In non-concrete news

Today is my grandma's 90th birthday.  She raised prize-winning African violets for years and years.  I'd like to think my love of gardening comes from her.

Happy birthday, Grandma!

F*ck concrete

I was just going to move one plant.  But because nothing can ever be EASY it turned into an excavation.  I was moving my nootka rose and I found some blackberry, so I dug it up.  And then I started clearing the brick that is littered all over the north side of my patio. 

Remember when we tore down the shed and found those bags of concrete that had gotten wet and solidified into huge heavy rocks?  I guess they had used them to extend the patio or something because there were a whole bunch set in the soil.

So I pulled out a lot of concrete.  Again.

There's so much buried rubble in this part of the yard it's almost impossible to plant without excavating it.

But! I've gained about four feet in planting space I didn't know I had before.  Excellent news!

I thought I had all the big chunks out but then I started digging the next day and found more.

And more.  And then I found a hatch.

I was pretty sure that this time I was definitely finding a dead body.  There was a plexiglass window lined with what I am guessing was the original bathroom tile (which is awesome because I wondered what it looked like), underlaid with huge chunks of concrete.  The flat side was up, so I think they may have used this as a firepit?  Or maybe they just liked burying concrete, I don't know.  The people who lived here before made weird decisions.

I was hoping to find Desmond down here (Mom, this is a reference to the TV show LOST) but I found something almost as hot: firefighters!

Or . . . a firetruck. 

Yada yada, bushywacky bushwacky, mulch mulch mulch . . .

No dead bodies, yay!

New plantings

My friend T has a pretty awesome hookup with a gardener/nursery that specializes in native plants.  I've been able to get all of my ferns, bleeding hearts, and other plants very cheaply.  As a result I've bought eleventy million ferns.  The shade garden is filling out nicely, though T came over and admonished me for not controlling the weeds and invasive plants better.  I felt like I'd been caught eating frosting for breakfast.

Not that I've ever done that. Ahem.

So I did some bushwhacking this weekend, which probably wasn't advisable considering the hacking cough I have.  But it needed to be done. To wit:

I planted mock orange and heuchera and soon dianthus will join them.

And I weeded and weeded and weeded and moved the ocean spray about a foot and put in a King Edward VII flowering currant.  Is this too much in one place?  Maybe.  Originally I wanted to remove the mystery willow but I've realized you shouldn't look an established green thing in the mouth.  Huh?

The ocean spray is the tiny one in the middle where the hose ends. Someday it will be 15 feet!

I put down some mulch in the shade garden which makes it look much more formal and finished.

I like things a little more overgrown and feral looking, so hopefully these will continue to grow and spread and look less . . . planned.  In the meantime I'm digging up a LOT of Spanish bluebell.  It spreads by bulb AND by seed!  It's the bane of my gardening existence.

And dandelions! Oh I hate you, dandelions!

And blackberry.  'Cause I don't have enough to do back there.

Things I've found in the yard

Plus or minus 200 pounds of brick and busted concrete, liberally spread about the yard.

I figure I can do some tricep lifts in between weeding, get ready for bikini season and all that.

If good fences make for good neighbors, I am the worst.

So the fence situation hasn't gotten any better.  The part that I propped up will not stay that way, so I finally just removed it to another corner of the yard.  I've been hunting for fence designs on Flickr and, man, people are building some really lovely fences these days.

But back to reality.  I finally met with the neighbor behind me to talk about the fence.  He's really very nice but I got the sense that he felt like the fence wasn't his. 

I spent way more time than I really wanted researching Oregon boundary fence laws and turned up this state statute that explains that responsibility is 50/50.  I wrote a letter explaining everything I was proposing and included a copy of the statute and the city's recommendation for building.  I really didn't know how they would receive it so I tried to temper the formality by including a bit at the end about how I feel very warmly toward them and I really want to keep everything friendly.

And you know what? I got a super nice email that night in response. Huzzah!  He even thinks he might prefer a horizontal board fence.  DOUBLE HUZZAH.

So right now we're planning for May and then I can start focusing on camouflaging the fence on the west side where there's so little privacy it might as well be a window.  I have a litmus test for how private I'd like the yard to be but I won't write it here since my mother is reading this.

Okay, it's gardening with the short shorts.  Nobody wants to see that.

I'm fixing a hole

There was a big hole in the backyard that was covered with some cement slabs.  I decided to excavate the hole in preparation for plants.

So I started digging and pulling out chunks of concrete. And more chunks. And then I started thinking about a conversation I had with friends this weekend about wheelbarrows and how they sometimes called them wheelbarrels even though wheelburrow might make more sense (except that it doesn't, BILL) and somehow burial cairns came up.  You know, shallow graves covered in stones so animals wouldn't dig up the body. 

The whole point of this rambling side story is that I started to worry that I was dissembling a cairn. Did I mention that I had just returned from talking to the neighbor about the fence and he told me they found a HEADSTONE in their backyard? The previous owner had lost her husband and they had to bring out someone to make sure she hadn't buried him back there (she hadn't). 

He calmly told me, "That might have been a dealbreaker." MIGHT have been?

So yeah, nerve-wracking.  And the hole kept getting bigger.

But there was no body that I could see. Thank you, backyard gods.

Now I just have to fill this humongous hole somehow. Anybody have a body they need to dispose of?

My dream fence

Mississippi Modern
Originally uploaded by pistilsdesign

Isn't it gorgeous? Wouldn't you love waking up in the morning and having a cup of coffee in your yard with this surrounding you?

My neighbors don't agree. They want a boring old vertical board fence. But more on that later.