Search Continues For Foundation Plantings

2 April, 2013 Reply
I think this might be the winner. It grows only 3' tall and wide, and it has a little bit of a golden cast to it, which would contrast nicely with all the dark glossy green leaves.

I think this might be the winner. It’s only 3′ tall and wide, and it has a little bit of a golden cast to it, which would contrast with all the dark glossy green leaves.

I’ve been spending some time looking online for plants to use as foundation plantings. Originally I thought I wanted yews across the front, but in my research I’ve found that they won’t do well in the location I was considering, especially when I just read that winter winds can turn the tips brown. We have vicious winter winds here and they blast in right on the side of the house they’d be located. Oh, well. Onward.

Evergreen Choices

I’m really looking for something evergreen, or at least semi-evergreen. I absolutely don’t want either holly or boxwood, as they are so overused and so unexciting. I’d also prefer that it bloom, although having some fir type evergreen, like an arborvitae is appealing too.

I’ve come up with a short list of some contenders, as the winter cold and blustery winds have invaded us again, so I’m back to dreaming by the fireplace (really, I am by the fireplace, just no fire, that’s where my chaise is). So far I’ve found:

  • Gardenia jasminoides ‘Frost Proof’
  • Eastern Arborvitae ‘Mr. Bowling Ball’
  • Eastern Arborvitae ‘Hetz Midget’
  • Dwarf Mugo Pine
  • Dwarf Fothergilla
  • False cypress
  • Glossy abelia
  • Weigela

I want to balance what I already have with some new introductions. They will be going underneath windows, where I planted what was supposed to be a low growing euonymous, but it ended up being more of a creeping plant, and after six years is not even one foot tall, so it needs to be moved where it can work more like a ground cover. Unfortunately I have six of them and five of them have to be moves. One of them did what the tag said it would and it looks nice where it is. The others look pitiful, like they’re trying to wear their big sister’s clothes.

In considering what I’m going to plant I also have to keep in mind that we’re going to be putting in a porch on the front of the house, eventually, so I need to plant as if it is already there. I didn’t do that before, so that means a couple of the plants I need to move will not have to be replaced, as they are located where the porch or patio will be.

Here's what I have now. Not too bad, but could use some cohesiveness.

Here’s what I have now. Not too bad, but could use some cohesiveness.

Here’s a picture of what I have not, which is a horrible hodge-podge. It got planted this way, because I didn’t have any garden areas ready except this one, and I went on a huge shopping spree right after we moved in. I learned my lesson there and am not buying anything I don’t have a home for anymore.

Numbers 1-8 are plants that are going to stay.

  1. Camellia
  2. Hydrangea
  3. 2 Azaleas
  4. Azalea
  5. Azalea
  6. Camellia
  7. Euonymous (the one that grew properly)
  8. Caryopteris

A, B, and C are where I need foundation plants.

After looking at what I have, I realize that I have a lot of flowering plants with glossy green leaves. So, I think that I would like to have evergreens in the other three places. I decided to look further at the arborvitae and I’ve found many that don’t get over 3’. So, unless I find something more enticing, I’m going to go with arborvitae for the three foundation plants. Then across the front of the patio, where we’ll really be able to smell them, I’ll put the hardy gardenias.

Any Ideas?

Sometimes you just have to sit down and look and the solution becomes obvious. However, I’d love your input on which plants you think would look good in spaces A,B, and C.

Which plant do you like best?

Let me know which plant you think would look best in my foundation garden.

Gardenia

         

Arborvitae

         

Dwarf Pine

         

Dwarf Fathergilla

         

Glossy Abelia

         

Weigela

         
Show me the results

The Winning Stake

22 March, 2013 Reply

To Plant Or Not To Plant

Property line stake that is. Last weekend we planned to mark where our blackberries and marionberries permanent homes are going to be. However, when we tried to decide where to put the marionberries, which were to be near the property line, we couldn’t find the marker for the SW corner of our property. Try and dig as we might, we didn’t find a thing.

Brand new markers are easy to find. After 13 years, though, they can be elusive.

Brand new markers are easy to find. After 13 years, though, they can be elusive.

I remembered reading about a metal detector group in our state that had put on some event about a year ago, so I looked them up online and contacted the president of the organization. I asked if there were any members around where I lived that might be able to help us locate our markers.

