The Oasis!

Our backyard is done, minus a few hostas and some decorations. It took longer than I thought--I was predicting that we'd be relaxing on our patio by the 4th of July. No such luck, which is a shame as the 4th of July was exceedingly beautiful this year. Alas, as I did predict, the yard is done just in time for a horrendous heatwave.

The heat, it kills the grass. Have I mentioned how much I despise grass? It hates me back. Actually, in the pictures it looks a bit better than it does today--it wasn't as hot two days ago and the weeds in the middle of the yard have grown like 6 inches this week (not actually an exaggeration, because you can't see them in the pictures).

Next to the deck is a tumbled paver patio.  It is pretty big--roughly 15x20.  We have a 6-seat rectangle table that will probably sit down there, plus the grill and smoker.  And there may be room left over for a low seating set with a firepit (TBP -- to be purchased).  Along the wall on the right side of the picture, I need to find some large pots or something to soften the edge of the foundation and blankness of the siding. 

Around the concrete drain are six good-sized Rose of Sharon.  There are rocks around there too--I apparently grabbed a photo pre-rocks.  If you can't hide the darned thing, make a pedestal out of it.  With the brick edging, the rocks, and the bushes, it is crying out for a Grecian Urn or a birdbath or something.  I'm not actually kidding on that (though I'm pretty sure that a 3-5 foot statue would be heavy and expensive)..


The landscaper also added rocks under the deck, and a nice border of shrubs around the base of it to soften things.  Along the back of the yard are five good-sized white pine trees with clumps of the tall decorative grass between (they are almost visible in the shot of the patio...bad light in the evenings when I'm trying to snap photos).  They aren't a wall, but do distract the eye from the street beyond it.  And they will get bigger as time goes on.  The tree line doesn't completely cover the back border, because if you look toward the other corner, there's a lovely view of a lake and open greenspace. We want to emphasize the nice view and downplay the road.

Finally, the part that's not visible is all the drainage work.  The long straight line of dirt leading toward the concrete pedestal is where they buried a drain pipe that comes off a downspout and the sump pump.  Previously, those outlets left a swamp on the side of the house (and made the sump pump work overtime).  They ran the drains that were in between the patio and deck out underground as well. A swath through the middle of the yard has been smoothed to remove a rut formed by water runoff. The back of the yard behind the trees used to look jagged, as though the builder had pushed dirt back there and just stopped (which is probably exactly what they did). It now has a nice rounded shape that looks intentional and a fresh layer of grass seed that we can maintain easier than the weeds that we had before.

Our inground sprinkler system has been repaired and activated, and I might relent and have a lawncare company spray stuff on the grass to make it green (I'm tempted to just buy spray paint...do you think the neighbors would notice?)  I have finally come to realize that we are going to have to fertilize the grass to make it grow, as our dirt is more gravel than soil.  And it's way too expensive to just pave the whole yard.

Deck Done

The deck is finished. It looks great. Next up (possibly as soon as this week): yard digging shall commence.

I'm hoping my husband and I can heft the grill up to the deck tonight to actually grill in our back yard instead of our driveway out front. I'm sure the neighbors will appreciate the effort as well ;)

The only issue with the deck process involved the stairs.  There is quite a drop between the house and where the stairs land, so our landscaper had to come out to figure out at what level the patio will rest.  The first attempt at the stairs ended about 18" from ground level, which would have meant some sort of retaining wall around that corner of the patio.  They re-did the stairs, and the patio will be a bit lower than where the dirt currently meets the house.

Also, once the big muddy process is done, perhaps we will actually fertilize our yard and do some weed control. It looks...kinda bad. But it isn't worth spending money on the back right now because a large stretch will be removed when the grading is fixed.

It Starts

The splintery stairs are gone!  In their place, we have the beginnings of framing for the new deck, plus holes where the footings will be poured. I believe an inspector must OK the holes before the concrete is added.

I was surprised to see that the deck is only attached to the house in two small areas--both about 2 feet wide, on either side of the breakfast bay.  The deck will not be attached to the bay itself, likely because there is no foundation directly below it.  We now have two small (1ft x 2ft) pieces of cut away vinyl siding.

Also, as we are still home recuperating from surgery, T-man got a front-row seat for the building process. He is loving getting to observe the process.

