berries and pavers and 'chokes, oh my!

I've been busy laying out the raised bed area in the garden, and doing other gardeny projects. On a whim, I bought six raspberry canes and decided to make the southeast corner of my garden a berrea (=berry area). A friend is going to give me some blueberry bushes, and I already have one blueberry stump that may or may not survive. There is one Himalayan blackberry in the neighbor's alley behind this part of my garden, which I have already taken steps to kill. For those of you who are horrified by the thought of wilfully killing blackberries, as I was before I moved to the Pacific Northwest, Himalayan blackberries are one of our most annoying weeds. They grow everywhere, and once they get started, it's really hard to eradicate them. Sure, it's wonderful to eat wild blackberries whenever you take a walk in a park, canoe down a stream, stop by the side of the highway to dump a body, etc., but you don't want these puppies in your yard. It is MIRACULOUS that my poorly tended yard, neglected for a dozen years, doesn't have blackberries, and I intend to keep it that way. So my berrea will be filled with blue and red berries, not purple. I also saw a cranberry bush at Home Depot -- I always thought cranberries, like blueberries in Michigan where I grew up -- were planted in bogs. Not so, apparently. I might just splurge and get one to see what happens.

I've also been busy working on small drainage problems by laying little pavers and rocks in muddy and unattractive areas. Mr. Reluctant and I are having some differences in opinion about this. I want stepping stones surrounded by rocks (see picture); he wants a more mathematically sound path of pavers snuggly fitted together with cement poured between the cracks (see attempt to do so in picture). This aesthetic difference, my friends, is the major issue in our marriage. Me=freeflowing natural crumbling pretty, him=build like a brick shithouse and just as ugly. What can ya do?

I also picked up some artichokes at a place I usually wouldn't recommend (for plants or anything else): Walmart. I went in looking for a cheap dark green plastic lawn table, which suddenly has become a rare commodity because all the plastic lawn furniture is suddenly beige and sage green, and I found a rather lovely bumper crop of green globe artichokes there. They are more mature than what's on sale elsewhere, and cheap, too, so I bought a couple (see first picture). Like the raspberries, they take two years to properly fruit, so we'll have some yumminess in 2008.