He sent the request out to the club and I got two responses. I arranged for one of them to come out. This morning he arrived with all his paraphernalia. It was pretty impressive.

Finding The Markers

We started at one corner of the property, where we thought the marker that we’d found wasn’t the correct one. He had a dickens of a time because there were so many bleeps that he kept getting all kinds of false readings. We finally went to the back stake, which we knew almost exactly where it was and got our bearings. We finally dug up the post we’d originally found and decided it was the correct one, even though it looks like it’s in an entirely different place than our plat shows.

Then we moved on to the other front marker. This one eluded us even more. He’d get a hit and we’d dig and find a screw, a piece of wire, etc. He was such a nice person, and just kept locating and digging, again unearthing screws and bits of wire, and one possible old button, which he gave me as a souvenir. We dug about a dozen holes, when I suggested I go stand at the back marker on that side, which was above ground and easily found, so that they could get an idea of where to dig. I did that, and still we didn’t find it. However, while my husband was back working on a better way to mark the back corner, Pat, our metal detectorist, found the other marker. I think he just needed us to get out of the way, so he could do his work.

It was fun, even though it was wickedly chilly out this morning. He let me put on the headphones and play with his detector a little. I could see where people could really enjoy this as a hobby. It’s like a treasure hunt, even though I didn’t find anything interesting (one piece of wire and a rusty screw).

Now we know where the property line runs and we’ll be able to safely plant the marionberries right where I’d planned them. Oh, I also found out that the big patch of violets that my neighbor kept cutting down last year is on our property, so they’ll get to stay and bloom their little hearts out this year (if he didn’t kill them with all the cutting).

This Could Help You Out

If you ever need to locate your property markers, and you know they are metal, just contact you local club and see if someone would be willing to help you out. Of course if you need it for something legal you should probably hire a surveyor, but for our purposes Pat’s finds were just what we needed. Pat’s a great guy, retired marine, who worked with us for two hours to find the markers in our “treasure” filled property. It might be interesting to see if there’s anything of value under any of the multitude of bleeps I heard…

Preparing For Spring Projects

5 February, 2013 Reply

It’s Planning Time

After moving a tree and large shrub that were blocking the front of the house. Now's the time to sit down and plan some landscaping.

After moving a tree and large shrub that were blocking the front of the house. Now’s the time to sit down and plan some landscaping.

It may seem early to a lot of you, as you look out your window at the mounds of snow, but here in the mid-Atlantic region I need to get my list of spring projects organized and ready to start working on them. Even now we’ll be having a few warmer days where I can get out and start on some preliminary projects, but March through May will be prime months for getting projects completed, while the temperatures are mild.

Review Of Last Year

In looking at my list from last year I only managed to get a few things done. Of course a bigger project, that I hadn’t really planned to do, but it suddenly came up – putting a roof on our back deck, took up a lot of time I could have been doing other things.

Also, I started some projects, but didn’t get many of them done. We got most of the soil in place for putting up the greenhouse, but then Sarvasri hurt his back and we couldn’t go any further. I managed to get one of the two japanese maple seedlings permanently planted.

Also, I ended up doing a lot of projects that are no longer on the list, or didn’t make it there in the first place. I put in a garden for melons and squash. We worked on the secret garden in the wooded part of our lot. We did buy and plant a bunch of fruit trees (that are all doing splendidly at this point). I permanently put in the herb garden where I wanted it.

New Commitment For 2013

I know the biggest thing on my list for this year is to get control of all the gardens, and to get permanent walls up for the raised beds. The other real biggie is to get the greenhouse up. I’m going to spend a bunch of time planning the front landscaping. Something I’d wanted to do last year, but when the deck project came up, my attention turned that direction.

This year, now that the giant autumn olive has been relocated, I want to get a complete design done for the front of the house, and start putting in the permanent foundation plantings. I found that some of the plants I originally planted I don’t like. They didn’t grow as described on the tag, so they’ll need to be moved and others need to take their place. I need to do some research and think about what I want the front to look like and exactly where the porch is going to go, so that I don’t plant anything there. It’s time to have a beautiful, attractive entrance to our house, instead of the tumble down wooden steps the builder supplied.

There are tons of other things that need to be completed. So, over the next few days I’m going to make a complete list of everything I see that needs to be done and then prioritize it. I’ll also set up some categories of quick jobs, moderate projects, long-term projects, etc. That way I can look and see what is a good match for the time I’m going to have. Working on a long-term project might not get very far if I only have an hour, but knowing what all the quick little jobs that need to be attended to would be perfect.

