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.

Rare Plant Research sale

So. The plan for the front yard has always been to have a lot of evergreen elements so the yard would look nice in every season. I wasn't going to use a lot of perennials. I really meant it. And I was only going to buy things that were drought tolerant so I wouldn't be watering every day in the summer. I swear I meant it.

But then I went to the Rare Plant Research sale.

Does it remind you of Italy? Greg asked me. No. California.

It started out okay. I bought Lewisia! These will go in the berm with the agaves since they both like sharp drainage and full sun. Good job, me! These will probably look pretty sad and soggy in the winter but they are technically evergreen.

Ditto this Dasylirion. Sharp drainage, full sun, great in the berm. I've wanted one of these since I saw a mature specimen in the Amsterdam Botanical garden.

Dasylirion texanum

Then I saw the cannas. I loved this one with the red-rimmed leaves so much I didn't even grab a tag! But I know it wants consistently moist soil.

Seriously, anyone know what I am?

And then I saw these lovely red cannas. They make orange flowers "all summer long." BOOM. Now I have Lionel Ritchie stuck in my head.

Canna durban

Cannas are neither evergreen nor drought tolerant. But they are so pretty and colorful. And Greg really liked them and he doesn't get excited about plants, ever. I put them next to the house where I can run over them with the hose, which is very likely since I'll be watering them every day. I'm going to blame my non-plan following on the enormous glass of wine I had (I think it was 10 ounces at least--I had to take a nap when we got home) and the fact that I was kind of amped up because I ran into Ryan and Patricia (and her daughter Megan). I have never felt so warmly embraced by a community as I have by the gardeners in Portland and online. Gardeners are the best.

I also bought a castor bean plant, an annual which can get seven feet tall . . . in very hot locations. I'm just hoping for three or four to fill in this blank spot next to the Mahonia x media 'Arthur Menzies'. Fine Gardening featured it this month and just the night before I had earmarked it and showed it to Greg. The next day he had no recollection of this. It's almost like he's not listening when I natter on about plants!

When I warned him that all parts of the plant are poisonous, he asked why I put it in the front yard, when a child/dog/goat could wander up and . . . eat it, I guess?

Ricinus communis

I may just park an agave in front of it as a warning. Get off my not-lawn!

At least the financing was good

I am embarrassed to write this post. I did something very expensive for kind of silly reasons: allergies and my bad habit of reading too many police reports. I have a really hard time with allergies all year round but they get way worse in the summer, especially when we use fans to pull outside air in at night. Because I read too many police reports, I hate having windows open at night while we sleep. So I got air conditioning.

Anybody who lives in Portland is snickering right now because our summers just aren't that hot. We get temperatures over 100 degrees in the summer, but rarely for that long. It's one of those things where I could have put that money toward better insulation and energy-efficiency but I went the energy hog route.  And now I have this big-ass monster to landscape around.

At least it matches the house

I can't even claim that it will help with resale value because that doesn't happen here. But I'm excited because I hate being hot. I melt in 85 degrees (now the Texas folk are snickering) and humidity makes me evil. But, oh, the things I could have done with that money. I could have refinished the wood floors (which does help with resale value) or built a deck out back (which would have made Greg really happy).

I used Jacob's, who gave me a nice discount for being a previous customer (they put in my furnace). They are great. I can't recommend them enough if you'd like to do something equally silly in your home.