Just a girl with a hammer

Tag: yard

  • Garden bloggers’ bloom day April 2015

    Garden bloggers’ bloom day April 2015

    Happy bloom day! 

    It’s April, which means it’s camassia month! Huzzah!

    Camassia leichtlinii ‘Blue Danube’

    Iris x pacifica ‘Civic Pride’

    Iris x pacifica ‘The Eyes Have It’
    Hooker’s fairy bells (Disporum hookeri/Prosartes hookeri)

    Geranium phaeum ‘Darkest of All’

    Epimedium grandiflora ‘Red Queen’

    Tulipa ‘Flair’ with a bird-planted Cotinus coggygria

    Cistus obtusifolius

    Salvia ‘Flame’

    Syringa patula ‘Miss Kim’

    Lewisia cotyledon

    Lewisia cotyledon ‘White Splendor’

    Othonna cheirifolia

    False Soloman’s Seal (Maianthemum racemosum)

    Coronilla v. spp. glauca ‘Variegata’

    The blooms of Darmera peltata emerge before the foliage does.

    A very happy bloom day to you! As always, thank you to our host, Carol, at May Dreams Gardens.

  • Hardscaping is hard.

    Hardscaping is hard.

    We haven’t been very good lately at taking it easy on the weekends. Last weekend they were calling for rain but then on the Thursday before the forecast changed to sun and I was like, “I guess there’s no reason not to tear out the lawn in the backyard.”

    This was back breaking and it sucked so hard that I’m glad we may never have to remove sod at this house again. This was before, with our weird boards showing where a low deck will go.

    As before, we put our sod on craigslist and a bunch of weirdos showed up and took it home. Enjoy your crap lawn! You’re insane. Also, my back hurts.Those rolls were HEAVY. But now I can say I’ve removed every inch of sod from this property.

    Then Greg and I sat here in our mudpit and drank a gin and tonic and bemoaned that our work was just beginning.

    And then we moved two yards of gravel to the backyard . . .

    . . . so that this guy could deliver two tons of rock to me.
    And then Sunday morning I started working on a rock wall.

    And then I had a crisis of confidence and nearly broke down because I couldn’t tell if it was ugly or not. It looked great on paper! I’m still unsure of how to size the deck appropriately. So I pulled out some boards from the garage so I could make a poorly rendered mockup in Photoshop of what the deck might look like. Picture a beautifully stained 4 inch platform deck. And all of the old Home Depot retaining wall stones are going.

    I need to redo the right side of the rock wall and bring it out a bit; I don’t like the angle of the curve the way it is right now. The fake deck is currently 10×14 feet. I’ve looked high and low for some sort of guide for deck sizes (how much room do people need around a dining table? more than three feet?) but every guide is for a mega-deck in a yard where people hate gardening. I vacillate between thinking it’s way too big and fearing it will be too small. Our deck just needs to hold a table that sits four people and our cute little bamboo couch.

    We have two stupid things and one serious thing dictating the size and location of the deck. The serious thing is the drip line of the cedar, which we need to dig outside of, so it can’t shift left any more, unless we cantilever the deck over the footings. The two stupid things are what-ifs that we never do:

    1. Really large dinner parties. Though we host barbecues, we’ve never had a large dinner party in the summer (I hate cooking when it’s hot) and a long table could be moved to the open gravel area IF that ever happened. 
    2. Movie viewings. We don’t own a screen but we borrowed a friend’s screen ONCE four years ago and hosted a movie night. Greg wants me to leave this wall clear so we can hang the screen we may never borrow again:
    The view from the deck
    I’m sort of inclined to move the rock wall out even further, movie screen be damned (the front plants will be short, anyway). My main goal with this project is to get as much planting space as humanly possible while getting a slightly raised area for wining and dining (that may get a pergola or cover at some point). 
    I’m already happy because we won’t have a dormant lawn, come July. It made the backyard look so desiccated and sad all summer. All of the new plantings for the rock wall area will be drought-tolerant because I hate watering.
    If anyone has opinions or advice, I’m all ears. Bigger deck? Smaller? Cantilevered? Get rid of it all and put in sod? I just don’t know anymore.
  • Garden bloggers’ bloom day March 2015

    Garden bloggers’ bloom day March 2015

    I may be late but many of my blooms are early this year. We have tulips already, for Pete’s sake! The daphnes, hellebores, and Pieris are all still going, making this month feel especially floriferous.

    Tulipa ‘Flair’
    Tulipa ‘Come Back’

    Bigroot geranium (Geranium macrorrhizum)

    Ribes sanguineum ‘Variegata’

    Ribes sanguineum
    Rhubarb (Rheum x hybridium ‘Victoria’)

    Vaccinium ‘Sunshine Blue’

    Epimedium ‘Black Sea’

    Aucuba japonica ‘Rozannie’

    Fothergilla gardenii ‘Jane Platt’

    A happy bloom day to you! Thanks to our host, Carol.

