My favorite things from the ANLD tour

Last week I was lucky to attend a preview of the 9th annual ANLD garden tour. Loree did a really wonderful job of capturing highlights from each garden. I wasn't as good about taking photos but I had a great time.

These were a few of my favorite things. Everything from the Floramagoria garden (which I've toured before) was awesome. This is a true plant lover's garden and they have some genius hardscaping, to boot. Large bamboo culms had been painted and stuck in the ground, giving this area height and color without blocking the view. You can purchase bamboo culms of this size at Bamboo Craftsman, if you want to recreate this.

A brilliant way to keep gravel from your paths from ending up where it shouldn't be.

Whismy. Such good whimsy.

A spectacular sun shade from the Cedar Mill garden.

I loved this pathway.

I saw Agave 'Blue Glow' for the first time at the Clackamas County Master Gardener's Fair and ever since I have noticed it everywhere. I must have one. This was at the Pequeño Paraiso garden.

I loved these lights. Unobtrusive and beautiful.

This was across the street from one of the tours but it cracked me up.

I loved everything about this water feature from the Plant Passion garden.

And there's that Blue Glow again!

The tour is this Saturday, June 22nd from 10am to 4pm. You can buy tickets from their website or the day of the tour from Garden Fever, Drake's 7 Dees, and Cornell Farms.

I made you a cedar chip wasteland

I have officially spent two weekends putting out a lot of effort to make a pathway, a pretty simple one at that. Apologies for how many crappy phone pics there are here, I was chugging along and couldn't be bothered to do anything beyond grabbing my phone out of my back pocket.

After we removed the sod along the driveway I needed to dig down a bit so it could hold the cedar chips I wanted here. I was hoping to soften up the ground before I had to dig, so I thought about how to make it rain. A ha, I thought, I'll put out yard debris bags! You know the bags--the ones that get heavy so easily and turn to mush and break if it rains even a little? We put four of those, filled with sod removal scraps, out on the street and of course the heavens opened up. But it made digging easier.

I found buried stuff because I always find buried stuff.

The oil tank that we knew was here.

A pretty large cavity, probably from a critter long ago (I hope long ago).

I was like, how can I make sure I move this soil as many times as humanly possible? I know, I'll dig it up, transport it to a tarp under the dogwood, then transport it back to the driveway and into Greg's truck so it can go to the soil recycling place. My back was not amused.

I used thinner, taller pieces of the same rock I've used to edge the beds elsewhere in the garden. I just wanted a simple line to say "chips here, mulch there."

It looks goofy now because the chips are bright orange. I have a skosh more room (just like Levis) in the beds, so I need to rearrange things a bit. It helps that a few weeks back I removed six or seven of the rose bushes here. All the rain had really softened the ground and they popped out with almost no effort. I got a little carried away and started removing them left and right.

Before

Before

Now I just need something low-growing and drought-tolerant to weave through and unify everything.

Now

The best part is that cedar chips break down and feed the soil, so when a future owner inevitably plants lawn here, they'll find the soil to be rich and loamy. Circle of life and all that.

I finished up by vacuuming the driveway. If that's wrong, I don't want to be right.

Garden bloggers' bloom day June 2013

Oh my gosh, so much blooming! Let's hit it.

Trachelospermum jasminoides

Echinacea purpurea 'Kim's Knee High'

Penstemon mexicali 'Sunburst Ruby' 

Salvia nemerosa 'Sensation Rose'

Coreopsis 'Moonbeam'

Sedums oreganum and Angelina

Cotula hispida

Gaillardia x grandiflora 'Arizona Apricot'

Lewisia cotyledon 'White Splendor'

Drosanthemum micans

Carex dispacea

Agastache 'Blue Blazes'

Penstemon 'Dark Towers'

Aquilegia formosa

Knautia macedonica 'Mars Midget'

Penstemon serrulatus

Deschampsia cespitosa

Amaranthus caudatus

Amaranthus cruentus 'Hopi Red Dye'

Geranium 'Rozanne'

Thanks to our host Carol at May Dreams Gardens! Be sure to check out what everyone else has blooming.

Lightning didn't strike twice

The last time we rented a sod cutter was in April of last year and we successfully got rid of the sod we removed by listing it on craigslist. Sadly, I don't think June (an unseasonably warm and dry one at that) is the time to try and get rid of old lawn. No one picked up our discard pile so I had to take it to Wood Waste Management after my dentist appointment yesterday. You'd think a dental cleaning and dealing with a truck full of sod would be a terrible way to spend your afternoon but I had fun (my teeth were super clean and my clothes were so dirty!). It was only $25 to drop it off to be composted, so I can't really complain.

I stopped by Fred Meyer and saw that all of their pots were 25% off. And then I saw a pot with a chip on it and asked the manager if she could come down in price. She agreed to knock off an additional 20% but then we couldn't get the pot dislodged from the larger pot it was sitting in so she said, "Just pick out a different pot and I'll honor the extra 20% off."

So I got this persimmon baby (it's larger than it looks) for $35. I threw some of the enormous stash of High Country Gardens freebies in here (Stachys coccineus 'Mountain Red') along with an agave pup and a Color Guard yucca. I realized that I have a pot addiction, one that's certainly more expensive than the one that comes with illegal transactions at music festivals. I also realized that need more agaves. A lot more. They look good everywhere!