Edging Done...

... for the gravel path surrounding the raised garden beds.

First, I dug a narrow trench; I marked guide "holes" at the end and the middle, and then set to work:

After digging the trench, I carried the stones back over (you may remember that this is where they WERE before I moved them across the yard... back again) and laid them out:

I was careful to choose only stones with a relatively flat edge, as I hope to have the edge flush with the grass for easy mowing.

I chose NOT to use landscaping fabric for two reasons (actually... three):
1) It's made of plastic, and I don't want to add more. (Please ignore the landscaping fabric in the fire circle... it was installed 2 years ago).
2) It isn't fool proof; see fire pit from two years ago.
3) It's expensive.

I'll line under the gravel with heavy sheets of newspaper; the edging stones will just have to accept grass growing between them.

Here is the finished edge; now I need to remove about an inch of soil between the edge and the beds to make room for two inches of gravel.

We are trying to decide between straight 3/8 inch crushed rock, and between the 3/8 minus (or breeze) rock that creates more of a hard packed path. Also trying to decide on color... I'm thinking grey would be nice. Not buttery yellow... but maybe rose/red. It's the cheapest. Seems funny to be buying rocks... especially since I see craigslist adds of people giving away landscaping rocks all the time. It's usually the 3/4 to 1 1/2 inch rocks, though... the kind that don't make a nice path... or pea gravel, which I am not a big fan of.

More Stone Beds

Three more stone garden beds, in a neat row (you can see the EVIL bush poking up over the fence- what IS it?):


The dogs knocked over a stone on the last one by playing body-slam tag into the wall right before I took the picture; I hadn't filled the cracks with stones chips yet. Funny pups never even blinked! I'll assume that the stone wasn't a good match for that spot, and replace it with another. The beds are generally steady and firm; filling with dirt/compost/manure will help their stability as well. I wouldn't recommend stacking these stones THREE deep in a single stone wide wall.

Each bed is approximately 4 feet wide, and 8 feet long, with a 2 foot path between each and along the fence. I ran out of newspaper, and so only covered the edges of the beds; I will fill in with massive quantities of newspaper later to smoother the grass poking up in the middle of each. One more bed to go!

Any Idea What THIS Evil Plant Is?

This plant/bush/vine has been terrorizing me for 5 years. It seemed innocuous enough when we moved in, just a nice bush with small pinky purple flowers drifting over the neighbor's fence. Then, it started to take over the yard.

You can see a bit of it coming over the neighbor's fence in yesterday's pictures... and here's a few old ones of it at it's finest:

(complete with garter snake and small purple flower)

(complete with fuzzy puppy who is stalking the garter snake).

The growth you can see appears to be second year growth... the first year's growth appears to be non-woody and have much larger leaves. The bush has runner type roots. I can pull or dig a plant up as far as I can, but I won't have gotten it all. A few weeks ago, I went all out and clipped EVERY bushlet in my yard down and painted each remained stumplet with stump killer. Last week, those stumplets were covered in new green growth.

Save me from the bush!

What is this plant?

Our First Iris!

Found this beauty in our garden the other day. It's the first bloom on our iris plants from 2 years ago.

Iris are one of my favorite flowers... and so easy to grow, even in a quasi desert! Almost half of the plants have blooms now... most are some variation of purple. I can't wait until they need dividing again!

The Best Laid Plans... (Backyard Plans)

Here are our two sketched backyard plans. They aren't completely to scale... we realized that the backyard is considerably shorter in the second plan. The width is right, as is the garage, and general size and location of the patio. The trees are marked with "A" (Ash), "S" (Spruce), "A" (Apple), "E" (Elm), "T" (Tree). North is at the top of the page, as standard, the house is at the bottom of the page. Right now, all of the stone has moved to the area inside the curved line along the fence on the west. Constants between the two plans are likely permanent, or already constructed features.

Here is the FIRST plan:


Here is our SECOND plan:


Plan Two didn't have as much care put into drawing or labeling. Pity the second child.

We are leaning towards plan TWO, as in retrospect I feel the veggie gardens (VG) will do better on the eastern side of the yard. Any thoughts?

Just to Make You Smile...

... here's a few spring flower pictures. I just love spring flowers!

