Plugging Away-- and Getting Plugged

Just a little progress report.  All garden related, of course.

My friend brought the tomatoes he promised to give me to church this morning.  One "Italian Goliath,"

one "Red Brandywine,"

one "Brandymaster,"

and one miscellaneous cherry.  Just now they're all leggy seedlings in 8 oz. yogurt cups.  The "Red Brandywine" broke on the way home, which is too bad, since I like me a Brandywine tomato.  But maybe it can be nursed and recover.

They won't get planted for awhile, though:  Over the years the garden bed that I'm rotating the tomatoes to has gotten so mounded up with soil amendments that it's more than a foot higher at the center than at the edges.  And the beds in the round vegetable garden aren't that big.  It needs to be levelled off before anything goes into it.  Oh, yeah, and it needs weeded before that.

Which didn't happen this afternoon or evening.  What did happen is more digging and spading of dirt off the bare places in the front lawn, where the nutsedge is emerging where I dug it out before.  Not as thickly yet as before, but still there.  It's very depressing having to deal with this, such a waste of time and topsoil, too, but what can you do?

Finished cutting up sticks and shifting leaves from the part of the open compost pile I began cleaning off yesterday.

There was a little finished compost at the bottom of it, which I spread on the new planting bed in the front garden.

At least, I think it was compost.  May have just been a mounded bit of topsoil.

Whether or no, after that it was time to make a new compost pile where that bit had been.  Didn't have a lot of "green" material, unless you count the Virginia creeper I pulled off the fence.

Organic parfait

Instead I made layers of grassy sod and leftover unmulched leaves.  Yeah, I know you're not supposed to put dirt in the compost heap. But what else am I supposed to do with all those turves?

A lot of the leaves I was using for that I shook off the branches and sticks that came off the limb that fell down last year.  There weren't too many large ones left on the pile to cut up for kindling today, so I just took the leaf rake and drew the leaf residue off the old pile to use it on the new.

Where things got left, in a hurry

Or I did until some apparent residents of the old pile took exception to this disturbance. First I knew of it was when something  tried to fly up my right nostril.  I sniffed out violently and tried to bat it away, whereupon it stung me twice on my nose right above the lip, on the septum.  Ow!

Quick but careful removal of self into the house-- don't want to be precipitous and trip on the porch stairs-- all the time hoping it wasn't a honeybee, since their stingers remain in and you have to tweeze them out.  Quick, find the baking soda and make a poultice with water.  Dab it on the affected area . . .  know one looks like an idiot, but never mind.  It kept the swelling down where the creature plugged me, and within five minutes the pain was gone too.

Returned to the scene of the incident, though not to do any more raking.  Yellowjackets, it was.  There were still three or four hovering around.  Not going to mess with that pile again until I've consulted the exterminator.

So as much as I wanted to get that pile turned for the first time in three years, it was time to drop it and do something else instead.

Like plant the Berberis thunbergii "Crimson Pygmy" barberry I bought Thursday night from the Outside Lawn & Garden department at work.  I was thinking I needed a reddish specimen in front of the right-hand Alberta spruce . . . but one will do, since my neighbor to the east has four or five or these.

She was out in her front yard, too, while I was planting this.  I told her about the yellowjacket sting.  I mean, I didn't expect to go into anaphylactic shock from it, never have before, but I know some people develop that reaction when they get older.  So in case I suddenly quit breathing and keeled over . . .

I didn't.  I finished getting the red barberry into the ground and went on to transplant a few volunteer Blackeyed Susans into the little strip next to the Siberian iris at the toe of the slope to the sidewalk.

Still so much to do, but the light ran out.  It'll all get done-- eventually-- if I keep plugging away at it.  At this rate I should be able to go back to working on the inside of the house by, oh, late September or so.

It Never Fails

Well, after studying over it and contem- plating it and poking at it ever since Memorial Day week- end, I put in a plant order with Wayside Gardens early this morning.

Was not that easy a process.  The biggest hassle was trying to come up to the minimum order to qualify for free shipping while incorporating only plants that'd make the biggest impact.  If I were flush with cash I would gladly have sailed on past that benchmark and loaded up on shrubs and perennials at up to 70% off.  But no.  Even as it is, I'm making this order on faith that this investment will turn out to be worth it later.  Made my final decisions early Thursday morning and was ready to submit my order, once I would receive the free-shipping promo code they were supposed to send me via email for signing up on the site.  But there was some sort of hitch and the code never came.  Waited two days, and by last night some of the plants I wanted were sold out.  Annoying.  I'd get even more annoyed, except that my computer has been working really slowly lately and my email software is even worse.  It's just possible that the registration message to Wayside never got out.