Looking at the house from the back, the area to the right of the deck towards the second bay window is where the stairs and paver patio will go.  In the picture it doesm't look that tall, but the end of the deck is a good 4 1/2 feet off the ground, so there will be about 6 steps down to ground level.

The deck is not that large. At its depest, it will be about 12 feet, but from the kitchen door probably more like 9.  Deep enough for either one of our patio tables (our smaller round one is hanging out in one of the side shots, the bigger rectangle one is in the garage where it's been stored since we moved), or else a different seating group.

I have been window shopping patio furniture ideas, but want to wait and see the finished spaces before buying anything new.  We already have the two tables, though the round one would need new chairs. The old ones are the cheap plastic, two of which moved with us to the old house, and are neither attractive nor comfortable (though they may live on for extra temporary seats in case we have a big party).  The round table is wrought iron and while it wasn't expensive, seems to be holding up great. I can get matching chairs from any of several stores, just waiting for someplace to put them. Our bigger rectangle table needs a fresh coat of paint, but I still love the floral weave pattern that it and its chairs have. Ideally we will keep both, because together we can seat ten people for an outdoor dinner, or have extra buffet or prep space.

I also love the idea of low chairs around a fire pit, but that would probably have to sit down on the patio rather than up on a wood deck. Without fire, we could use the deck for a conversation area instead. I'm also not sure we can trust kiddos near fire, but they aren't babies. So it all just depends on how our existing furniture fits, what furniture we find, and how much we have left to spend after we're done paying for our landscaping adventure.

In Gardening News

Nothing is happening in our backyard oasis-to-be. Yet. We’ve had a lot of rain recently, which prevents landscapers from working. I'm trying hard to be patient as all of the lovely spring mornings slip away and I have nowhere outside to sit with my coffee (except on the stairs, which isn't the same thing).

My irises are blooming! These are bulbs that we divided from the old house and transplanted after we moved. They originated at my husband’s childhood home in Iowa, and they bloom every Mother’s day. Last year, we got a good crop of leaves but only one or two lonely flower stalks, likely due to the transplanting shock. This year, there are dozens. But it seems that only one variety of the four that we brought from the old house has actually survived, as all of the blooms so far are the same color pattern. I have a box full of additional iris bulb parts that I ran out of room for—I may find a spot in the yard this fall and plant them and see if any will still re-grow after a two-year vacation.

We did put in one small flower bed ourselves. About 8x2 along the side of the garage, with a basic brick-like concrete paver edging. The idea was to dress up a large square of boring vinyl siding (it’s the side of the garage, so there aren’t even windows). But we also filled it with perennials in bulb form, so we might not get many blooms this year. I'd share a picture, but right now it looks like dirt, literally. We planted clematis, peonies, bleeding heart, and callas. I still need to find a trellis or two for the clematis to climb.

We had more bulbs than we could use in that small space, so we added some to a small bed we have going in one corner of the backyard. That spot got an elephant ear, two more peonies, and a rhododendron that we planted last spring in a spot that will soon be covered with patio. The sad part is that we had all the various bulbs sititng in the garage for over a month, but every time we would have free time, it would rain (and/or nearly freeze). I suppose this is better than last year’s drought, assuming the plantlings still grow.

On the subject of too much rain and recurring near-freezing temperatures: the really lovely purple basil plant in my veggie garden seems done for. Nary a leaf left. The green basil looks precarious. Rosemary and oregano are happy as clams (except that clams would be really unhappy in a Midwestern veggie garden). Two tomatoes look sickly but not dead yet . The first wave of lettuce is starting to come in. I’m betting that we’re done with the near-freezing, as I sowed various pepper varieties directly in the garden (they would produce faster if I started them indoors earlier in the spring, but I always lose them in the transplanting process).

Project Backyard - Take 3

Being impatient, busy, and picky is not a good combination.

In round 2 of our patio/yard planning adventure, we had a very nice and seemingly very knowledgeable landscape designer come and draw a plan and give an estimate.  His plans for fixing drainage in the yard, for the plantings, and even somewhat for the patio itself.  But of course, there’s a catch.