I’ve made lists before, but I’ve never prioritized them by these categories. I’m hoping this will help me have a better idea of what to spend my time on.

What’s the Heat Zone Index?

18 September, 2012 Reply

I was looking through my old posts and found that I had never talked about the heat index. I can’t believe I would leave out such important information! Please excuse my omission.

Horticultural Zone Information

Almost anybody that does even a small amount of gardening knows about the horticultural zone index, but many don’t know about, or are not familiar with, the heat zone index. Just because a plant will grow in a certain zone, does not mean it will thrive.

If you look at the horticultural zone map you’ll see that zone 8 stretches from the maritime northwest, down to Texas, and over to the the mid-Atlantic states. What this means is that all these areas have approximately the same first/last frost date. If you think about it just a little you’ll realize that the climates in these areas are totally different.

I’ve lived in all three of the areas mentioned and they are as different as could be imagined.

Seattle is a very mild climate with very few hot or cold days. It is sort of in the middle. It is comfortably humid.

Texas, at least the parts I lived in had mild winters, hot summers. It was an arid climate.

I live in the mid-Atlantic now. The area I’m in has very variable weather. It doesn’t usually get extremely cold, but it does once in awhile, it does get quite hot in the summer. It is a humid climate year-round.

Even in Texas alone you have various climates in the same zone. Some part of Texas are very dry, while others, near the coast, can be quite humid.

Heat Zone Index Information

Beautiful 'Silver Mound'

This plant was magnificent in a dry climate, a pile of mush in a humid one. Artemisia schmidtiana ‘Silver Mound’
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

What the heat zone index tells you is whether a plant can take the weather conditions that are prevalent in your area. I’ll give you an example. When I lived in the desert southwest I fell in love with Artemisia schmidtiana ‘Nana’ or ‘Silver Mound’. These plants have downy leaves and are very drought tolerant. When I planted the same thing in the mid-Atlantic, because its downy leaves keeps moisture on the leaf for most of the day, it rotted in one season. Although it showed it would grow in both horticultural zones, if you look at the heat zone it shows it doesn’t do well in high humidity.

Not all plants are tagged with this information, although more and more trees and shrubs are. Perennials are still a mix and annuals are not considered important enough to bother (I guess).

If we look at the heat zone index for these three areas we see that Seattle is a HI=3, Texas HI=9, and where I live now HI=7. Knowing this can help you make fewer mistakes when planting, especially for larger plant purchases.

What Do You Think?

Have you used the heat zone index? If so, did it help you make a better decision in your plant choices?

Get Ready For Fall Planting

14 August, 2012 Reply
You can do a lot of planting in the fall

Don’t put your tools away until the frost is on the ground!

In many parts of the country, fall is just as good a time, maybe even better, to do serious planting. That is especially true of trees and shrubs, as it gives them time to grow a good root system over the winter months, without having to worry about keeping leaves going, too.

In any area of the country you can plant until the ground freezes hard. Now, I would recommend you know when the average first frost date is for your area, and plan to finish up around that time. If you know your area really well, have lived there for a number of years and have paid attention to the weather patterns, then you can probably stretch it some or even a lot. However, if you’re a relative newbie to the gardening realm, then plan on calling it a season around the average first frost date.

In some parts of the country, here for instance, fall is really the time to plant a lawn. This confuses a lot of people, as when they think “seeds,” they think spring. However, the grass will come up, have time to put down enough roots to keep it going, then when the cold hits it no longer needs to grow up, so it grows out, with nice long strong roots that will help it be strong and green, able to withstand weeds attacks, in the spring. Timing is important with this, as you need to make sure you get the grass far enough along that it can withstand the winter, and, unfortunately, every once in awhile you’ll have a really nasty winter and it just won’t take, but that’s rare.

Most perennials plant well in the fall, too. You can buy small plants, pint size, and put them in. Over the winter they’ll put out roots and the next spring you’ll have as big a plant as if you had bought the gallon one to begin with. Just remember to look at the mature size of the perennial so you don’t crowd them too close. It sometimes takes a lot of faith to believe that tiny little plant is going to cover the large area you’re leaving for it, but most grow really fast.

