Gardening

I may have mentioned that the yard and its duties are divided between the two duplexes our landlord owns. Our next door neighbors include a Full time Mom with a 3? yrold and a 6 weeks old baby. During thier naps she takes great joy in tending to the little vegetable patch in the back, and is very generous in sharing its abundance. She has been here a couple years now and managed to tame that area to be a very serviceable urban patch.
The front yard, we share with the upstairs neighbors, who seem to have as much time for yard work as we do (grad students), which means is is pretty ugly. There are some bulbs that delighted us this spring, and some hostas are volunteering in the shade of an untended hedge, but this is invisible from the street due to the dramatic slope (16 steps to our front door). Not that this ugliness is likely to change soon, but since the Ashman lab had finished a round of fertility tracking on a batch of thier model organism (the strawberry plant!), they were giving away boat-loads of hearty looking 4 inch pots. I grabbed an armload- I dream of a front yard that overwhelms with big beautiful berries, and I can re-enact the U-Pik-em summer days in Spokane. More realistically though, a little ground cover to fill in the bits between the hedges and rocks would be a welcome touch. We'll just have to see if they'll take to the marginal soil up there...