Our yard has a couple of design challenges, and so far neither of the two contractors we’ve talked to have (in my opinion) adequately addressed one of those.  Our breakfast room is in the middle of the back of our house, and bumps back into the yard, with an additional bay-window-shaped bump. The glass door (currently a slider, though I’d like to swap it for a French door) is in the middle of the bay.  The threshold of the sliding door sits about 40” above the grass level.  That’s too high for a simple step or two down to a ground-level patio.  Our current, temporary, wood staircase required 5 steps down to the grass, and juts about 5-feet into the yard (remember that the whole breakfast room already juts into the yard).

In short, because of how our breakfast room sits on the back of the house, the stairs out of it to the yard cut the yard in two.  

The stamped-concrete contractor suggested we have a nicer set of decking steps built.  We could choose composite for the stairs, handrails that were vinyl or pvc (and these days those come in several colors that would coordinate nicely with the house). Great, except that what we end up with, looking down from above, is basically a 6ftx6ft square out of the middle of a section of patio that is approximately 12x12 (there would be another larger section of patio where we could actually put the table and grill). That’s a lot of concrete whose sole purpose seems to be making a focal point out of stairs, since the space around the stairs is too narrow to actually put furniture on.

The garden landscape designer basically suggested the same thing, except that he proposed to build the stairs themselves out of paver stones to match the proposed paver patio. So his 6ftx6ft chunk out of the middle of the 12x12 patio would be solid stone. And his way would leave this strange little 3 foot high by 3 foot wide by 7 foot long crawl tunnel under the bay window itself. (I'm sure the kids would be thrilled, but it's going to look silly from the side)

*sigh* With both guys, I told them that I hate the stairs and that I want something else. I didn’t mean just a different material. I don’t want to spend my money buying stairs and concrete for under the stairs. I want to actually sit there or grill there or have it look pretty. Patio with stairs taking up the middle doesn’t accomplish any of those objectives.

If we stick to the patio idea, the best option for "something else" is to make the patio in two levels. The higher level would be 2-3 steps down from the breakfast room, and would require building-up the space with fill dirt and a retaining wall. It would then step down 1-2 more steps to a lower patio off the side. Stairs would still be required, but would be split up, smaller, nothing quite so huge and dramatic and did-I-mention-huge. But building up a retaining wall and laying a patio on it is even more expensive than building giant stone monolithic stairs, and would trade the crawl-tunnel for a 4-5 foot ledge that the kids can jump off of (see, the door is 40" from ground level, but the yard slopes away from the house).  

On to plan C.  This time, a deck designer. If I’m going to give up a chunk out of the middle of our yard, I want it to be useful. I'm thinking a 12x12 deck off the breakfast room, with stairs off one side down to the patio (rather than toward the middle of the yard, further severing it in two).  The stairs would only need to be 36 or 48 inches wide, not 72, and that 12x12 foot space in the middle of the yard become seating area instead of a shrine to the stairs.

Then we call the garden landscaper back to re-work the stone patio at ground level (about 2/3 of the original patio, with no stairs), plus the rest of the grading, drainage, and trees that he proposed.  I am probably being overly optimistic that this will be the final iteration of our landscape design.

What I would really love at this point is for one of those tv shows to come in and make me a new yard in two days. The whole thing, start-to-finish, concept-to-bbq-party. Every communication with a contractor takes a full week—one week from initial contact to when they show up at your house, another week before you get a quote back, another week before they come back to discuss revising the plan. Maybe it would go faster if I didn’t work every day. But then, we wouldn’t be able to afford to pay for anything.

I should have started in January, and called everyone in the phone book at once. Maybe then we would have  hada nice yard in time for spring.  Because right now, I'm not sure we will get this pulled together before Memorial Day.

Project Backyard: The Beginning

Our house came with almost no landscaping. We have grass. A poorly done (and half-finished looking) raised garden bed on the front of the house.  A set of temporary stairs to get out of breakfast room and into the back  yard. There is a sprinkler system that has served to keep the grass alive, though one of the sprinkler heads was placed below the afore-mentioned breakfast room sliding door and therefore waters our temporary stairs as much as it waters as the yard. 

