Apples

I picked my bumper crop of backyard apples last weekend. There were about 5 pounds and they were nearly perfect, nary a worm. I've been eating them all week and they have a delicious crunch and tart flavor. Can't wait for more next year!

Flowers: A Montage

 Just a few shots from my garden on the last day of July.

Echinacea and Russian Sage

 

Bluebeard and Monarda

My favorite vignette: Penstemon, Daphne and Dusty Miller

Gardening News

Justin and I have been busy in the garden, taking advantage of our warm summery weekends and not-so-warm, dreary weekdays. We've nearly planted all of our crops and have been harvesting assorted greens (chard, spinach & lettuce) and radishes for about a month now. This is the first year I've successfully planted multiple rotations of radishes. We're on our third rotation and I'm out of seeds so I guess that's all until fall.

Peas, tomatoes and peppers (and some sad looking garlic that wintered over). We each ate a single pea pod this evening--they are just coming in. These babies aren't very tall but they have quite a batch of incoming pods.

My grove of greens: spinach and lettuce. Behind are the sprouts of pickling cukes and squash. In between is the third crop of radishes, just peaking through.

Here's the health-food section: chard, kale, beets and parsnips. Only the parsnips have a ways to go. Everything else is ready to go. Believe it or not, we've probably had a half-dozen salads with the chard already. The beans in the background are just getting their second leaves.

Here's a sweet little pocket of the garden: poppy and lupine

Lots of stuff is in bloom and we're starting to get little vignettes of plants and flowers coming in. It's fun to watch and rearrange certain items in my head (and some day in the yard as well).

First Harvest

We have some crisp and spicy red radishes, fresh from the garden!

A finished project!

 Finally a weekend with two healthy DIYers and 10 hours of dry daylight! Justin and I got our jig on carving up umpteen 2x3s with a fanciful curve and mounting them on the top of the trellis. I sawed, Justin sanded and then we finished the project off with a little edge-easing with the router. All in a day's work.

Around this time last year, we had barely more than a pile of rubble and a big vision for the backyard. But this year, the yard is filling in with fresh flowers and new greenery including some promising looking salad greens in the raised bed. Our apple trees have blossomed and our maples are just leafing out. I can't wait to fill in the bare spots with some new shrubs and perennials.

Spring has sprung!

We've been waiting for the first weekend of the year where the sun shines and air is crisp and almost warm. And it came this weekend. Both cats were out and about, eating blades of grass and romping through the neighborhood. We spent Saturday exhausting ourselves moving boxes and furniture for friends Ryan and Michelle. They're spending the summer in an apartment while they search for a new house. And today, even with a few sore muscles from yesterday, we made some progress on the arbor and some other outdoor projects. I'm pretty proud of our accomplishments.

We hung a bunch of lattice on the trellis, filling it in. We under-ordered on a few dimensions of wood so we couldn't get much further than this today.

After a trip to the home improvement store, we came home with some hooks for improving our storage arrangement for our garden tools. I installed the hooks and hung all of the tools while Justin worked on the arbor/trellis.

When we bought our house, it had bars on the basement windows. But, last year before we had the windows replaced, Justin and I removed all of the bars, opting for an unobstructed view. Thinking ahead to a day like today, I saved the decorative ironwork with the future hope of making a trellis or garden art. With our sugar snap peas planted and sprouted, these re-purposed window grates should provide a nice support for our incoming crop.

A perfect width!

Farmer Laura

Did the groundhog see his shadow this year? I think so and now six weeks later, Seattle is enjoying temperatures that are pretty ideal for kicking off the planting season. I should mention that I kicked off the planting season over a month ago indoors with grow light and heating pad and today, the seedlings are all of an inch tall and really spindly. Something is not right with my indoor garden. Let's hope the seeds I planted yesterday fair a little better. If so, I'll have baby lettuce, spinach, radishes, beets, kale, chard, peas and parsnips poking out in another week or so.

Winterizing

A welcome surprise came on Friday, clearly the work of Mother Nature's elves (does she have such things?). Apparently, trees are falling like pick-up sticks around here because a friendly tree service was finally calling with a load of chips. It smelled like Christmas trees around here all afternoon.

Here's the pile before--probably about 10 yards of mulch:

Our newly bedazzled yard, tucked in for the winter officially now (hope it's not too late, the cold snap came early this year!):

We have about a yard of mulch remaining and hopefully a neighbor will want to use it in their yard. It's free and it's a miracle worker on weeds.

Trees!

We planted 5 new trees this weekend and found a screaming deal on them to boot. We picked up two apple trees, 2 paperbark maples and one Japanese maple all from West Seattle Nursery. WSN was having the sale of the year...the prices were 50-70% less than Swanson's on trees. I'd been anticipating that Swanson's, with it's larger space, would have a better selection and comparable prices. NOT SO!

