst. The biggest root we cut was as thick as my wrist, but there were lots of finger-thick ones.

Together H and I lifted the whole bush with as much of the roots intact as possible; unfortunately not much of the root system made it, hardly any bigger ones at all.

After that H's wrist decided it wanted no part in these fun games, so I went on alone. At the end of the day there was actually too little soil rather than too much, so that worked out all right.

Now the gate corner is only waiting for the new gate to be put in! We'll also get some more stones for the path.

Dead things, or Should v. want

I'm doing my best to follow my new, self-valuing guideline "if it's dead or it otherwise stinks, just get rid of it", and attacked the greensplosion flowerbed from the previous post. I took out most of the phlox stalks that stuck out among the alchemillas, partly because they were catching the wind and bringing all the other plants down with them but mostly because they just looked out of place there. I trimmed the left side of the bed until it's nicely separated from the next one and the front until I could see the edge of the grass. I didn't have the supports to prop up the long stalks of the other plants. I'm still considering whether to keep that bed as it is over this summer or whether to pull everything up now.

Before

After

New stuff

I'm on my way out to buy some more plants. It's really hard to stick to the plan of sitting out the first year and watching the garden develop! For example, this bit:

None of these are my favourite plants and the whole spot is just a mess! I don't know how to tidy up the monster flowerbed on the right, since it's got three or four plants mixed together (some might be milkweed, but I like milkweed so I'm letting them be, especially since I'm not sure). As far as the bushes on the right (that I can't ID just now and can't be bothered to google, though it's a really common plant) are concerned, they're really not my ideal plants. I'd like to dig up the lot and replace them with something a bit more, well, less bushy.
But for now I'm just going to stick to buying a few pots and things and plopping flowers in them. For example, a square planter with legs filled with bright colours would go great in the corner of the front yard where grass tends not to grow:

By the way, is anyone able to identify that bush in the foreground? It shows no signs of flowering and every sign of not being pruned earlier. I'm thinking that eventually we could dig that up and have a big planter with a kitchen garden full of herbs there.

Greensplosion

Remember this picture from mid-April?

Here's the same view now: