The previous owner of my people's garden is my new neighbor too. Now that I have had a chance to get to know the lay of the land better, I realize that she was more focused the veg patch. I am totally into the borders and flowerbeds. I don't know what to do with those big rectangles of empty dirt in those naked beds. It's too late to plant seeds, as far as I know. And there are so many weeds....

She is going to take away the planks she used to shore up the sides of the veg patch. Since I don't know anything about that stuff, I said she could take them. I will probably regret it later. But now my focus is on lawns and borders.

They are a mess.

At first everything looked so wonderfully lush and romantic - before I started digging in and working. The lawn is ultra compacted, super mossy, sparse in places. There is horsetail as high as a twelve year old's eye. I am scared to go into the far corner of the garden, the weeds are so tall. My old Florida fear of snakes makes it tough to stick my hands straight into anything I can't see - our mothers taught us well, and it probably saved my life with I was a kid walking through woods with rattlesnakes, but Holland's only poisonous snake is the adder, and I hope I never see one.

I did see the biggest slug in my entire life, at first I thought it was a dog turd. And when I reached back into the leaves to snip dead wood, a toy toad with bright red eyes made me yelp (I touched it with my rake just to make sure it wasn't a poisonous frog ready to pounce, how chicken is that?)

It took me a couple of hours to untangle the mess of overgrown rose bushes and stray tree seedlings and fluffy weeds and dead growth. The ground is nice, with lots of rotted leaves from the giant beech tree above. Everything needs help, but I can't help them all right now. I just fed the roses and will leave them until the fall (or so I read). There is a cornus with lovely white leaves that is just stringy and weird all over the place. I feel free to randomly prune that.

Online, I looked up the list of plants I got with the place and saved links to info about pruning and feeding. I am going to print that all out and take it with me.

Oh, and I also fertilized the grass, I figured with all the rain we have now it might help. And my new soil tester kit turned blue, which means the soil is neutral. Is that a good thing?