Pictured here (looking east): 2 espaliered apples and 2 paperbark maples amongst a bramble of raspberry vines that are just now starting to produce. The raspberries are moving as soon as the fruit ripens.

And our lovely-shaped, multi-trunk Japanese maple...planted between the house and garage.

We picked up a few other items as well like a red rhody to block the alley between our garage and the neighbor's and a bunch of herbs for our soon-to-be herb garden in the parking strip. I love the fall because you can plant without consequences and all of the nurseries are having end-of-season sales so the plants are cheap!

Happy Holidays blog readers. We had a busy and productive weekend around the house. Mostly we got busy in the painting barn (aka the garage) but we had a few other items we were able to check off the list.

Justin and I put the fascia and trim around the deck this weekend which was a chore! Believe it or not, the deck isn't square and plumb :( Moreover, everywhere we wanted to install a fastener for the trim, Justin seemed to hit a fastener that was installed in the framing. So, it took twice as long as can be imagined. We are going to need some tips on how to make nail holes inconspicuous in the Trex material because we have quite a few.

Decked out!
Meanwhile, while Justin fiddled with installing the trim, I painted our future railing. We don't have enough staging space so I'll be painting the railing in batches. This will be a slow project since it needs 3 coats.

Everything's drying out.

Justin moved all of the scrap lumber that we've had piled up next to the garage and we graded and moved some of our new soil into the bed between the garage and the house. It's now a ~12x12 blank slate in partial shade. We made a stop at the nursery to take advantage of some coupons and pick up a few plants to fill in around the edges. I see a paperbark maple tree in our future, just not today. Mostly we still have a blank slate left.

We picked up a hose reel to take care of a little organization problem in the front of the house. Unfortunately, the connection leaked in the new reel so it's going back to the store.

Before: messy eyesore!

During: Reeling 'er in.

After: stay tuned. The saga continues...

Mending Fences

We've been capitalizing on the long summer evenings this past week and wrapped up the raised bed project last Wednesday. I decided to make one the crazy vine bed (zucs, cukes and beans) and the other the root bed (beets and radishes) for this season. I picked up another tomato and pepper plant to put in the sunny bed alongside the garage--you can never have too many veggies! (although, it is very likely that I will have too many zucchinis--that's 3 plants you see, all for the price of one.)

Our soon-to-be productive beds. We installed hardware (aka PVC pipe) that will allow us to make these into hoop houses in the winter and spring.

Additionally, I got some of the flowers and shrubs that I picked up over the past few weeks into the ground along the edges. I'm hesitant to get too carried away because I need to buy a few trees and get those placed in the right spots before I fill in with smaller landscaping AND I don't want to spend a fortune watering these little babes all summer to get them established. But, the fun of plant shopping continues to call to me so I'll probably succumb somewhat.

We had an action packed weekend and writing this I am pretty proud of us for getting it all in. On Saturday, we trucked it out to the lumber yard to pick up all of the trim for our new deck railing. Justin and I chopped it all up to size and sanded and primed the pieces to ready them for installation. We are going to get them all painted up with their final coat before we install them and then just touch them up once they're installed.

The painting barn in full production mode:

On Sunday morning (well, really it was about noon by the time we got underway) we bicycled over to Alki Beach for lunch. Returning, we dug right in with our paint brushes, applying another coat and running ourselves out of paint. With plenty of energy remaining (joking), Justin decided to take on mending the fence. We have to replace one of the posts since it rotted and fell over and then mount the end of the fence onto a new post.

Here's Justin in demo mode; his favorite job.

Visualize...

You can really visualize our yard now. We finished up one raised bed and got the pieces cut for the second so it should be a quick and easy assembly. But maneuvering one bed into place has really given us a picture of what the rest of the yard will look like. All of a sudden we have margins along the edges for flower beds and I'm starting to imagine where a few trees will go for privacy and shade.

I think I'll plant a summer crop of zucchini and cucumbers in these beds since there's no point letting them lie fallow all summer.

A flat yard and other news

It took one dump truck and one excavator and one Saturday morning and we finally have a flat yard with no extra dirt. We figure that we got rid of about 30 yards of dirt from this tiny Seattle lot which is amazing. The yard was pretty flat to begin with but it was about a foot higher in most spots than it is now. We'll be bringing in some quality soil to use for a top layer so that our garden can thrive but it will be a lot less than 30 yards.

Here's Dan loading the truck up one shovel at a time. Thanks Dan!