We did add a bunch of “trees” last year. By “tree” I mean “twig with roots”, most of which we lost to some combination of drought, excess water (ironically, from poor drainage around where the sump pump empties), and our lawn service’s mowers.  Guys on commercial mowers don’t recognize six-inch twigs as landscape features unless they are surrounded them with large patches of mulch or edging. Yes, we paid for mowers and not for trees—mowers were cheaper.

We have exactly  two trees that are bigger than a foot tall, and both are more bush-sized than tree size. Neither are in the front of the house. The raised garden bed and another small patch of yard between the driveway and the front steps both have some perennials, including irises that were divided from ones we grew at the old house (which in turn came from my mother-in-law’s garden in Iowa).  So the yard is not completely bare.

It is time for some landscape work. Actually, it’s way past time for some landscape work, but we finally have the financial resources to attempt something.

First up: the back yard. The temporary stairs need to go.  I would really like to move our patio table out of the garage (where it has been collecting random boxes of junk). I would like to grill in the backyard rather than the driveway. I’m sure our neighbors will appreciate that as well.

We don’t have a good idea what we want in the yard. Just a vague idea that it should look “nice” and “in keeping with the house”. We need trees. We need some privacy screening along one side of the house for noise and headlights from the nearby road. We need a place to sit, and a place to grill. We want to keep a large grassy area available.  We are not planning a large swing-set (as one kid doesn’t care to swing and the other will outgrow it all too soon), but do have one smaller climber to install and want room for the kids to play. We have kicked around the idea of someday putting in a pool, though we aren’t sure and the kids aren’t old enough for that yet. We love the idea of an outdoor kitchen or a screen room or a fire pit or any number of other fancy features, but kind of want  to take things in phases and not overspend right away.

We do not have a walk-out basement, but the breakfast room door is about four feet above the grade of the yard, and it is smack in the middle of the back of the house.  That makes part of the design harder. We could go with a low deck, or steps down to a patio, or some combination thereof. We could build it toward the street-side of the house so that the entertaining space is closer to the road (with some traffic sounds) and runs behind the family room. Or we could build it towards the opposite side of the house, farther from traffic but right next to our master bedroom windows. 

We are incapable of doing this job ourselves. Though at least one friend has told us how easy laying a paver patio is, we have neither the time off work, the brute strength and/or tools to dig and level that much sod, nor the inclination to spend our vacation time digging. We are definitely hiring this out.

Last night, we took our first baby step towards figuring this mess out: we had a concrete contractor come for an estimate. They do stamped and stained concrete work, which is a slightly less expensive alternative to pavers. We also like the look of pavers, but a poured concrete patio with a brick-or-stone look is a definite option, especially if it leaves room in the budget for more of the trees and possibly some drainage work, or a few new pieces of patio furniture. And it would take less time—only about two days rather than a week or more.

I was disappointed that the contractor expected us to know exactly where and how big and what shape we wanted—I wanted more design guidance and he wanted to measure.  I had no quarrel with the price that he quoted: the price-per-square foot was within what I had seen online, and though he quoted a much larger area than I had anticipated using, the price was reasonable.  Oddly, he was busy talking us away from more expensive options.  One of my biggest pet peeves among salespeople is ones who attempt to down-sell us.  Frankly, I want someone to let us dream big, and show us where we can maximize value (or where we can split a big job into pieces that can be spread across a couple of years so we aren’t financing everything).

Next up: calling an actual landscape designer or two. We probably should have started there.

Rain, Rain...come again another day

It is so dry here lately that two of my neighbors recently commented that they spent more on their water bills last month than their electric bills. That is impressive given the sheer number of 100+ degree days and the fact that AC aint cheap in that kind of weather.

We haven't crossed that line, as evidenced by the color of our lawn. Or what is left of our lawn. We have an inground sprinkler system, but large swaths of our grass are still dying because we water for only 15 minutes every other day (an excessive amount, in my opinion...if I have to have grass I would prefer it stay nice with maybe one sprinkling a week...stop laughing...)

The neighbors who are taking out mortgages with the water company? The ones with the lush green grass? Probably twice a day. (One was actively sowing grass seed while we chatted. Not sure he had any bare patches or that it would germinate in this heat, but what do I know). One side of our house benefits nicely from the runoff from our next door neighbor's daily watering (and probably the runoff of their fertilizer too, and the shadiness provided by two houses), so some of our grass is lush and green.