If you live in a milder climate you can do a winter vegetable garden. Most of the cole crops will make it well into the late fall or early winter, in some areas, with just a little bit of protection, they’ll go all the way until the warm weather hits in the spring. I’ve gone out on Christmas day to harvest chard and kale for our holiday meal. I think last year we even had some lettuce still going, but that’s rare. We had an extremely mild winter last year.

So, don’t dismay, if you’re landscape plans aren’t as far along as you’d like, you may have another three to four months of planting, if you’re in the right zone.

When was the latest or earliest you’ve planted something and had it survive? Mine was a clematis that I bought way too early. I planted it in February. I’ll have to share the whole story in my next blog…

A New Garden Experiment

26 July, 2012 Reply

My System Doesn’t Work

I’ve made a decision. After spending the last two mornings rescuing my tomato plants from over-zealous bean plants I realized that my gardening has not been very successful in the past few years. This year everything started out great, but now, as the weather gets really hot, the gardens are looking miserable and the production that was so abundant earlier has stopped. Disease is setting in on many plants, and others are not producing much of anything.

Learning How To Communicate With Nature

Many years ago I purchased a book called Perelandra Garden Workshop by Machaelle Small Wright. At the time I was all excited about it, but the techniques seemed cumbersome and after working with it for a short time I dropped it, because I just didn’t have that many hours in the day.

I’m giving the book a second look. I’m going to give the techniques a try, a real try this time. However, I will probably try to find shortcuts to getting the information, as having to ask 100 questions to get the answer to one problems is still too time consuming. I have a lot of knowledge under my belt now, though. A lot of understanding about energy and how to work with it, so it should be a faster process.

Her technique involves working with all the energy spirits or devas that oversee an area. They know what is going on in the area, what the soil needs, what the plants need, where placement of plants will be most beneficial for the plants success, etc. Now, whether you believe in devas or nature spirits really doesn’t matter, because, in essence what you are doing is tapping into the energy field that nature resides on. That you can’t deny exists. Science has proven that we’re 99% energy. That the physical form that we see is not really solid, etc. So, what I’m going to do is start to work with the energy of the property we live on and get it balanced so that the plants and my family can flourish.

Right now I feel more like I’m on a battlefield and all I do is go from one skirmish to the next. If I had taken the time to connect with the energy of the garden, the tomato plants, and the bean plants before I allowed them in the same garden together I would have gotten a huge no from the tomato plants.

No Foresight Causes Disaster

Here’s how it unfolded for me. I planned to put the tomato plants in a certain garden, because you need to move them from year to year, so as not to allow disease to settle into the soil. So, you try not to plant them in the same place for three years. This has been a challenge for me, because we don’t have all our garden space finished and finding a garden that hasn’t had a tomato plant in it for three years can be a challenge. Anyway, I chose the garden, but had to clear it out of some major weeds. That took some time and during that time a bunch of volunteer bean plants came up. These beans did extremely well in our heat and humidity last year so I just left them. I planted the tomatoes amongst the small bean sprouts and waited to see what happened.

At first it seemed like a good match. They were growing at about the same rate and the beans were actually holding the tomatoes up. Then things started to turn south. I found that some of the bean plants were smothering the three hot pepper plants I had put in the garden, so I moved the beans to the outside edge of that part of the garden.

My poor tomatoes are devastated.

Time to try a new method of knowing what my plants need. This tomato was beautiful and healthy just a couple weeks ago. Now, because of damp conditions and the beans stopping the air movement it is just a twig with a couple tomatoes hanging on the end of them.

This last week I realized that I wasn’t seeing very many tomatoes on my plants and on closer inspection I realized that the beans were trying to make the tomatoes their trellis and they were in-fact now smothering the tomato plants.

Because of circumstances I wasn’t able to get to them until this week and in that one week disease set in and my tomato plants, which were huge and beautiful, are now a mass of black leaves, early blight has struck again. I was so careful not to water them from above this spring, but the leaves of the beans held moisture in around the tomato plant, which was a prescription for disaster.

So, for the past two days I’ve been hacking back bean plants until they are just around the edges of the entire garden and trying to salvage at least some of the tomato plants. I don’t know if I have, we’ll have to see how they fare, now that they are no longer buried.

I’ll do some testing to see if there is anything I can do to curtail the early blight and get the plants healthy again, but I fear that there’s not much that can be done this year.

So, instead of guessing and putting out fires over and over, I’m going to ask the land and the plants what they want and need and give them that. Hopefully then I can start to see healthy productive plants in all gardens every year.

I’ll keep you apprised with the progress and any modifications I do to Machaelle’s program to make it simpler to use.

How Do You Communicate With Nature?

If anyone out there has used Machaelle’s method I’d love to hear from you. Or maybe you have some other method of communicating with nature that you could recommend.

 

We’re covered!

24 July, 2012 1 Comment

This past weekend we finally finished the roof on the back deck. It rocks! It took us a lot of time to get the deck reworked the way we wanted it, but it was worth it. We sat outside the other day and just enjoyed the evening slowly enveloping us. It was great.

We’re not necessarily fast workers, but we’re thorough. Here’s the progress of our humble respite.

Our Deck Before Remodel

Ugly, ugly, ugly. A huge eyesore! (Photo 1)

Not Move In Ready

When I first saw the deck I immediately decided I wanted the steps moved so that they were beside the deck instead of sticking out into usable ground. The other problem was that they put the steps on the corner away from the house, which meant there was an area that got no sun and wasn’t good for much of anything except catching all the bits and pieces of “treasures” my husband had for his various inventions! It was a catastrophe and was soon overgrown with weeds in amongst all his findings. Not only that the wood was very tired looking. It was only six years old when we moved in, but it had not been preserved or cleaned at all during that time. So the color of the wood was a dark grey and it looked very unappealing. Worst of all it was set so that it is in the blistering sun from around 8 in the morning until 5 or so in the evening. Meaning that it was unusable. We put an indoor/outdoor thermometer out there and the average summer temperature was over 110˚F!

Our deck was still an eyesore 5 years later!

Five years later it still looks pretty unappealing! (Photo 2)

Inside First

When we first moved in we didn’t really have time to spend outside as we were remodeling the inside of the house. We don’t have any outbuildings or a garage on our property, so we tried to put up a tarp over the deck so that we could cut the flooring and other outside and to keep down the sawdust. Photo 1 is of the deck after a big windstorm tore our tarp to shreds and left us with a 20th century looking sculpture in its place. As you can see we had a lot of stuff stored all around the deck, because at least under the deck provided a bit of protection. I also had all the plants I’d brought from the other property setting back there waiting for me to find them permanent homes.

At Long Last The Yard

Five long years later (Photo 2) you can see that not much has changed. We have picked up most of the mess and I’ve planted most of the plants, but it is still a very sad looking excuse for a deck and we still never use it. This is the first year we really did anything on the yard as we worked on the interior for the first three years, then spent two summers in India. Finally a summer to get some real gardens in.

Power washing made an amazing transformation.

Here’s the difference between before and after power washing. I want a power washer! (Photo 3)

Last summer we power washed the entire thing (Photo 3) and moved the stairs to their new location (Photo 4). It made a huge difference. The deck no longer looked so tired. Then I started to paint it. I only got that partially done, due to the fact that it kept raining and the wood would never dry out long enough for me to do much.

Commitment To Completion

This spring I begged my husband to work with me until the job was completed and I’m glad to say he did. I’ve always promised to be honest about our projects. This one took much longer than it really needed to. We only worked on it about a hour a day until we got ready to put up the rafters and put down the roofing. There’s so much to be done on the property that we felt that we couldn’t just give all our attention to the deck. So each day we would put up one board. Of course there were some days we couldn’t work on it at all, and some we spent a little more time, but it took us about 2 months to do what could have been done in one or two weekends if we’d really given it our all.

Moving the stairs made a huge difference.

Now the stairs are an asset and help to set off the herb garden that is at their base. (Photo 4)

We found some interesting things. First, they didn’t cut the railings the right length on one corner. That was the reason the railing on the other side was hanging by a thread. We cut the board properly and now it is much more secure. We had a lot of niggling to do to get everything together as the wood was old, had warped and often didn’t want us to screw something tight to it. We measured and remeasured and still made a 1/2” mistake on one corner, but you can’t tell. None of it was terribly hard, except getting my husband and I on the same book and page. We have very different styles of doing things and I finally had to just let go of my laid back, throw it together style, because he was going to draw perfectly scaled pictures before he cut one piece.

A Bit More To Go

The white really brightens up the deck.

Although the base of the deck still needs a lot of work, we now have a lovely place with lots of loving memories hung about it to spend our summer evenings. (Photo 5)

Of course it’s not completely done, as the first paint I bought was not very good (Valspar) and a good portion of it peeled off over the winter. So, we found another paint that has polyurethane in it (I didn’t win the battle for latex paint), and we’ll give that a try.

What you’re seeing in the after photos is about 75% complete, as the painting will take some time.

I’ve already dressed it up with all the gifts friends and family have given us over the years (Photo 5) and once the painting is done I’ll get the plants back on it. Hopefully within the next week, so we get a chance to enjoy it completely decked out (pun intended).

Share Your Handiwork

Have you ever reworked an eyesore on your property and been thrilled with the results? Share you story with all of us. I love to hear them.

First Impressions

3 July, 2012 Reply
I like this leaf motif mailbox post

I think this would look nice in white, with my purple clematis blooming on it.

What Does Your Mailbox Say About You?

One of the first things people see, sometimes even before they see your house, is your mailbox. Most people don’t give much thought to what they’re putting out, and it shows.

Next time you’re out and about, take a note of people’s mailboxes. In our area most people have the wooden posts you can get from the big box home improvement stores, because that’s what their builder put in. It usually has a rusted mailbox on the top, often times with a hinge that no longer holds the box closed.

Now think about the mailboxes you’ve seen that actually stuck with you. Of course there’s the really creative ones that are made out of some sort of found junk or a tree stump. Even if you go more conventional, you’ll find the mailboxes that you remember are ones that made a statement about the people and their care of the property, even before you met them.

Does Your Mailbox Post Need To Do Double or Triple Duty?

The reason I’m thinking about this so much right now is we need to replace our mailbox post. The cheap wooden one, that the builder put in, is now eaten half way through by wood eating ants and sometime soon it is probably going to topple.

My immediate thought is to look at decorative mailbox posts, in something other than wood. I have one main consideration. I have a clematis in my mailbox garden and it needs something to climb on, a ready made trellis of sorts. The other consideration is that I want an English country garden sort of feel. I was thinking white to go with the house, and the picket fence and arbor we’ll be putting in this fall. Maybe copper or bronze could work, too. I just know I don’t want black. I’ve seen some pretty ones with vining leaf motifs on them. I’ll keep looking, as I’ve probably have several months before it gets critical to replace the existing one.

If you’re in the market for a new mailbox and/or post, keep in mind that functionality isn’t everything. What do you want people to think about you before they meet you? Your mailbox helps set the right tone.

Temporary Storage Structures

22 June, 2012 2 Comments
Temporary storage structure that's protecting our tools and outdoor equipment.

The silver temporary structure is a bit of an eyesore, but having all our stuff protected from the elements is worth it!

Last fall we erected a couple of temporary storage structures. We haven’t decided exactly what we want for permanent buildings, but got to the point that tripping over the tools in the laundry was way past being old.

After some trial and error, we came up with a simple Quonset hut design, made with electrical conduit and tarps. The biggest problem we had was keeping the things from blowing away in the heavy winds we get here. Our area of the country is well known for sudden, strong storms that carry walloping winds. These winds don’t often last long, but when they hit it sounds like a freight train coming through, almost like what people say a tornado sounds like.

After repeated blowouts we finally found some good ground anchors at a reasonable price. My husband made some ingenious clamps, so that we could tie down the structures by the tarps and we’ve been in business ever since.

The one thing we noticed, though, is that it makes a huge difference in the quality of the tarp you use. One is a heavy duty tarp , the other a mid-duty tarp. Unfortunately the mid-duty tarp is already showing signs of stress and if it lasts through the season I’ll be surprised. The heavy duty tarp even went through a huge snowstorm this winter, where it got totally blown to pieces (structurally) and it’s lasting better than the mid-duty tarp that was put on this spring.

Tarps can actually be pretty pricey, so you want to know what you’re getting will work well for you. We’re now scouting around for really heavy duty tarps that are waterproof, UV protected  on both sides, mildew resistant, acid resistant, flexible even in really cold weather, and tear resistant. We’re also looking at how close together the grommets are spaced. This makes a big difference in how securely you can tie something down. The last thing we’re looking at is color. The heavy duty tarp is silver, which sticks out like a sore thumb in our landscape. The mid is brown, which blends in with the woods better. Green would probably be the best, as long as it is a dark green.