After the dirt was long gone, Justin got to work on framing up our walkway to the alley and tamping the gravel into place. Meanwhile, I busied myself digging up weeds in the yard. I'm a bit concerned of what lies beneath this lovely bare soil. Just two months ago, this was a thriving weed patch and I'm not so naive to believe that scraping off the top layer will do away with the former crop. I'm especially wary of the morning glory that has been poking out of nearly every corner of the yard despite my futile attempts at eradication.

Here's the tamped down base for the future path to the alley. Where the gravel stops, we'll be installing concrete the total width of the lot to provide a small parking spot, driveway into the garage and pad for the garbage cans.On Sunday I wanted to get some plants in the ground. I've been busy picking up plants here and there over the past few weeks and I was anxious to arrange them and plant them. After raining all night, the soil was heavy and muddy so I quickly made a mess of everything traipsing through the dirt. But, I got the east side of the patio completely planted, save for one hebe that I still need to find and buy. I can't wait until these plants grow up a bit and fill in.

Here's the spot on the north side of the stairs to the deck. The featured plant is a variegated red twig dogwood which should get as tall as the deck.

Looking south, I've got a ninebark plant, privet, yarrow, several barberry plants and a few daylilies. I'll be looking for an exciting clematis in a hot color to train up the trellis.

Weeds-be-gone

After a bunch of desperate calls to tree services, we finally got a load of wood chips for mulch. Heaven sent! Apparently tree mulch is in high demand or tree services are in low demand because we've been asking for months for a load. Today, some random caller offered me a load and I didn't even recognize the company name as one that I had called, but I've been spreading my name and address and phone number around like I'm looking for trouble. Who wants to bet that we end up with more mulch than we could ever dream of using? It's bound to happen.

A view of the front yard:

Justin and I spent about an hour spreading the whole pile around the yard, hoping that the weedlings will choke on the mulch and die under it's woody goodness. I've been keeping them at bay with regular tending but they keep popping up, especially after all the glorious rain we've had.

Looking south...

This weekend

Swinging single again this weekend due to back-to-back regattas, I picked up where I left off last weekend. I weeded the garden beds, picked up some new plants and got down and dirty in the garden. Unlike the other parts of the yard, I don't have a planting layout for the backyard. I figured I'd try playing it a little fast and loose...picking out whatever looked good at the nursery. I did get a little lost in the daylily section but for the most part, I think I did okay with my selections. I don't have enough plants to fill in the bare beds yet so photos of my landscape design are not yet available. But, I will say that I'm going with a "hot" color scheme. That means I'm ditching the pink and pastels and will be planting reds, yellows, oranges, lime greens and looking for interesting contrasts and textures.

Here I'm putting my best foot forward...ha ha...isn't this a FUN! planter?

Justin and I laid the rest of the walkway to the north side of our yard after work last week. All that remains with the stone work now is the walkway out to the alley.

Here, I've plugged the stones in place with a spot of moss. Someday, it'll take over and I'll just have a moss walkway.

Just for fun: Tink gets comfortable...because really, is there anything more to being a cat?

Oh, my aching body...

Well, our backyard now looks like an archeological dig site, although the only discoveries were giant blocks of concrete and a pile of broken bricks.

Two out of three of us were up by 8am ready to carve up the backyard with heavy machinery. I was in bed, trying to sleep in a few more minutes and wishing I'd had one fewer glasses of wine on Saturday night. Dan, our equipment operator and friend of Justin's mother, graciously volunteered to run the equipment. And Justin, eager to get some full body exercise stood in as the dirt schlepper, ferrying a 1/2 yard of dirt at a time to a dirt broker a few miles south. Ultimately, I pulled weeds and separated out rocks that we can use for our drainage project.

Here you see the patio space and pathway to the garage excavated along with a drainage trench along the house.

Here's our giant pile of dirt...only 2-3 yards found a new home so far. We're going to use the other 12 yards for a bmx jump :)

Dan's going to try to come back to finish up...we had so much extra dirt that maneuverability was too limited to dig out the pathway to the alley.

Here today, gone tomorrow

Well, our giant pile of rubble is packed up and ready to be hauled away. We got super, super lucky and found some folks via craigslist to come take the large pieces of concrete. It was a win win because now we don't have to pay for disposal/recycling and they get some free material to build their retaining walls. Justin ordered up a dumpster for the smaller scraps and we filled it up in quick time and still had a mini pile remaining. The pile wasn't large enough to warrant using a dumpster so we decided to take a trip to the dump with it. We also filled up our yard waste bin with so many weeds that we can barely move it. We are hoping that it is not too heavy to collect.


We have a lot of small pebbles and gravel that was under the slab of concrete and we are hoping that when we install our drainage trench and french drain, we will be able to reuse this material for that. If you look closely in the picture above you can see the contour of the filled-in trench where Justin installed water and electricity to the garage last weekend. I want to have an easy option for irrigating my vegetable beds when we put this yard back together and thought that a spigot off the garage was a better option than drawing water from the spigot on the house. And, despite being wired up inside of the garage, the previous owner never actually pulled power from the panel to power the garage. So, Justin's got the conduit in place to allow for us to actually wire the garage to a real power source, not just thin air.

