Creating natural neighborhoods: bus stops

Thinking and musing about how to encourage folks to plant (and maintain) any semblance of nature in the city, I've been scouting around medians, bus stops, and neglected patches here and there, primarily to pitch to my garden club group as guerrilla "flash" gardening clean-ups.

They're everywhere in my small mountain city.

Thanks to inspired folks for decades, we HAVE lots of median plantings, city plantings, etc.  But there's not so much money or time for maintenance.

Bus stops seem to be a particular "no-person's land" -- the city delegates them to the bus folks, who definitely have a limited landscape maintenance staff and budget.

Clingman Avenue bus stop

This one, along a major route to the River Arts District, would be an easy guerrilla "clean up."

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An overgrown garden

Hmm, coming home to the Piedmont, I just want to run directly into the house.  The garden, front and back, is overgrown.

The front meadow is overridden with common milkweed and river oats (and needs a good bushwacking), there are weedy edges everywhere, and my "main" vegetable garden is full of weedy summer annuals, happy for a respite from the gardener, I guess.

I hardly want to venture forth.  My gardening companion has mowed.  A good first start.  He removed the champion-sized pokeweed (the biggest I've ever seen) from border I see from from my study window (the oakleaf hydrangea and butterfly bush look fine).  And the giant garden phlox next to my garden shed (viewed from my gardening companion's window) looks beautiful.

So, I'll venture forth and start weeding, I guess.  I've ordered garlic for fall planting and yet another sort of arugula (MyWay) to try!

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A tidier garden

Happily, even with a recovering Golden in tow, I've managed to clean up quite a few more of the seedling/sapling volunteers (think redbud, magnolia, sassafras, Althea, lacebark elm, American holly, Chinese privet, nandina, English ivy, etc.)  Not to mention the runners - Bermuda grass, vinca (major and minor), air potato vine, and morning glory.

And the entrance to the front door actually looks like a flagstone path again, and not the entrance to a mysterious house in the woods.  Woo-hoo!

Hmm, there's still LOTS to be done, but I'm feeling better about it.  Geez, nothing like talking about and showing images of your garden in better times to help kick-start things.  And a dear friend's suggestion that we visit together while we garden was encouragement, too.  She's the original energizer bunny of mulching and weeding, so her suggestion helped me out of my gardening funk!  Major garden cleanup involving pruners and heavy cutting is NOT on my list of favorite gardening activities.

I'm hoping to get out and get my garlic in the ground in the next couple of days. It's the perfect time, and my beds are ready.

The satellite vegetable garden is being nibbled on by some sort of herbivore (deer? rabbit?) I managed to harvest the turnips ahead of it, but didn't get a chance to check on the arugula today.  I don't think it's a woodchuck, because, next to my potting bench, all the Tuscan kale in a tall ceramic container was eaten, right next to a container of cilantro, which has been a favorite of woodchucks in the past.

Thankfully, none of the normal nibblers care for garlic!

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