Never mind.  The plants I wanted most were still available, and I came up with replacements for the ones I couldn't get.  And found another promo code via a Google search that was better than the one I was trying to get before.

So the order is on its way, as of 1:55 this morning (I know it is; I got the confirmation).  It includes

• (2) Berberis "Helmond Pillar" European barberry shrubs (to flank the gate from the back yard on the east side of the house)



• (3) "Royal Candles" speedwell plants 

(3) "Blacknight" Alcea rosea hollyhock plants (as I pursue my never-ending quest for something tall for the back of the front border)

(3) "Millennium" Allium ornamental onion plants

(1) "Ostbo Red" Kalmia latifolia mountain laurel shrub (Pennsylvania's state flower-- this'll go over by the west fence, probably where the useless woodpile now is), and

(1)  Asteromea mongolica Kalimeris double Japanese aster.

All at very good end-of-season closeout prices.

So this noon I walk over to our town's annual Garrison Day fair, and I make a point of visiting the booths that have plants for sale.  Got a new rosemary plant (to replace my old potted one I underwatered and killed over the winter) and some basil seedlings at one.  But at this same booth what else did I see?  Three (count 'em, 3) "Blacknight" Alcea rosea hollyhock plants, in gallon pots, for sale for a buck less each than the pint-potted ones I ordered last night.  It never fails!

Just for a moment, I considered running home and calling to see if I could cancel that part of my order, and replace them with something else to keep the discount, and . . .  No, forget it.  What's done is done.  

A grassy mess

And on a brighter note, what else is done as of this afternoon is rooting the grass out of the ground- cover roses and the ornamental deadnettle in the front border.  Figured I should do that before I plant anything more.  It's true the thorns will get you if they can, but I discovered that if you pull the trailers aside with a hand-held garden fork, the weight of the handle will keep them out of the way as you weed.  So the flower bed got a hair cut.

Gradually pulling it clean

Cleaned up

And I got the first third of the open compost heap turned.  Which is to say I pulled the brush off it and cut up the sticks to give to a friend to use for kindling.  Got too dark to do anything else this evening.

The compost heap is next to the fence.  The pile in front of it is turves from the front yard.

Kindling

What else?  I picked up a used thatch rake Thursday afternoon but haven't used it yet, and the trash haulers took the bags of nutsedge-contaminated soil I put in the trash to go to the landfill (not into the borough compost pile!).  So far, so good.

What I'm hoping now is that the plant order takes its time getting here.  I have so much to do before I can get them in.  And I still have those lupines, and the broccoli and eggplant I bought in May to plant, and the herbs I got today at the fair.  Not to mention the vegetable beds have to be cleared for seeds, and tomorrow I'm getting some tomato plants from the guy the kindling is going to.  So much to do, and I'm still fighting nutsedge in the front garden, and well, you know, life is so comic that the Wayside order will probably show up the day after tomorrow.  It never fails.

Marking Boundaries

Gratuitous existing front border shot

I don't need to tell chronic house renovators how often one can make a reasoned, cerebral decision regarding phasing on a particular project, then suddenly change one's mind for any reason or none at all.

In my case, I'd decided to put off doing much planting in my new front garden bed until the path and seating area could be done. But then I came across a really good sale on plant materials at Wayside Gardens' online store, which included items I've wanted for years.  Should I?  Could I?  Would I be more foolish to spend the money on plants now, or crazier to wait and risk the things I wanted not being available in the future?

I've been leaning towards doing it . . . provided I can come to a decision on the minimum amount of plant material to qualify for the free shipping offers that seem to come and go on the site . . .  But if I'm going to go through with it, I have to know exactly where I can put the shrubs and perennials I might be getting.

Which means defining where the shrubs and perennials won't get put.  So this afternoon out I went with the tape measure, the string, and a handful of millwork off cuts to use for stakes, to lay out the area that will be paved.

Since I'm working with curves I had to use a lot of stakes, and I ran out before I got to the other side of the bed.  Had to use metal plant stakes, and broken-off paint stirrers (which don't stand up too well). It has occurred to me that those pieces of 5/8" painted quarter round I put out for the Large Item Pick-Up three or four weeks ago could have been cut up for layout stakes.  And plant stakes, too, for that matter.  Oh, well.  Inutiles regrets.

Didn't take too long to get the general shape down and marked, a couple hours or so, though I had to tweak the shape of the path a time or two.

I tested the width with my lawn mower, and initally it wasn't wide enough.  No problem, move the stakes and shift the line over.

Once the stakes were in the right position, took the string and marked the line on both sides.