The Invading Elms

We have 7 mature elm trees on our city lot... and probably 15 juveniles that I regularly chop down. These 15 trees are trees growing where trees shouldn't grow... between the house and driveway, in the middle of flower beds, and HERE:

... in the middle of our shrubbery. The light colored branches are the elm. I have chopped this tree down at least 3 times. The last time I even carefully dabbed stump killer on the cut stumps, to no avail. It takes about 3 months to create the kind of growth you see in the picture... if I miss even a week of chopping down suckers, it's over. I just spent 2 hours chopping down this and the rest of the elms invading our shrubs... and dabbed a bit more stump killer on, but I suspect that it won't work this time, either. I like the shrub, and don't want to kill it. Any suggestions?

Out of the Ashes...

This crocus is blooming in the empty hole left by my fallen crabapple tree. I'd planted a few last fall and forgotten about them... what a nice surprise!

Garden Work

Here's what my front flower gardens looked like all winter:



I went to work with a garden rake, a pair of bypass clippers, and a weeder, and after an hour or two the gardens looked like THIS:




Look at all the greenery poking up! I crunched up most of the leaves covering the beds over the winter, and mulched around with leave bits; this will allow the leaves to break down into nutrients faster, and it presents a neater appearance to the beds. I can't wait until it's time to get in there and start dividing up the older perennials!

Lilac Mayhem and Rejuvenation

Our tiny old house came with a HUGE OVERGROWN LILAC BUSH. Two beloved pet ratties and a young robin are buried under this bush.



It has seven or eight thick old trunks that have been chopped off about 3 to 4 feet up, giving it the appearance of a bundle of wood. I have only seen one flower on it in the four springs we have been here. After much pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth (and research), I decided to "start over" with the lilac. This time of year is perfect for lilac rejuvenation:



Here is the lilac bush now (with a visitor who loves the camera and wouldn't stay away). I removed ALL of the thick, old stems with a sharp pruning saw. This is NOT recommended if you would like lilac blooms anytime in the next three years, as it takes three years for a stem to produce flowers. If your lilac is in better health/structure than mine, I would recommend taking off 1/3 of the branches each year right after blooming instead of this drastic haircut.

Hopefully, my lilac bush will become a contributing member of our backyard garden now. Lilacs can be beautiful bushes!

Death of a Tree

Just a few short months ago, I posted a beautiful picture of crap apple blossoms; I mentioned that it might be the last time the tree ever bloomed. How right I was.

It was VERY windy this afternoon. The wind blew and blew, with gust in the 50 mph's. The wind was so strong and loud that we never heard it fall. I stepped outside to get the mail, and the tree was lying on the ground.



Poor tree. I'm not surprised it fell; I'm surprised it held on this long. You can see that the trunk is completely rotted around the base, save for one small bit of live wood that was feeding the current blooms.

Hopefully the downy woodpeckers babies living in the woodpecker hole are fully fledged...

and have already flown away. This is the second year they have made a home in our crabapple; it's been quite a few weeks since we first noticed them this year, so I have some hope. They drilled this nest last year, about the time we noticed that half of the tree had died (and they were the reason we didn't remove the entire tree when we had our trees trimmed).

I didn't hear their soft cheeping when I tried to listen; but the wind was very loud.

Gardening

I spent the day out in the garden, weeding and transplanting. I love the feeling of cool earth under my fingers, of coaxing small plants into living. Brown thumb be damned... I'll grow something yet!

Here's my newest flowerbed... it went from this:



to this:



with the help of some iris (transplanted at the wrong time so it won't flower this year), woolly thyme, magenta ice plant, and two unknown wildflowers from my wildflower garden.

I planted a few seeds in the bare spots...



Poppies and snow-in-summer. Both will tolerate drought and HOT, sunny conditions. Perfect for that little spot!

I cleared out the wildflower garden in the front of dead matter, dandelions, and the MILLIONS of tiny trees that had taken root...



Oh, and the grass that is still sure that it belongs in THERE instead of on the bare spots in my yard...



Getting ready for summer!

Dug...

and dug and dug and dug and dug.

And dug.

And hauled dirt. And dug.

More later. After beer.

Found a Blue String...

attached to my apple tree.




I followed it up the tree...



to a bird nest!



Now, who is making their home in my apple tree?

April Showers Bring April Flowers

We've had lots of snow and rain for the past few weeks... here's what's popping up!


Grape Hyacinth


Delicate, early blooming star shaped tulips


Pansies!