I just can't do it. Parts of St. Louis have been under mandatory or voluntary water conservation for a month or more. Not our little town, but still. I can't justify making my lawn lush during a severe drought so bad I've driven past huge fields of corn that are already brown in the field. What is the point? Green it up so I can have the pleasure of looking at it? So my son can trample through it and possibly dig it up with a toy shovel? So that we can have the pleasure of mowing more often in 90+ degree heat?

Sure, our part of the county tends to be floodprone and has some nearby natural wetlands (We have blue and white herons who regularly visit the pond that is behind our neighborhood). Living so close to confluence of three rivers (Missouri, Mississippi, and the Meramac) generally keeps the whole metro area humid and green even in the triple-digits temperatures of July and August. I imagine that water rationing seems kind of foreign with so much water around us.

I have been trying a few techniques for conserving some water. Silly, minor things like emptying the kids camp water bottles onto my flowers out front instead of down the sink (I figure that whatever gunk Trystan gets into his every day might even fertilize the plants). I put a bucket in the shower the other day and easily filled it with the excess water just from starting up the shower. But I am not sure that shower-temperature water was a good idea for the garden (too hot), and my husband objects to the bucket for aesthetic reasons (somewhere, perhaps, I have a less unsightly one that I used in college for toting shampoo to the dorm bathroom).

I have a water barrel sitting next to my veggie garden, and a kit to hook it into the closest downspout. (The kit is in the kitchen, still in the box) In our last house, I got my veggie garden to self-water with water barrel, soaker hose, and an automatic garden timer. I should feel guilty about not yet installing the one at the new house, except it hasn't rained anyway. I guess I could pour my shower water into that instead of straight on the plants.

Some small-minded part of me is half-hoping for mandatory water conservation to go into effect for us, just to watch those coddled lawns wither and die the day they shut off the sprinklers. Not because I dislike my neighbors, but because I think their watering choices are a tad selfish and short-sighted and that they won't recognize that until they are forced to face the reality of it. (Though I doubt they'd go down without a fight).

But really, I'm just hoping for rain. For all of us.

Our Garden in June

Our garden is growing beautifully, so far, and I think it looks very pretty. So I took pictures and made a quick and amateurish video slideshow of them. And you're the lucky audience. (Well, you and my future self, since I write this stuff for my own amusement). BTW, this is my first attempt at throwing pictures into a movie for the web, so please forgive the rough edges.

So far, most things are growing great. One tomato plant and one cucumber are attempting to take over the rest, and the watermelon plant at the other end has crept into the rock bed. By count, we have more pepper plants than anything else (combination of jalapeno, banana, and bell peppers), but they're slow to take off. I wonder if its not quite sunny enough for them, or if they're just later growers.

The rain barrel is working pretty well so far, but it has really low water pressure (just gravity). I recently removed the fancy irrigation system made from a kit and replaced it with a really long soaker hose looped around all the plants. The word "fancy" was a bit sarcastic. The kit was a nice idea, but it had some issues (like leaky connections that may have been the fault of the, ahem, installer). The soaker hose seems to be working, even with the low flow from the barrel. Its on a timer set for an hour a day, which seems to be working for now.

And we've been enjoying mini-harvests of beans, green onions, and lettuce (in the flower pots) for about two weeks now. Charlotte eats the peas right off the stalk. And this is the first year we've had ripe tomatoes before the 4th of July. Only a couple so far, and Charlotte has claimed most of those also.

Those Garden Photos

I'm sure I have more interesting things to talk about than my yard, but I seem to be misplacing quite a few things, including my brain. So rather than attempt to write something more clever, I'm posting pictures of my garden.

These are the "after" shots, which are really the "during" because there are quite a few things not quite finished. But you can see the rectangular raised garden bed that runs along one side of the patio, with newly planted vegetables (and seeds, and space for a few more things that aren't out yet).

At the corner of the house is the stone thing (pillar?) that my husband built to hold the rain barrel. The barrel itself is styled like an old-world terra cotta pot, but its plastic. We still don't have the downspout actually sending any water into the rain barrel, but I did get a basic irrigation system assembled this weekend (not in the photo, and also not actually attached to the rain barrel for lack of proper connectors and timer). So, yeah, large brown hollow plastic pot on a stack of rocks. Moving right along.

