Gardening

The equivalent word for gardening in North America seems to be “yardwork” but that seems to refer to all aspects of caring for a yard, including gardening but also caring for paving or decking. Is that correct, do we think?
In my part of the US, gardening is generally considered a subset of yardwork. Gardening might be working in a decorative or vegetable garden. Yardwork might be mowing the grass, trimming hedges or trees, general cleanup, planting something not in a garden. If one mows the grass and weeds the garden, the entire set of work would likely be called yardwork. Repairing or installing a patio or deck would probably be referred to using rather specific terms, like "I fixed my deck." or "I put in a patio."
 

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Here in California we've embraced rocks with a few hardy plants. Not as pretty, but much easier to tend to. Also, not having water's a factor too...
 

Ours got away from us. Paid a guy to do it. Cost a few thousand in potato NZ dollars.

Pla is to stay on top of it and pay someone for trees and heavy lifting (injuries I'm not doing it).

Think we are gonna weed mat everything, ignore the flowers and put in shrubs and NZ natives.

I've done one of them. Landscapers going to finish it off. Anything annoying to look after is probably getting replaced.

A few a bare dirt atm heading into winter. Might turn it into an alpine style look.
 

Man, it's such hard work.

In April, May, June, we spend 3 months getting the garden presentable. We enjoy it for 3 months through July, August, September. Then it gets 6 months of heavy bombardment of rain from October through April, at which point it has been utterly destroyed and we have to start all over again. Every year.

Today is the day we started all over again. Here goes...

Has the very hot weather in the UK I've seen on the weather graphics the last few years affected growing season?
 

We were living for a while in San Francisco, in a neighborhood that was encased in fog for 25 - 100% of each day. The apartment building had a little shared back yard that we adopted. We pulled all the weeds and dropped cuttings of succulents into the sandy soil. By the time we left we had a lovely succulent garden.

Now we are in Atlanta. It's rainy and sunny most of the year. Our soil is very clay-heavy but also full of good bugs. Everything grows here! I've been able to cultivate a yard as well as a number of trees and flowering bushes. We have an herb garden in the back with rosemary, thyme, sage, and chives, and garden boxes in the front that we plant seasonally. The fig tree I planted almost 4 years ago is finally fruiting!

I love spending time out in the garden. It takes a lot of work in the Spring and Summer, but in the winter everything freezes and I don't have to mow the lawn, which is nice.
 

I’m not a gardener by any stretch of the imagination. But I’ve had to step up and do some things for our 2 most recent dwellings over the past 40+ years, so I’ve had my share of “experiences”.

At our previous house, I had to find a species of grass to grow in a very shady back yard that had hard-packed dirt. I also had to replant a “J” shaped planter on our front lawn that ran next to our driveway, going from full sun to partial shade, with one end dipping down about 3’.

In both cases, I spent half of a day breaking up the soil with a hoe and trident while listening to Sepultura’s Roots album on my portable CD player. (The planter was much smaller, but the soil was MUCH harder- almost as hard as baked ceramics.)

In both cases, out worked out great.

We are currently living about a 30 minute drive north of our previous house, and we have a full-time gardener. But he doesn’t handle anything that’s not actually planted in the ground. So all the pots are my responsibility. I’m also partly responsible for decision-making on what plants we have in general.

And when we got nailed by that killer winter storm in 2021, we lost a LOT of our shrubs and ground cover, and many of our pots just cracked apart. So we’ve (slowly) been researching what we should use to replace what we lost.

One thing that survived the freeze were our 3 pequin pepper plants. Here’s a friend about to harvest some for making salsa:
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Closeup. The peppers are slightly larger than a green pea, but each is 30k-60k scoville units- hotter than jalapeños (5k-9k).

Right now, I’m thinking about adding some more peppers to our front lawn, plus signage describing the varietals. Maybe even some “Take some!” signs. One that has my attention is a habanero varietal that has almost no heat. Gets all kinds of recommendations for its flavor.

Because peppers bloom and fruit all spring and summer, and somewhat into the fall here in D/FW, so it would be a nice visual display and a source of seasonings.

I also want to put a trellis next to our front door to support a jasmine plant.
 

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