Bright, fiery tulips


My crabapple tree blooming for possibly it's last spring. Every spring, another limb doesn't emerge from winter... soon there will be nothing left. It is old and gnarled; half of it is gone already. It makes me sad to think of it's eventual demise, but I'm rejoicing in it's flowers this spring.

This Weekend's Projects

This weekend, we worked on sundry and miscellaneous outdoor tasks.

First, we trimmed the bushes:


I'm going to extend the stone barrier (on the left) all the way down to our garage; I'm trying to decide what to do about the gaps between the bushes. (You can't see the additional 3 bushes to the right of the picture, but they continue the line down to the garage). I'm thinking of putting up some fencing of some sort (picket or wrought iron... whatever I can find for free) just between the bushes (to continue the line), and then planting flowers on our side.

Then, we attacked the wood pile; we made quite a dent, and have a lot of wood for fires this summer.

Before:


After (not quite done):


Our wood pile NOW:


Finally, we faced the garage, spurred on by Chile's challenge of garage decluttering.

As you may remember, this is the garage before (several months ago):


You can see previous efforts here and here...

Here's what we accomplished today:

Hiking and camping gear hung on nails, organized, and stored in storage tubs we already owned.


An open space cleared by freecycling a large quantity of items we didn't need, but hadn't gotten rid of yet. Here's to more usable space... just in time for summer!

Made Another Flowerbed...

Here is the patch of dirt between our driveway and our neighbor's driveway. There are bushes that line most of this strip... but the front 2 feet is bare dirt.



I dug out most of the soil, and edged it with some of the rubble stone (limestone that is almost marble) that we are using for our garden edging.



I plan on planting a bunch of daylilies, iceplants, and bulbs in here... nice, big invasive plants that will fill in nicely.

Cost: $0

Materials:
Compost- Our Compost Pile
Stone- Father-in-law's scrap pile

Our New Compost Pile in No Man's Land

In honor of Chile's new challenge, "Cut the Crap - DECLUTTER", I finally finished a project started last summer! I built a compost pile and wood pile in the space we call "no man's land" between our garage and the fence.



I used pallets salvaged from the city recycling center to create a frame for the compost pile... I'm starting the compost on one side and finishing it on the other. The pallets had been sitting around since last spring... just waiting.

There's more wood for the pile in the backyard... it just needs cut down to size and stacked. Lazy summer nights around our fire-pit, here we come!

By the way, the red garage is NOT our garage; I just noticed that big hole in it today. I'll have to patch it for them since they can't see it! (It's the property line).

Mowed the Lawn Today...

With my brand new Brill Luxus pushmower!



I really like it... it is quiet, easy to push, and doesn't jar my shoulders like holding onto our gas powered mower. I think it is even easier to push and control than our self-propelled mower is! I love how it leaves the clippings right on the lawn for mulch. The only downside I found is that it is somewhat uneven on our VERY bumpy and uneven lawn. I am hoping that as we fill in the bare spots, this will go away... however, I'm not in the manicured lawn club, so I will use it even if it doesn't give a perfect clip!

I went around the hole yard with my hand weeder pulling dandilions. 56 dandilion carcasses later, I was ready to aerate the lawn with a hand aerator...



The tool (I used a Turf Hound Aerator) looks like a small pitchfork with really hefty tines. You walk across your yard, stepping down every 6 inches on the aerator. We saw marked improvement in our lawn quality and in the germination of the grass seed last fall after we did this; it seems like a great and easy way to make your lawn healthier (and thus more drought resistant).

We threw down another 3 lbs of drought resistant grass seed into the few bare areas that didn't germinate last fall... (one is in the picture above).

One lawn, prepped for summer!

Crocus!

This morning while browsing through some of my favorite blogs, I noticed everyone's crocuses were coming up. Aimee has gorgeous, saturated yellow crocuses in her flower beds, and Jen and her dogs have beautiful purple and white crocuses scattered through their yard. Minhus even talked about the emerging spring flowers in her garden... and posted some gorgeous cut flowers.

I was feeling a little left out, a little lonely in my flowerless existence. No spring flowers for me.

Then I stepped outside to get the mail... and saw THIS:

My very first spring flower... a bright yellow crocus. It makes me want to SING! Definitely worth the $40 I spent on bulbs last fall.