Tucked behind it up against the side of the house is our oh-so-pretty half-broken compost bin, which is starting the season off already half-full of old plant parts. I added grass clippings today (with the snow shovel, no joke), and I think the sedums (or never-dies as my MIL calls them) are actually growing inside the compost bin. Seriously, the dumb things are still green and perky. The never-dies are the plants at the corner of the patio, and are exceedingly hard to kill (even with 100 degree heat and no water) and very very fertile. They also have pretty flowers come late summer that attract butterflies and bees (pollinators!) by the dozens. If you want one, come on over and I'll pull a chunk back out of the compost bin...

And the astute observer may notice a slight variation in the edging to our new rock bed area. We had bricks around the edges of Patio Garden 1.0 which have been reused in Patio Garden 2.0, except there weren't quite enough, and they are no longer being sold. We bought a second type of brick edgers to fill in the gap, but didn't measure quite thoroughly, so we need a few more. And we need to finish setting the rest of what we have. But you should get the idea.

And on the theme of our plastic-and-concrete backyard, I have to point out that our raised garden bed walls are plastic, the stepping stones at the bottom of the deck stairs are made from recycled plastic garbage bags, our rain barrel is plastic, and our deck is Trex and white vinyl. And, yes, we used chunks of construction-debris concrete dug out of the yard as decorative stones in between the never-dies. All the man-made (and potentially carcinogenic if media is to be believed) materials make an amusing contrast to the organic soil, water conservation, and composting. Amusing to me, anyway :)

Our Garden

I have wanted to post pictures of my garden for the past week because I feel like showing off the little outdoor renovation that our whole family (yes, even the 3-year old) worked hard at the past few weekends.  But somehow getting the right camera to the right computer with some time on my hands hasn’t really happened yet.

 

You’ll just have to take my words for it. These words.

 

We used to have a perennial bed that ran along one side of our concrete patio.  I installed the bed myself almost ten years ago and was pretty pleased with it for about five years.  It was edged with concrete bricks, topped with pretty river rock around an assortment of hardy plants (including one my mother-in-law calls “never-dies” because they don’t).  It was great. But the best landscape fabric in the world doesn’t stop dirt and fallen plant material from composting into new soil around the rocks, and the past few years the thing has been a sea of weeds (mainly grass, which I consider a weed).  And somewhere around the 2004, coincidentally, the same year that Charlotte was born, I ran out of time to garden.

 

With the help of the kids, we painstakingly removed all of the rocks from the garden bed and piled most of them in our wheelbarrow.  They didn’t all fit.  The rest got dumped on the patio and a couple of empty flower pots.  There were a LOT of rocks.  We removed the edgers, and dug out the plants, tossed the remains of the landscape fabric, and found more rocks.  Those suckers were everywhere.  They’d worked their way under the fabric, around the fabric, into the grass, deep into the dirt.  We spent a week panning for stones in soil. 

 

Three-year olds are quite good at digging in dirt for rocks, by the way.  The trouble is convincing them not to throw the rocks, or to put them in the sandbox, or right back into the dirt.  Luckily three-year olds are also washable.

 

In place of the old perennial bed, we added a raised garden from a pair of kits.  The sides are plastic and snapped together to make a single 4 x 12 rectangle, to which we added bagged garden soil.  Around 14 cubic feet.  Bags of dirt are very heavy, by the way.

 

The rocks and smaller pieces of those perennials were relocated to another side of the patio, between the corner of the new veggie bed and the base of the steps to the deck.  This is where I need a photo.  The rocks plus a couple of stepping stones we already had make for a little path that connects the stairs, the patio, and the grass beyond.  And those never-dies are great at attracting bees and butterflies in the summer (pollinators!).

 

In yesterday’s mist and gloom, Charlotte and I planted the veggie bed.  Some were from Home Depot, some sown as seeds, and some brought from school where Char’s class is also talking about gardens.  We planted strawberries, cucumbers, tomatoes, snow peas, green onions, jalapenos, banana peppers, and watermelons.  And what Char believes are two marigolds.  I have enough space left for a few more plants, and a pile of bell pepper seeds still in the kitchen.  I’m hoping that dreary weather will be good for the transplants, with no bright sunlight to burn the leaves, plus free watering.

