Because it was raining

I decided to paint the basement stairwell, as part of my "little things" resolution. This is the last area of the house to be painted, except for the laundry room, which is unfinished cinderblock. I don't want to paint the laundry room because, ugh, what a pain in the butt. Also: spiders.

If we are being honest I will probably paint it at some point because, ugh, I'm compulsive like that.

The walls were a shiny off-white and they were filthy from dragging the old furnace out, moving furniture in and out, and all of the work we've done in the crawlspaces. There's cheap fake wood paneling at the base of the stairs that looks terrible. The carpet is going to come out, maybe this winter, which is why I wasn't very careful with drop cloths.

High five!

Right before I started painting

If I was smart I would have painted the walls the color of dirty hand smudges (maybe Sherwin Williams' You Have Sons, Your Bathroom Will Never Be Clean Again) but I didn't want to spend a lot of money on this project, so I bought a gallon of heavy duty primer and used the gallon of Benjamin Moore's Whirlpool I had leftover from painting the alcoves . BM paint costs more than my car, so I wanted to use it up. We're going to get it all dirty again in a second but for right now it looks bright and light. I asked Greg the other night if he put a stronger bulb in the light fixture and he thought I was fishing for a compliment on the paint.

It's not white, I swear. It's a very pale blue.

It's noticeably brighter coming down the stairs now. I used leftover white paint on the wood paneling but I might change that later, if it gets grimy quickly. In low-light situations I've heard you're supposed to use saturated paint colors. This one definitely doesn't qualify and it's difficult to photograph well. Stupid designers and their rules of thumb.

We hung the signed poster the Portlandia crew sent us as a thank you for volunteering our house. We have a lot of extra art floating around the house and I think I'm going to hang it in here. Because once you've made your basement stairwell light and bright the next logical step is to crowd it with artwork so you feel claustrophobic when fetching your laundry.

I also have to finish scraping the peeling latex paint that the previous owner applied to the oil-based paint on the door trim. Then prime, then paint in a bright white that we can immediately get dirty. Circle of life and all that.

My biggest pet peeve

The plastic tags in landscaping. It killllllls me. This office building had four of these planted and they left the tag in every single one.

I didn't remove them but I was very tempted. Lately I've been snapping a photo of my plants with their nursery tag and then uploading the photo to a folder in my Google/Picasa account. Then I throw the tag away. Anybody have a better system?

Are we done yet?

This weekend I started to remove sod in the backyard where I'm going to increase the planting beds, but I remembered that I hate removing sod so I decided to work on the front yard instead. It's nice to have options.

Thus, we have a rock wall to separate the gravel mulch from the bark mulch. I'm not sure if I like it yet. I don't have much experience working with rock so it doesn't look terribly organic. Of course, the rocks in the bottom of the rain garden annoy me so much that they are all I see in this photo.

Rock is expensive so I just ran it across the front with the hope to enclose the whole area down the line.

We really need to incorporate some decorative boulders and rocks so it's not just gravel and flat rock.

I'm really not crazy about how it looks on the back side but that can be improved later. (Someone tell me this will look great once it fills in with weeds.)

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And while we're telling me lies, someone tell me that the piece of cedar bender board will actually keep the cedar chips and gravel separate.

But I've decided I'm not going to sweat any of my landscaping choices until things start growing. I discovered that these plants that thrive on poor soils annoy me me because I can't do anything proactive with them. They want sun, not too much water, and no fertilizer or compost. So I can't fuss over them. I just have to wait. I hate that.

So I can feel like I'm doing something productive in the front yard, I police the grass that wants so badly to return. If I had to do this project over again I would have left the whole front yard under black plastic all winter to really kill the lawn. I keep finding individual blades of grass poking up in the bare spots, despite the fact that I used a sod cutter, then roto-tilled, then applied a thick layer of mulch.

Fun fact: when I tell non-gardeners that I've planted agave they tend to ask me if I'm going to make tequila. This weekend the kid at Oregon Decorative Rock informed me, "I just use sugar, myself." Alrighty then.

The good, the bad, and the ugly

THE GOOD

Summer flowers like penstemon are budding.

Penstemon 'Dark Towers'

And peonies will be blooming any second.

THE BAD

The old apple tree, whose stump I turned into a birdbath, won't die. It sends up suckers all along the root system and I've decided that this fall I'll need to dig up this entire area and have the stump ground out. I should have done that from the get-go. Or maybe when I was already having stumps ground out last fall, since that would have been way cheaper. Sigh.

What a bunch of suckers.

I also sort of suspect that The Stump That Won't Freaking Die Already is the only thing keeping that bamboo clump behind it in check. I'm thinking about removing the bamboo, too. I've been obsessed with the chartreuse smokebush Cotinus coggygria 'Golden Spirit.' I think it would look pretty in the shrub hedge, possibly trained into a tree.

THE UGLY

The problem with planting a lot of tulips is that the greenery sticks around a lot longer than the blooms. I've been waiting for the foliage to die before pruning back the hundreds of tulips I planted in the yard, which means everything that used to look like this . . .

. . . now kind of looks like this, which is to say: messy.

So. much. visual. noise. ugh. i. can't. even.

That gaping hole between the stringed-up Cryptomeria and the ninebark is where I pulled out a flowering currant and planted a wee huckleberry. The lady at the Audubon sale told me that they are fussy and difficult to get started and "I should plant it over a rotten log," as if normal people have those lying around. Except it turned out I did have a piece of rotting wood from The Stump That Won't Freaking Die Already! Let's hope it doesn't reanimate and start suckering over here too.

THE GOOD

The elderberry that I moved, only to have it make a giant sad, is rebounding.