2010 Flower & Garden Show

I thought I would share some shots of the garden show. There were a few things there that caught my eye.

I wonder what the real Dr. Chomsky would think of this? I thought it was funny.
Here's a lovely panorama of one of the gardens. My preliminary garden sketches for the backyard are leading me toward something like this...a big patio with 3'-5' beds along the perimeter.

This was one of the coolest new ideas I saw this year. It's a vertical strawberry bed. It's something I think I might be able to make work in my space.

And this was my all-time favorite new plant (at least new to me): 'Midwinter Fire' Bloodtwig Dogwood. The photo doesn't do the color justice. And doesn't it look fabulous with the black mondo grass?

All in all, the show this year was a little bit less amazing then in previous years. The first year I attended, maybe 2003, there were tons of freebies and awesome coupons from the nurseries around the area. This year, there wasn't much of that. I think I came home with three packets of seeds and a single coupon to a nursery in Lynnwood. The show organizers seem to have let in a lot more shed-builders and window replacement vendors. There are still some awesome booths, Ravenna Gardens had one for sure and some of the more far-flung nurseries were peddling some interesting plants. Prices seemed a little steeper than my last memory and it didn't look like the vendors were selling as much given the huge masses of people at the show. This was the year for the longest ticket line for sure.

But as usual, the show didn't fail to inspire and with a backyard that is a blank slate (well, more like a blank concrete), I needed a few grand ideas to get me thinking.

Labor Day Weekend

We took this holiday literally. We labored. Most of our time since last December when we purchased the bungalow has been on fixin' up the inside. The outside has been a bit of an eyesore, at least to me who is used to lots of flowers. At my last place, I hired a landscape designer to help with a plan and since implementing that plan and tending to the plants for several years, I know what I like and what I don't. With that confidence, I put together a landscape design for the front yard over the last few weeks and this weekend we installed it over the three day weekend.
On Friday night, Justin went off-script and started spreading some of the compost we had delivered. I wasn't ready for 4 days of labor so mostly I watched and made dinner. Bright and early on Saturday, we trucked it over to the rental yard and borrowed a sod cutter. Justin loves the sod cutter. He says it's like driving a Tasmanian devil. Justin drove the machine and I rolled up all of our weedy sod, readying it for the dump. We then spread 12 yards of compost around the freshly barren lawn. That took it out of us for Saturday. Except for a fun visit to the nursery for plants (I need a little bright spot to all of the dirt!). Sunday morning the weather was disgusting-hard driving rain. Although we were planning to rototill all of the compost to amend the soil, the prospect of working in the rain wasn't appealling. Instead, we trucked it out to the burbs to some more nurseries for more plants. It rained for most of the shopping but it sure beat laboring in the rain. By the time we returned home, the rain had let up and we got our rototilling on. By the time we had tilled the yard and raked it mostly even and cleaned up, it was time for bed. Today, we headed out to a couple more nurseries to see about filling out the rest of the plant list (we still have a few more plants to get!). And then we planted. Justin dug the holes and I filled them in. He also built a threshold to go around a basement window to hold back the dirt from the wood around the window.
We are sore and tired but there's a chicken roasting in the oven for dinner and a great view out of out dining room to our new front yard.

Here are some photos:

In process: sod removed and compost spread.

After planting:

Well, it's a start.

The plan this weekend was to go on a hike up Mt. Pilchuck, an all day affair, but our hike leader canceled the hike due to iffy weather. So, I had an extra day burning a hole in my pocket. I decided to maximize it. I was up at 8, painting the kitchen on Saturday morning. I wrapped up around 9:30 and changed into my spandex bike gear. My friends came over with their bikes at 10 and we cycled around Mercer Island and back. I had a quick lunch and pulled out the blue paint to do all the touch-up. Finished that, decided the iffy weather was going to turn out to just be sunny and cool so I got out my gardening tools and dug in (literally). I weeded one of the planting areas in the front of the house and trimmed up the lone shrub, a lanky euphorbia. The OCD started to kick in and I decided to go for some of the more obnoxious weeds in the backyard too (it's full of them). So, it's a start. Summer isn't the best time of year to plant a new garden so I will just be defending my fresh bed against weeds until fall when I can get to planting. My yard waste bin is full until Thursday when I can get started on the blackberry bramble behind the garage.

Painted and ready for service. Next up: a tile backsplash and crown moulding for the kitchen

My freshly weeded flower bed. This is where my witch hazel is going.