 

As part of this, we also relocated our compost bin to a spot on the corner of the house right near the veggie patch.  It was out of commission last year after losing its real estate to a swing set, and needed a little duct tape to keep the sides steady.  But really, its just a glorified trash can, so it doesn’t have to look pretty.  We also bought a rain barrel this spring, and my husband built a short stone platform for it to raise it up off the ground to allow gravity to help the water flow out of it.

 

We have a few to-do’s left.  I have an irrigation kit to install (it’s been in the garage for a couple of years now because it was too linear to fit any of our previous spaces well). It will be connected to the rain barrel with a timer.  And we need to fix up the downspout to fill the rain barrel correctly.  I think a pair of tin snips are in order. 

 

Overall, I’m really happy with the space.  It looks fresher than it has in a long time, and the garden space is huge compared to the spots I’ve tried in the past.  Now, though, the concrete of our patio looks stained and cracked and generally ugly.  We also have plans to buy an outdoor storage box/mini shed to hide under the deck for storage, and I would like some new patio chairs to replace white plastic one that are now permanently gray.  One step at a time.

 

The day the tomato plants die.

The first frost date in my area is typically around mid-October. That is the end of the growing season. The day the tomato plants die.

Here we are in mid-November, and I don't think we've actually had a true freeze. I'm not complaining. But boy are all the plants confused. Some of the trees that lost their leaves early are now budding. I saw one near our church that was about to sprout new spring leaves. I cut fresh roses the other day, and have a few more I could bring in. We have a bumper crop of cherry tomatoes that are ripening in the garden. And several peppers-one bell, lots of poblanos. Yes, poblano peppers in November. In St. Louis.

I am afraid that we'll pay a heavy price for all the mild weather once winter finally arrives.

My Garden

My husband and I are at odds over the yard.

He tries valiantly to cut and maintain a lush carpet of green grass
every year. He does the mowing himself, and likes to hire a service to
do all the bug/weed/fertilizer spraying. And in general, we end up with
nice looking grass.

That is, if you like that sort of thing. For me, I'm not a grass fan.
Grass requires more maintenance than my rose bushes, and its flowers
aren't exactly colorful. Nor can you eat it, unless you're a cow.

It gets into everything, especially my flower beds. Grass is the worst
weed in our yard. The only way I've been able to kill grass that has
infiltrated my garden beds is by waiting till winter and spraying the
whole bed with Roundup, hoping that I'm not damaging dormant perennials.

And removing chunks of sod to add a new bed is backbreaking,
hand-blistering work. I know, I do a lot of it myself. I've tried
using roundup and/or weed fabric + mulch to get rid of the grass without
actually digging it out of the beds, and it just comes back. Usually
right in the middle of a plant where I can't spray it with weed killer.

I spent a lot of time outside this weekend working on the garden. Note
I don't say "working on the yard". I filled in vacant beds with flowers
(I seem incapable of choosing a plant that doesn't flower or produce
edible fruit), removed a small dead tree and replaced it with a pair of
raspberry bushes, transplanted a small volunteer pine tree out of one of
my flower beds, and set up the hanging baskets on our front porch with
fresh coconut liners and petunias. I love petunias in hanging baskets.
That volunteer pine tree was added to a newly-dug bed and flanked by a
pair of evergreen shrubs (wait, those aren't edible...but neither is the
pine tree and it needed friends).

I also started to dig grass out from under a new set of stepping stones
that lead from the sidewalk to our front door, to set them into the
ground better (I am not a fan of house walks that lead only to the
driveway--as if every visitor must arrive by vehicle and never by foot).
The stones are made out of recycled grocery bags and look really nice,
though I need one more--they were sold in 3-packs though. So I may be
making my own stepping stone to fill the gap (a nice mosaic tile one
with the house numbers or kiddo hand prints maybe).

I gave up quickly on digging out the grass under them. It's a huge
pain. And I didn't have any sand to help level the bumpy clay left once
the grass was gone. Instead, I proposed to my husband that we just turn
that whole side of the front yard into a large planting bed. He wasn't
too keen on killing that much grass. Alas.