  • Garden bloggers’ bloom day February 2015.

    Garden bloggers’ bloom day February 2015.

    I missed bloom day in January, even though I had but three things to post. It doesn’t get much easier than January. Also, so many people are buried in terrible weather, why wouldn’t you celebrate having blooms in your garden?

    Friends is on Netflix streaming. That’s why. Also, Greg pulled a quilt that his Grandmother made him out of storage and it makes our couch dangerously comfortable.

    Sarcococca ruscifolia

    Hamamelis I. ‘Early Bright’

    Mahonia x media ‘Arthur Menzies’
    But I’m ready to rejoice: I’m finally past the season when Ross had a monkey and the weather has been so delightful lately! I’m getting off the couch, but only for a little bit. 
    Arctostaphylos ‘John Dourley’

    Daphne odora ‘Mae Jima’

    Euphobia ‘Blackbird’

    Crocus chrysanthus ‘Romance’

    All of my hellebores are blooming and all of them look pretty terrible. I wasn’t quick enough to get Sluggo down this year.

    Helleborus orientalis ‘Metallic Blue Lady’

    Othonna cheirifolia

    Rosemary

    Arctostaphylos bakeri ‘Louis Edmonds’

    Helleborus x ‘Black Diamond’
    Daphne odora ‘Aureomarginata’ with a bumble bee!
    Not pictured: Pieris japonica, whose blooms I always miss even though the entire shrub looks gift wrapped and Euphorbia myrsinites.
    Happy bloom day! Spring is near! Thank you to our host, Carol, over at May Dreams Gardens.
  • Garden bloggers’ bloom day, December 2014

    Garden bloggers’ bloom day, December 2014

    I had blooms to show you in November, like this beautiful Crocus speciosus.

    Or my Salvia ‘Amistad’ that was improbably pushing out blooms, despite a freeze.

    Or my Helenium ‘Mardis Gras’.

    But I couldn’t pull my shit together last month (a recurring problem) and now those things have finally succumbed to weather. I’m left with Mahonia x media ‘Arthur Menzies’ outside.

    Indoors I have a few blooms to cheer me up.

    Cuttings of Echeveria diffractens I brought inside are blooming in a sunny window
    An unknown succulent blooms despite a tenacious mealy bug problem.

    Happy bloom day to you and yours! Thank you Carol for hosting us. I for one am looking forward to spring crocuses, hellebores, and a new year.

  • Garden bloggers’ bloom day October 2014

    Garden bloggers’ bloom day October 2014

    “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” –F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

    Ignoring the fact that the quote above is uttered by one awful person to another awful person in a book I didn’t really care for, I agree with the sentiment. Fall weather is finally here! I have been cooking and wearing socks and bringing tender plants indoors and I am so freaking happy about it. The bird feeders are up, my Netflix queue is full and I am so ready to hibernate for a bit. This is that nice time when we’re finally getting rain and cooler nights but the castor beans haven’t died yet and things still look okay.

    All of the salvias and agastaches are still going strong, acting like they just might bloom all winter if you let them. This canna popped up in a pathway and I left it to be a surprisingly effective hosebreak all summer.

    My bloom is sad because someone didn’t water me all summer.

    These Aster oblongifolius are my favorite right now. They cooked all summer next to reflected heat of the chimney without a drop of water and they couldn’t be prettier.

    I’ve spent more time than I’d care to admit internally debating whether Dan Hinkley was on a bender or responding to a dare when he named this Mahonia eurybracteata ‘Soft Caress.’ Its blooms aren’t quite as showy as its relatives but I’ll take them.

    Eutrochium rugosum is sited right next to some large clumps of snowberry, making this fairly uninteresting part of the yard look gift wrapped.

    Eutrochium rugosum and Symphoricarpos albus
    Plectranthus ecklonii was a spring addition to the dry shade under the cedar tree and I’m very happy with the late blooms.

    Is it early for Fatsia japonica to be blooming? It feels like it.

    Happy bloom day and happy fall weather to you! Be sure to visit our host Carol at May Dreams Gardens for the full show.

  • Better bring a pickax

    Better bring a pickax

    Oh man, you guys. This summer. It feels like it will never end and I want it very badly to just go away. Between The Fling, many house guests, multiple parties, and a lot of work and non-work trips, I spent the least amount of time working in my garden since I bought this house. It shows, too. There are weeds everywhere and for the first time in my life I just couldn’t bring myself to care. People would come over and I’d be like, “That’s where we keep the dandelions. Over there, too.” There’s red oxalis everywhere, weaving itself especially tenaciously around anything with a spike or a poker.