Of course, since these are temporary buildings we’re looking for them at a budget price. We’ve found some online, that are significantly less than we can purchase the same or similar product locally.

One thing for sure, having a place to store some of our tools and do outdoor projects has been a real stress reliever. I’ve completed several painting projects, because I know that what I’m painting is fairly well protected from the elements. We’ve got all our outdoor tools under cover, so they’re no longer rusting. Best of all I have a place to work on potting plants that is in the shade, protected from the rain, but still has the feeling of being out in nature, since the ends of the structures are open.

My recommendation is that you go with the best tarp you can afford to buy, because you might otherwise have to buy two or three tarps to last the same amount of time. And whatever you do don’t buy the tarps from the dollar type stores. They last about 1 month. We made that mistake for some light duty coverings. Total waste of money.

Woodland Fairyland

10 June, 2012 Reply
Entrance to Our Secret Garden

From the moment we owned the property I saw a secret entrance to a woodland garden.

From the moment we bought our property I knew I wanted to have a woodland garden. About 1/4 acre of our 1 acre lot is covered by native forest. There is a clump of massive tulip poplars and two massive oak trees that anchor the woodland area. Most of the other trees are quite small and can easily be removed by a lopper. Only a few are large enough to actually need a saw.

The first spring we were here I was delighted to find that we have two native dogwoods and a few native flowering shrubs. I made note of where they were so that I wouldn’t remove them by accident.

A small pile of garbage found in the woodland while cleaning it up.

The property had been used as a dumping ground by previous owners. They didn’t know what a gem they had.

It wasn’t until last summer that I finally got a chance to start cleaning things out and it was a good thing I did. The largest dogwood had been overtaken by wild grapevines and was near death. I pulled as much of the grapevine out of the tree as I could. Unfortunately I ended up covered in chigger bites. They had showered down on me while I was pulling down the vines. The nearly microscopic critters are next to impossible to detect, but their after-affects are visible for days or weeks!

I then put off pulling down anything else until the chiggers had died off due to cold weather. This spring I went back into the woodlands and  cut down all the tiny seedling trees in an area big enough for our 12’ screened gazebo. My husband helped me with the couple of bigger trees. Then we got busy with other pressing issues.

First we had to clear out a place to put our gazebo.

Lots of small trees needed to be removed to make room for our gazebo and plantings.

This weekend I finally took the time to dig up all the hostas and ferns I had planted across the front of the property when we moved in. From what I could determine when we first moved in the front of the house was nearly due north and would be in the shade. The reality, however, was that sets NW and heavy on the west, so in the afternoon it sits in blazing sun for the summer months, not the place for hostas and ferns.

Even in less than perfect location the hostas and ferns had grown massively and it took both my husband and myself to dig them out with a lot of grunting and sweating, but no swear words! I could only haul two at a time in my little garden cart! Away I went with my treasure to the back of the house and my dreamed of woodland garden.

Hostas and ferns dug and ready for separating and replanting.

These massive clumps were divided and planted throughout the woodland area.

I began cutting the huge clumps in to smaller pieces so that I could place them all over the area we’d cleaned out.

Once a manageable size I placed them all over the path and around the area where we’ll put the deck for the gazebo. Then I started to try and plant them. OMG, the soil was as hard as a rock and filled with big thick roots! To top it all off I had hurt my back digging them out, so couldn’t dig with much power. Lucky for me my husband put on his superman outfit (not literally) and dug out all but three or four of the plants holes. He’s not a macho-man, but he sure put on a macho show today.

Ferns and hostas replace trash and beer bottles.

Hostas and ferns replaced trash and beer bottles.

We managed to get all the plants in the ground and well watered. We’re both delighted with how it looks and the plants are not even well established. However, I moved one plant there earlier this year and it is now full sized and looking better than it ever did in the front garden. I recommend you stand back, because I expect to have a lush woodland garden quicker than you can blink your eye. Of course, since I just moved them I will have to watch them carefully and water them regularly until they get a good root system established.

Friendly gnome has already moved into our woodland hideaway.

Look who showed up! A woodland gnome already settling into his new home!

During this next week I’ll give them a rich fertilizer treatment with nutrients and a root booster (all organic and vegan no less), and then top them off with some leaf compost. I just needed to call it a day and take care of my poor, aching back. However, not before I took a few snaps of the dramatic change. Who wouldn’t want to wander back here now?

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