Hell strip purgatory

For the second week in a row, I must apologize for being late with this blog entry. This time it's because we were away for the weekend visiting our friends in Virginia, and after driving home and unpacking, I didn't have the energy to tackle it. (I'm starting to think I should just switch to updating the blog on Monday every week, rather than over the weekend. We've been a lot busier in retirement than we expected to be, but the weekends seem to be even busier than the weekdays. Or at least, they're more likely to be busy for whole days at a time.)

Anyway, remember how we decided last summer to tear out the grass from our hell strip, that narrow sliver of turf between the road and the sidewalk, and replace it with some native wildflowers? And how we put in a bunch of seeds last fall and were just waiting for spring to see what came up? Well, spring is now here, and the answer is officially, "Not much." Here's how the hell strip looked as of last week: just a long patch of lightly mulched dirt with a few rogue tufts of grass and weeds. There were a few surviving salvia plants down at the far end, and the one tuft of yarrow we put in next to the street sign was actually looking pretty healthy. (Yarrow, as far as I can tell, is literally impossible to kill.) But none of the stuff we'd started from seed appeared to have germinated at all.

Disappointed but not deterred, Brian spent an hour or so last Thursday clearing out the patch. He didn't want to till the whole thing up for fear of disturbing any flowers that might still decide to germinate, so he sat on the sidewalk and painstakingly pulled out the weeds by hand. That got it back to its baseline state of a bare bed with a thin covering of mulch, which looks dull but at least reasonably neat. Then he put in a few rudbeckia seedlings (black-eyed Susans) that he'd started over the winter, using our new seed snail method. 

However, these are so tiny that he's not that confident they're going to survive, so we're on the lookout for additional plants that might be suitable for this difficult area. They need to meet several fairly stringent criteria:

• Perennial and low-maintenance
• Small enough to fit in a one-foot strip of dirt
• Tolerant of full sun and clay soil
• Able to withstand some exposure to road salt
• Unappetizing to deer

It's a tough order to fill, but I've found a few possible candidates, including catmint, creeping thyme, and something called antennaria (commonly known as pussy-toes). And if we can't find any of those, well, we can always fill in the whole thing with yarrow. We'll have to go out there with the string trimmer to beat it back occasionally, but that's less work than mowing.

In the meantime, I can offer one update on a project that's been resolved a bit more satisfactorily. Around the same time we finished planting out the hell strip last fall, we also had to fix several other things in our yard that got damaged by our neighbor's sewer-line repair. We were able to put most of it to rights, but we couldn't repair our flagstone path because that area of the yard was still torn up—and it stayed torn throughout the winter and most of the spring. But this month, our neighbor finally managed to get the sunken area filled in and planted with clover seed. This covered up the new sewer access that the workers had put in, but Brian went back in and uncovered it so that in case they ever need it again, they won't have to rip up the yard to find it. To make the pipe a bit more sightly, he constructed a hex-shaped wooden frame for it, then carefully fitted in the flagstones around it. So now we have a direct path from the street to our door again, and soon enough we should have some nice green clover to fill in the area around the stones. Based on how well it's coming up so far, we expect this area will be fully filled in a lot quicker than the hell strip will.