    I visited a lot of open gardens this summer, far more than I usually do, all of which made me hate my back garden even more than I normally do. Instead of inspiring me they mostly filled me with frustration. Greg and I are still arm-wrestling over hardscaping and the placement of a deck, which puts any garden expansion on hold. I swing wildly from wanting it to look better NOW to feeling like this is all an experiment and I don’t have cancer (yet) so what’s the rush? I’m not a landscape designer, I have nothing to prove. But I want better.

    The front yard remains in my good graces, mostly because it doesn’t require much watering and it’s always full of bees. The color scheme is a little whacked out but I like it.

    But. The meadow has been driving me crazy, mostly because I placed the plants all wrong initially. At first I put all the Schizachyrium scoparium ‘Blue Heaven’ in the front and they got so tall that they blocked everything else behind them.

    So I moved them to the back of the meadow even though I knew they wouldn’t get enough sun there. But I was like, “Let’s see what happens!” And what happened was they didn’t get enough sun so they stayed tiny and they didn’t bloom. It was shocking. Luckily I also planted Sedum ‘Matrona’ all along the front of the bed to give it some structure, which I think actually worked. One step forward, two steps back.

    After getting a week of rain recently I went out with my pickax and started moving things around. The Pennisetum macrcorum ‘White Lancer’ (with the tall white seedheads) got moved closer together, since it seems more interested in running than bulking up.

    Then I had room to move the Blue Heaven back into a sunny spot, seen here on the right-hand side. I also put in three of the tall Liatris spicata, which is common as dirt but I love it. I had hopes to incorporate some redder hues in the form of Centaurea atropupurea but I just learned from Grace that they get a lot taller than the tag says. But you know what? This is all an experiment and I can tell you about moving them next fall! It will be great.

    I’m also moving one of my most beloved agaves out of the gravel berm and into the mulched hinterlands.

    This is my second largest agave and it’s pretty big for the Pacific Northwest, so I’m keeping everything crossed (I caught myself calling it “baby” while I moved it because I love it so much). I’ve been wanting something in this area that is evergreen with visual heft and I thought it might do the trick. He has two smaller companions nearby. The good news is that I have something to worry about obsessively this winter! Are my babies rotting out? Should I wander into my front yard wearing the yoga pants with the ripped out butt to check on them?

    Let’s see what happens.

  • Garden bloggers’ bloom day September 2014

    Garden bloggers’ bloom day September 2014

    I’m late, I know. My garden is fried and so am I. Between the Fling and having out of town guests and trips all summer, I’ve let my garden coast much more than usual. I gave up on weeding a while back and I’m very close to giving up on watering because I’m so sick of doing it.

    I recently noticed that my bumble bee numbers are down dramatically while all of my other bees are way up. I posted to a gardeners’ group on Facebook to see if this was the normal time of year for them to die off. People suggested that maybe I need to work on prolonging my bloom successions and, because I’m cranky and I’ve been watching a LOT of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, I got super defensive and like, “Bitch, why are you hating on my garden? I am very rich in blooms!”

    And I really am. The salvias, the zauschneria, the sedums, the agastaches, the penstemons (all bumble favorites), they all keep going even though I’ve abandoned deadheading. My milkweed hit six feet, then blew over, so I cut them back and now they look like they might bloom again. If only my tomatoes would keep going, I might not mind all this watering so much.

    Just in case the pollinators are sick of the same old fare, we’ve got fresh flowers-formerly-known-as-asters popping out.

    Aster douglasii or Symphyotrichum douglasii if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.
    Aster douglasii/Symphyotrichum douglasii
    Aster oblongifolius
    Erigeron glaucus ‘Wayne Roderick’ might as well be an aster.
    Datura wrightii likes it hot and dry, therefore I like it.
    My Miscanthus sinensis ‘Little Zebra’ looks like a giant party favor

    When I was in high school I went through a religious phase. I always found the part of the Sunday sermon where they told you to “greet your neighbors” very odd. It was a weird, mumbly ritual in what was already a very stuffy Presbyterian service. One time we visited what I think was called a “jubilee church.” People danced in the aisle! People clapped! People sang beautifully! And when the time came to greet your neighbor they seem elated to see you and shake your hand. It was actually fun. That’s what bloom day always feels like to me. So I’m cranky and I want rain and autumn, but I wish you a very happy, non-Presbyterian bloom day. Be sure to visit our host Carol and see who else is dancing in the aisles.
  • Garden bloggers’ bloom day, August 2014

    Garden bloggers’ bloom day, August 2014

    I have friends, friends who don’t garden, who ask me, “What’s new? What have you been up to?” and the honest truth is that I haven’t been doing much. I wander out into my front garden and I stare at bees. It’s too hot and dry to do any real gardening but I find I like deadheading perennials almost as much as I like having my hair shampooed (which is a lot). It’s very relaxing. And I can squat and gawp at one plant that is crawling with bees, making my neighbors wonder if I’ve had a stroke or something.