Frankly, I wish there was a longer path in relation to the size of the seating area, but it is what it is.  And how I pave it will make a difference.  Right now, my hope and dream is to do the paving in flagstones.  If I can get them free from some friend or acquaintance's land, all the better.  But that means the boundary line doesn't have to be precise.  And I want the flag at the west end to intrude into the grass past the brick border.

It'll also need a teeny-tiny "retaining wall" at the south edge, since the ground slopes as much as 6" in the 6' or so this area will be wide.  Rough ashlar limestone blocks?  Or nice Beaver County breadloaf-sized roundy rocks?  Whatever's cheaper!

Once the paving area was laid out, I had just enough time before getting changed for work to move the brick border to reflect the bigger radius I scribed and grubbed out yesterday.  This time I broke the line where the path will emerge, so only a couple non-matching bricks were needed.  Nice.

I think the enlarged curve looks a lot better.  What do you think?

Stripping in Public, Again

Last time I had a post with this title, it was the summer of 2008 and it involved standing on my screened-in back porch removing the finish from pieces of wood trim.  It still gets a lot of hits, probably not from people looking to find out about on woodwork refinishing.  The way people's minds work!  Though come to think of it . . . Oh, never mind.

Anyway, this time I was stripping in public again, in broad daylight.  In the front yard.  The dead brown thatch and the unneeded clumps of grass had to come off the new planting bed, and I did what had to be done.  And after three or four days of effort (seems longer!), the area is stripped.  Denuded.  Bare.

Well, all except for the spotted spurge and the sorrel that has opportunistically covered a lot of the ground I deturfed last autumn.   And yes, I'm still digging out the nutsedge, wherever it pops up its head(s).

Monday morning

Project took a good part of the past two days, not including what I stripped off the last weekend in May.  My good pointy-ended steel trowel turns out to work really well for getting leverage under the old grass roots.  Though sometimes it was easier if I stood up and hacked it with the hoe.  I'm not sure if it was easier with the songs that kept going through my head . . .  "The Farmer in the Dell" and "Oats, Peas, Beans, and Barley Grow" as earworms are bad enough.  But when you get the "Ode to Billy Joe" going on your cerebral MP3 player starting the morning of the 3rd of June and can't get it to stop for the next two days . . .  Well, maybe it did help.  You stab and pry the roots of the unwanted grass all the harder, just to compensate for the annoyance.

Early Monday afternoon

Where I left it late Monday afternoon

Found a few interesting things as I stripped thatch and grass.  Not artifacts, no.  No buried gold.  (*Sigh*)  But natural history, like evidence of the tree the previous owners took out of the yard way before I bought the house.

Decaying tree root

And bits of brick that tell me this was to some extent fill dirt (ok, that is an artifact) and not native soil.  And most interesting, a deep tunnel, too deep for me to get my arm to the bottom of it, extending down into the earth from the depression where a mother rabbit had her babies in the front yard two years running.  A warren?  Had no idea it was there.  Dumped dirt and more dirt down it, and I hope it won't sink in.

Rabbit hole.  Yeah, this is a picture of a hole in the ground.

Tuesday-- the last of it before the last of it.

Got the last of the unwanted grass up at around 3:20 this afternoon.

Gone!   (Barring the spurge, of course)

But it wasn't time to go in and wash up. No.  Because I'd been contemplating how the line of the new planting bed looked in the gener neighborhood landscape.  Overall, the shape of it seemed well enough.  But the more I looked at it, the more I saw that the 4' radius quarter-circle that swung off what's left of the straight front border was just too tight and finicking.  So out again came the tape measure, the stakes and the string, and I replaced the initial arc with one with a radius of 6'-6". Pulled the grass off that new sliver, but as for moving the bricks to redefine the border, that has to wait for another time.

Revised radius

Dare I admit that I bought two purple lupine plants last Sunday after church?  And that I have hopes of getting them in in the next couple of days, not to mention the broccoli and the eggplant?

Hopes-- or delusions.  Well, we'll see.

Stripped for action!

Visions-- and Realities

Even before early 2008 when I laid out the crape myrtle bed beside the two steps down to the front sidewalk I've had an idea.  A dream.  If I wanted to be grandiose, I'd say I've had a Vision.  It was to pull up a third to a half of the front lawn in a great curvaceous triangle and convert it to a landscaping bed.  With a footpath winding through it for the lawn mower, the postman, and the neighborhood kids.  And a little paved seating area just big enough for a bistro table and and chair or two, to make up the lack of a front porch to sit out on on summer evenings.

But I had such nice grass it would be a pain and a shame to pull it up, and besides, I didn't have the money.  So a dream it remained.

