gardening in December?

What I meant to say was "raking leaves in December"!

Actually, I got 99 percent of the leaves raked in late November, after it finally quit raining. But there were a few...try several dozen...strays from the neighbor's yard that had fluttered into the courtyard with the most recent wind-storm. And since it was warm-ish and quite sunny today, I raked them. And with that, that should be it for the leave-raking for this year.

To tell you the truth, I really don't mind raking the leaves all that much. I'm sure a lot of that has to do with the fact that this is my first house. Seriously, yard-work of any sort gets me thinking about things I can do with my .38-acre patch of the American dream. Since this particular piece of land lies in a wooded floodplain, I necessarily must start by considering what I can't do:

• Terracing. The slope from the river bank to the house is too gradual.
• Planting at least 70 percent of my most favorite flowers. They happen to be the ones that demand full sun, and at best I have a 2' X 3' corner that just barely qualifies as "partial shade" -- for about three weeks in late June/early July.
• Planting a full blanket of grass in any less than 3-5 years. Too much shade, too many bare spots, and too much bad luck with rain/wind cycles (even with the requisite cultivation of the area, followed by just the right amount and distribution of straw on top of the grass seed). I'm just going to have to be patient.
  

I've decided that for this coming spring, I'm going to adopt the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach and convert a particularly stubborn dirt area straddling three close-together trees into a landscaped area with mulch and some strategically-placed hostas, lobelia (AKA the "cardinal flower") and the like. The people living in the houses along 80th St., between Keystone and Westfield Blvd. -- a far more shady area than my neck of the woods -- seem to have been quite successful with this approach.

And I've resolved, for 2007, to do a better job of taking my camera with me on my walks, so that I can take pictures of yards I like.

That's actually the easy part. The hard part is going to be getting the resolve on those drizzly, blustery April days to get digging and making this envisioned shade garden actually happen.

As I mentioned before, there are a few garden spots already present in my yard. But all I've done with them is tend them -- this would be the first garden area that I plan, design, prepare, and plant all on my own.

I've got my fingers crossed that it blends in respectably with the spots that previous owners created! :)