Day 287: I call it the Barren Wasteland: the ten-foot wide space between my house and garage. When I first moved here, I thought to turn it into a vegetable garden, working around the concrete and wood dead spaces which cover the pit where my water system's captive-air tank lives. Little did I know that nothing but weeds would grow in that soil...not radishes, not zucchini, and definitely not corn or peas or tomatoes. A few years' experiments with bush beans yielded rather sickly crops, so after several attempts at trying to draw blood from the proverbial turnip, I threw in the towel and let the Barren Wasteland go. Then one year I hit on the bright idea of making it a wildflower garden. I bought a mix of seeds "designed for the Pacific Northwest" without paying too much attention to the content. It came up mostly California poppies which, despite being pretty en masse, are undesirable for their tendency to go out of control and into monoculture. My vision of a rampant English-garden style space refused to go according to plan until I relocated a vigorous Rudbeckia to one corner, apparently providing just the "lift" the Wasteland needed to take off on its own. I even found that some of the wildflower seeds germinated long after they'd been sown, delicate Deptford Pinks shooting up here and there accompanied by orange Wallflowers and the occasional Tall Phlox from some prior point in history. I added Rose Campion (purloined from a friend's yard) and more Rudbeckias, even a wild currant. Little by little, the Barren Wasteland filled in. Today, it's far from barren, but the name persists for this "wild space" where colour now crowds out the weeds. I'm happy with it, even though I am still pulling California poppies.
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