No, really, this is an improvement.

THE BAD

The doublefile viburnum (I think it's Watanabe?) I planted to the left of these two elderberries, was planted as a privacy shrub. Viburnums aren't privacy shrubs, they are specimen plants! They are beautiful and deserve to be front and center, not sandwiched in the back behind a vine maple.

Viburnum plicatum var. Watanabe

THE UGLY

I'm smothering the lawn here to increase the size of this bed. This part never looks good.

I sort of think I should move the vine maple to the center of this cardboard-covered area, since I'm moving everything in my yard around. It just sat there for two years, not getting much beyond a foot tall, and now that it's putting on some growth I think it's time to shock it. That'll teach you to thrive in my yard! I'll move you, in June no less!

Too much stuff crammed together

I'm also tempted to move the viburnum but I think the cedar tree will steal too much water from it. In conclusion: I don't know what I'm doing, so I'm rearranging everything. Who wants to help me dig? Who has a better plan that doesn't involve angering established shrubs?

Housekeeping

I wrote about why I DIY over at Tinkernation.com (hint: I can't afford to have someone else do it). It's cheesy and earnest and nothing you don't already know. What's exciting is that they sponsored me to install baseboard in my kitchen so some day soon I'll be able to show you the finished product (once they publish the next installment). Those are Bill's hands in the photo, not mine, by the way. If the music industry thing doesn't work out for him I think he has a future as a dirty hand model.

The baseboard looks great, except for that one spot where it looks weird. And we have yet to re-tack the transition strip back down between the kitchen and the dining room, so I'm constantly tripping over it and I'll probably end up cracking it. Such is life in our house; if there weren't hazards laying about I'd just run into the walls (ask me why that bone in my hand looks weird). It was also brought to my attention recently that I pronounce sandwich "SAM-WICH" so I think we should all keep the bar low and just be happy that I haven't lost my house to a freak gasoline fight accident. KNOCK ON WOOD.

After reading my post my mom told me she saw herself in me, which is high praise considering my mama kicks ass and can make/do almost anything. I'm hoping she meant the can-do part and not the drain cleaner mishap. She might have meant the drain cleaner mishap.

The Chelsea Chop

I had never heard of the Chelsea Chop until I read about it on Linda's blog. It's a pruning method where you chop your taller sedums down in late May, after the Chelsea flower show. It actually works with a lot of taller plants that have a tendency to fall over. Greg's parents gave us an enormous clump of Autumn Joy that had a tendency to flop in the summer. They didn't like the habit so they gave it to us, since I can't say no to free sedum.

Supposedly the plant will sprout new growth from the chop, leaving a bushier, more upright plant. I threw some of the cuttings into soil so I could grow new plants.

My friend T gave me a beautiful pot of mystery sedums for my birthday last year. It included this beautiful blue and white variegated specimen (maybe 'Frosty Morn'?), along with a sprig of what looks like Autumn Joy and a tiny bit of pure white sedum (all unlabeled, sadly). I want that white one to flourish so I chopped the others, hoping to temporarily give it more sun (though how it will photosynthesize is a mystery). I want to try and extricate it at the end of the summer and maybe propagate more of it.

I'm really digging the different colors of sedums commingling here. Flower floosie, shrub whore . . . I might be turning into a sedum strumpet.

Come hell or high water . . . oh god, what did I do?

Because I had AC installed and I put tomatoes in the ground, it rained a lot this week. We got a break yesterday afternoon so I decided I wanted to work chicken grit into the berm out front and get the succulents planted. I went to Garden Fever and they were all out of big bags of chicken grit. I caught myself eyeing ferns before I snapped out of it and started calling other suppliers. I called Livingscape Nursery and they weren't selling it in bulk. I think that's when I muttered "Goddamn it, come hell or high water I want to do this TONIGHT." But I didn't want to drive down to Milwaukie to Concentrates NW, plus I'd never make it before they closed.

I called Urban Farm Store and they had big bags! I had 20 minutes to get down to Belmont Street before they closed! When I arrived I asked for 300 pounds of chicken grit. The lady rang me up, ran my card, and as I was signing she started giggling.

"I don't know why I rang you up for that. We don't have that much in stock."

Son of a. It turns out they only had 200 pounds, so we had to reverse charge my card and all of that, but then I was home with my plants and my chicken grit, hallelujah. I got the Dasylirion in the ground and then the sky opened up and was like, "COME HELL OR HIGH WATER? WATCH THIS YOU SILLY GIRL." Epic. rain. y'all.

The rain garden out front, which only has one gutter feeding it, never fills. It actually had four or five inches of water. 

Crappy phone photo!

The rain garden out back, which is humongous and serves the most roof water, almost overflowed. That's why you install an overflow notch, but I honestly never thought I'd need it.

DAMN.

Note to self: don't change perspective halfway through a video.

Eventually it stopped raining and I threw on my rain boots and dry pants and got back out there. Getting the agaves out of their pots was easier than I thought it would be. Sarah gave me the helpful advice to use a garden knife around the edges of the pot, then put the agave face-down into wet soil, then pull. In most cases the pot comes right off, though your poor agaves have mud all over their faces.

Agave americana

The back side of the berm is still a bit empty, though I have two more agaves to put in. I wish I had bought more Lewisia last weekend. 

I still need to acquire rock to edge the berm, then mulch the berm with gravel, and then maybe I can just let it do its thing for the summer. I'd still like to work in a black daphne (to the right by the castor bean plant) but I may wait until fall to put it in.

I can see the finish line and I think, with some tweaks (like redoing the dry rock bed and editing down the grasses), it's going to look pretty out there.