Garden bloggers' bloom day October 2012

The rains are finally here! Not everyone is happy about it but I'm selfish and sick of watering the garden. I'm also eager to finally get the ground softened so I can plant these guys:

I snapped most of these last week, right before the rain kicked in.

Salvia 'Black and Blue'

Mexican milkweed Asclepias curassavica

Greg's father gave us what he dubbed "screaming orange" crocosmia in July. They got in the ground late so they bloomed late . . . I wish I could do that every year. They are so hard to photograph but they are the most fantastic yellow-orange-red combo.

NOID Crocosmia

The yellow Coreopsis 'Moonbeam' and orange Zauschneria californica 'Wayne's Select' are still blooming like crazy.

Okay, this isn't a bloom so much as a fruit, but my creeping snowberry (Symphoricarpos mollis) is gorgeous right now.

Symphoricarpos mollis

Agastache 'Ava'

NOID canna

Happy bloom day, y'all! Head over to Carol's to see the rest of the show.

Damn it.

This is why we can't have nice things.

A cat or a raccoon or someone who really hates birds broke the $5 birdbath that I drove all the way to Cornelius in rush hour traffic to get. This is the third one I've lost. I don't know how I can find them any cheaper than that.

I give up.

It's still growing.

Last week was windy. All that wind really fluffed up my castor bean plant, causing it to lose some height but gain some width. 

No joke, it's as wide as my Honda is long.

But I'm more excited because my Mahonia media 'Arthur Menzies' put on about 8 inches of growth overnight.

Grow, baby, grow! That castor bean is going to die soon and I'll have a big gaping hole that you need to fill.

I have expensive taste

I feel like my house reflects me as a person, in that I clean up okay but I'm always lacking a bit of polish. I'll get all dressed up for work and notice that my shoes need to be polished or that I have threads hanging off of my crappy old purse. My house is lacking in finishing details like window treatments and area rugs. 

You know why? Those things are freaking expensive. It doesn't help that I always fall in love with the expensive ones. But it makes me feel like I'm pretending as an adult to have bare floors. I may be 35 and own a house but nobody's buying it because we don't have a rug in the bedroom.

Though someone did call me "ma'am" the other day and I died a little inside.

Every year, like clockwork, my focus turns from gardening to the interior of the house. Right now I'm obsessed with rug hunting. We have two area rugs in the house, one in the living room:

And the shitty indoor/outdoor rug from my reveal, which now lives in the basement:

I found the perfect rug for our bedroom, for the low, low price of $1685 at Schoolhouse Electric. It's soft, it's not made of polypropylene, and it's not a trendy style that I'll hate in two years. It's so pretty. 

Image: Walton handwoven llama rug from Schoolhouse Electric

Come ON, that thing is sexy! And it would look great in our bedroom! (And maybe I'd throw one of those army blankets across the end of the bed. And now that I'm staring at this picture I want to swap out those nightstands. And the lamps. Hmm.) Someone help me convince Greg that we should buy this, should it ever go on sale.

Or maybe I'll keep the heat off in the morning this winter and he'll convince himself.

Curtain prototype is done

Last year I found the perfect mid-century pinch-pleat draperies at JC Penney. Pam at Retro Renovation said her readers found them to be a good source. At Christmas my parents gave me a gift certificate to JC Penney for so I could buy some . . . and JCP immediately stopped producing the style/color/length I needed.

Image from Retro Renovation

So I've been buying (and returning) curtains left and right, trying to find something I liked. Then I saw this post on Emily Henderson's site about where to find cheap but good curtains. I liked these "French-Belgian linen panels," but at $60 a pop I'd need to spend $600 just in the living room.

I am so sorry for these terrible photos. Do you know how hard it is to photograph a window with natural light streaming through? I picked up some "linen-look" tencel fabric, which is dyable, and used a rolled hem foot to zip a 3mm hem around all four sides. The real deal will be a floor-length panel with a more substantial curtain rod.

I have an Ikea Enje blind behind it, which is wonderful during the day but it provides zero privacy at night. I wonder if all the people who have installed Enjes in their house realize this? Wait for the sun to go down, turn on your lights, then step outside and see your life on display.

So now I start the laborious process of doing the prep work for a bunch of panels. The fabric is so thin and malleable that it has to be starched and ironed (and any stray threads trimmed) before running it through the rolled hem foot on my sewing machine. My hope is to get one panel prepped after work each night, then sew like crazy this weekend and get them hung. I figure that gives JC Penney enough time to magically start producing the pinch-pleat draperies I wanted in the first place.

Officially ready for rain, damn it.

Guys, I'm so sick of watering the garden. I'm sick of sunshine and warm weather and the hard rocky soil that prevents me from putting my new grasses in the ground.

OH I KNOW. I know. I should shut up.

I just want three days of light but steady rain, enough to recharge the ground a bit. I'd also like to test out our new gutter situation. Since I built the rain garden in front the size of an Olympic swimming pool, I've determined that it can handle all the gutter outflow from the front of the house. The only problem is that the gutters on the left side of the front of the house all tip toward a downspout here:

I need the gutters to tip toward the right side of the house, to the downspout that leads to the buried PVC pipe that carries the water to the rain garden. 

So these guys came out, removed the gutters, cut them down, then repositioned them so they tip to the right.

They also removed the downspout there, so we need to do some touch-up painting.

They left the gutters a grimy mess but otherwise everything looks fine. Now I just need some rain to make sure they work properly. I spent the weekend ignoring the sunshine and making a freezer full of empanadas and contemplating sewing projects.

I am ready for cool weather. I'm ready for long sleeves and homemade pasta and movies and pining for spring. Let's do this.

I really am just defective . . . and I'm very happy about it.

Happy dance! The appraisal for my mortgage refinance came back at $75K more than my purchase price. I want to think that it's because I put in a pretty garden and painted the rooms nice colors but I know it comes down to the improving economy and housing market.

The best part is that this picture of our dining room was immortalized in the appraisal. Last year I hung a banner for Greg's birthday that said, "Happy Fucking Birthday" and we've been swapping it around ever since. It currently says "grab it funky chap."

But seriously, whew.

We also got the official report back on the indoor air quality tests and they show no abnormally high pollen, mold, or bacteria counts. Pollen counts were especially high this year so I may just be reacting to that, or I'm allergic to Greg. My allergies started when he moved in, have I mentioned that?

I'm just one of those dorky kids with an inhaler and I couldn't be happier! I ordered my air purifier and I'll report back if it helps or not.