But this past summer of 2012, that dry summer of 2012, I stinted on watering the lawn.  Economizing.  My sprinkler attachment wasn't working right anyway, and I didn't want to spring for a new one.  But the Scott's guy were still coming round to do the treatments, and at the height of the dryness he applied fertilizer or weed killer or both and over half the yard fried out and turned yellow.

No, I didn't call up Scott's to gripe about it.  Never got around to it.  But eventually, I knew, I'd have to get around to deciding what to do about my largely-dead lawn.  Happily, most of the brown places were where I wanted the shrubs and perennials and things.  Was it time to landscape on some scale, or should I just reseed the lawn?

Whatever I determined, I figured it wouldn't hurt to get rid of the dead grass.  Started the process last November.

Pretty pathetic.  I used to have grass.

That was all for 2012

Was hoping to get it all stripped and amend the soil and maybe overseed it, last winter.  But it was too cold and dark in the evenings and I had other things I could do inside.

So come this spring when the lawn didn't revive on its own, I figured it was now or never.  High time to do the landscaping, though very much on the cheap.  Still, I didn't do anything tangible about it for several weeks.  I had the idea I wanted to design it all out in AutoCAD.  Theoretically could have.  My student-edition AutoCAD license expired in December 2008, but I've got a free download drawing program, DraftSight, on my computer.  But, gulp! it's been so long that I can't remember the blinking commands.  And my computer is so slow it's hard to load the program, let alone use it.  In fact, I haven't done any machine drawing these past few years with anything but SketchUp.  Nothing wrong with SketchUp per se; it'd be cool to lay out my front garden in 3D.   But that'd mean measuring and reckoning elevations and slopes, which I simply have no time to do.  Nevertheless, three or four weeks ago I got out there with the tape and documented some of the existing conditions in the front border  I even pulled out my AutoCAD course textbook to refresh my skills.

But a couple Saturdays ago, as I mentioned in the previous post, I came across a good deal on eggplant and broccoli plants at an area grocer.  Why not put them in the front yard, where it's sunny and the dog won't get them?  The day after, Sunday the 19th, something switched on in my pea brain and I thought, why bother with a drawing?  Why not just get out there and do it?  Or maybe I didn't think.  I just gathered up my steel tape measure, a couple of garden spikes, and a roll of string and started scribing arcs in the dead-and-alive grass of my pathetic front lawn.

Came off the existing border towards the west end

As I went I took the hoe and made the arcs good and obvious.

Note tape measure and string

Petered out before I hit the sidewalk.  Hit a tough clump of grass and left it till later.

Just for fun, pulled out the first few bricks and  set them on the ground to mark the new line.

The following Saturday the 25th I took the hoe and started hacking out divots along the scribed line.  Only got so far before the dryness of the soil, the stubbornness of some of the grass, and a weird hitch in my right hip got the better of my persistence.  I quit digging till it would rain again.

Carts and carts full of divots.  It only gets worse.

Cut the grass in the new bed short.  Maybe it'll die and be easier to remove.

Still, I didn't see any harm in beginning the edging.  A line of bricks has defined the front border for years before I got here.  They look perfectly fine, so why not reuse them?  And why not just sink them flush in the earth the way the previous owners did?  True, they do tend to let the grass stolons into the flower beds, but it's not like they heave or anything.  Why make a big deal of it?

So I pried more bricks out of the old border and laid them along to make the new one, until it got too dark to continue.

The next day, Sunday the 26th, I laid in more bricks for the new border, till all the ones in the former border were used.

Last one!

Almost there.

And then I borrowed my neighbor's edger.  Why?  Because until I had a clean line between the lawn and the sidewalk I couldn't possibly know how to bring the curve of my new planting bed down to the pavement.

Once that big hank of overgrown grass was hacked off, I could finish the brick border, just as dusk fell.  Had to supplement them with some I collected for the borders in the back.  Not quite the same, but close enough.

In for a landing.

By the 29th it had rained, and I didn't get called in to sub.  But I only finished the edging in the back yard.

Before, with two or three years of overgrowth

During

After.  

Nothing got accomplished in the front until today-- And the ground has dried out again.

Never mind.  It took over three hours, but the front sidewalk is edged and swept.  Ditto the grass along the curb.

The edger gives me a line for my dad's old grass knife to follow.  LOL

Hacking through the jungle.

Took it to my neighbor's roof drain outfall, a little past the property line.

Sidewalk done, both sides

The curb line gets it now.

Can I leave that dirt in the gutter for the street sweeper to pick up?

No, clean it up.  They don't come by half the time anyway.

Tomorrow, if I can get to it, God willing, the real work begins.