    Agastache ‘Blue Blazes’

    The kids from three doors down wander by and I mutter, “Look at how the bumbles keep to the agastache while the honeybees feed on the sedum. And I don’t even know what these tiny guys are on the tithonia.” They no longer like talking to me because they are teenagers now and also, I’m rambling about bees.

    This year has been a banner year for pollinators in my garden. It could be that they were always there and I never noticed or maybe they really are flourishing because I gave them so many blooms. On the flip side I have no butterflies, save the cabbage whites. I don’t even have skippers. I whine about the yard wondering aloud, “Where are you? I gave you muddy drinking stations.” My neighbors think I’m insane.

    If we’re being honest, I hate August. I’m sick of the heat and I find myself thinking, “I miss eating soup. I want ragout and pasta!” while simultaneously seeing mums at the grocery store and despairing because, what the hell, summer just started! It’s that annoying time of year where I can’t enjoy my successes because I’m already plotting how things will be better next year. I’m grumpy and I suspect I’m unpleasant to be around.

    I planted Eryngium partitum two years ago and it promptly fell over. The seeds waited two years to germinate but they had the good sense to do it in a patch of Rose Campion, which holds them aloft. Good job!

    The heathers that I planted last fall survived our terrible winter and bloom in shades of lavender that I hate. But I’m thrilled they’re alive.

    Calluna vulgaris ‘Fraser’s Old Gold’

    Calluna vulgaris ‘Easter Bonfire’

    Sedum ‘Blade Runner’ shocked me by blooming from the top, as well as the stalk.

    Rudbeckia hirta (I think) and Helenium ‘Mardi Gras’

    Crocosmia x crocosmiflora ‘Solfatare’
    Crocosmia ‘Golden Fleece’
    Shut your bloom hole, Leycesteria formosa. You’re so pretty.
    Sedum telephium ‘Hab Gray’
    Joe Pye, you’re a bee whore and I love you. (Eutrochium purpureum)

    Potentilla gelida needs to stop blooming because I planted it for its foliage and the way it mingles with brown grasses. Brown + silver 4-EVER.

    Happy bloom day, from my cranky garden to yours! Thank you, Carol, for hosting us.

  • How Bloomtown changed my life (with only a tiny bit of hyperbole)

    How Bloomtown changed my life (with only a tiny bit of hyperbole)

    Seven years ago Portland Metro hosted a “Gardens of Natural Delights” bicycle tour that showed off pesticide-free gardens. A lot of the gardens were focused on food production and they were fairly utilitarian. There was a lot of straw mulch and a slant toward function over form. The gardens were pesticide free but they weren’t very beautiful.

    Then we pedaled over to a different garden and my brain imploded.

    My first garden

    At the time I had a raised veggie bed at home that a boyfriend had built for me. Standing outside of the brain-imploding garden I remember thinking, “Gardens can be like THIS?!?” This garden was layered and exuberant and stuffed with both edible and ornamental plants and it was beautiful. I wanted a garden just like it. I think that was the moment I became a gardener, for real.

    I recently spent a Monday evening dragging Greg to a bunch of HPSO open gardens. One of the visits we made was to Darcy Daniels’ garden.

    I met Darcy on the Garden Bloggers’ Fling and as we approached her house she called out, “Have you been here before?” and I told her no.

    Vegetable beds zigzag through her side yard

    As we stepped into the back garden I realized that I had been there before; THIS was the garden from seven years ago. This was the garden that ignited that passion for gardening.

    My camera got so excited that it crapped out and I had to take most of my photos with my phone.

    I loved Darcy’s garden just as much the second time. It’s cozy and intimate and she has an incredible number of conifers tucked in everywhere (which I find so difficult). And it’s infectious! Gardening has been one of the most wonderful, life-changing things to happen to me, so I’m thankful Bloomtown was on that tour, so many years ago.

    If you’re an Oregon local (or close-in Washington) and haven’t joined HPSO, you’re missing out. It’s only $35 to join and you won’t be too late to get a summer tour book. Every single week there are open gardens that you can tour for inspiration. And they bring in the best speakers during the winter. It’s an incredible deal.

    Has anyone else had such a lightning bolt moment with gardening? And is there a joke we can work in about de-flowering your garden innocence that won’t make Darcy feel icky?