Vegetable Patch Facelift

The first time I saw the house I’m living in now, it was on the internet.  I scrolled through pictures, ignoring the 70-year-old kitchen and the random placement of the laundry machines right next to where the TV was hung on a wall, and I landed on pictures of the backyard.  And then I immediately e-mailed my wife and the real estate agent demanding (nicely) that we schedule a viewing.

One of the things that struck me about the yard was this picket fence vegetable patch.  I have never been much of a vegetable grower.  What I have grown has almost exclusively been done in containers.  

Although I was enchanted by it initially, I quickly realized that there were some problems.  For one, it hadn't been attended to in a long time.  It was filled with weeds, grass, and a struggling patch of strawberries.  I left the strawberries alone and even got to enjoy a few bowls.

I tried smothering the rest of the weeds with the leftover moving boxes and piled a couple inches of compost on top.  I have used this method with some success in the past, but I wouldn't try it again.  At least not for an area that I intended to plant in within a year's time.  For one, I found that even when I dug holes through the cardboard to plant my tomatoes, they all limped along.  I think the cardboard restricted water penetration and I've since learned that it also deprives the soil of oxygen.

After I gave up on this year's crop of tomatoes, I pulled up the cardboard and abandoned the vegetable patch for the remainder of the summer.  Many of the weeds had been killed, but the surrounding lawn was starting to invade in the absence of the weeds.

Unwanted grass.  Is there anything a gardener despises more?

In the picture below you can see that I have a rose bush planted in one corner.  I originally put it there along with a couple other plants just as a holding bed until a permanent home could be located.  I have since decided to leave it be.  I figure that the blooms might help attract pollinators to the veggie patch.  You might also notice along the edges that I tried placing stones as a border to keep the grass from encroaching.  It worked okay, but the irregular shapes of the rocks created gaps.

Around September I decided that I would try to solarize the remaining weeds and grass.  September is a little late for most people to do this but when I installed the plastic it was still well over 100 degrees here which is more than sufficient for solarization to work.  Unfortunately, the hot weather didn't last long enough and the process was only marginally successful.

In the picture below you can see that most of the grass is gone.  Of course, there's still some lingering beneath the ground and it'll surely rear it's ugly green head in the coming weeks.  I also switched out the rocks in favor of a border of bricks.  I think the bricks will work better to keep grass out from growing through as long as I keep up on the edging.

I scrapped my initial plan of making a pathway in the shape of an X and laid out the form below.  It probably doesn't make the best use of space but I don't need or want a huge vegetable patch anyway.

I filled the middle portion with pea gravel and tamped it down to form a permeable place to walk.

And then I decided to paint the fence "Sweet Molasses" Brown.  The vegetable garden is in a prominent place in our backyard and is visible from nearly every window that looks out on it.  I wanted to dress it up a little bit and also to have it blend in a little bit.  I think the brown will produce a nice foil for the green vegetation and when that white rose starts poking out of the pickets I think it will really make a statement.

I also added finials to the square posts to dress it up a bit and better mirror the shape of the pickets.

Finally, after all the painting was finished, the sand swept between the bricks, and the drip irrigation was installed, my daughter and I planted fava beans and a mixture of field peas and hulled oats. I figured that after the abuse this plot has taken I should give it a good start by planting some nitrogen-fixing cover crops this first go 'round.

I'm happy with the way it all turned out and I'm really happy that it's finished because now I can move on to the next project knowing that I've actually succeeded in finishing something.

Rain Delay

My front yard project has been in a rain delay for the past five days.  In that time we’ve received almost a full five inches of rain.  About a half inch of that came in a single stop-what-you’re doing-and-take-notice 10-minute period Sunday morning.  We stood at the windows and watched the water on the street crest the sidewalk.  If the local news hadn’t brought in all four of their meteorologists that morning and talked at length about this thin yellow band on the Doppler radar I would have been concerned about real flooding.  But I trusted that Mark, Eileen, Tamara and Dirk all knew what they were talking about and that the “extreme weather” wouldn’t stay long. 

The storm has knocked down most of the leaves.

By Sunday afternoon the clouds had finally cleared.  When I stood outside and looked east, I could still see the dark grey clouds and knew they were dumping snow on Lake Tahoe a hundred miles away.   

Berries on an Arbutus 'Marina' - also known as a Strawberry Tree

The sky was still clear this morning so the landscaping crew was finally back at work.  Today’s goal is to dig the trenches for the new sprinkler system.  They are running into some pretty hefty roots leftover though so work is progressing much slower than I’m sure they hoped. 

A red leaf cradled by Lambs Ear

Normally they would also plan to lay the sod today but the landscaper called his supplier and was told that right now the sod is under about 2 inches of water.  If it dries up early in the day they might be able to lay it down but it’ll likely be “heavy as hell” so the sod might have to wait a few more days as more rain is forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday.



Acer palmatum 'Glowing Embers'



It’s a little crazy to me when I think about this being December and yard projects of this type are still being done.  But this is California and, in spite of the storm (or perhaps because of it) overnight temperatures have been in the mid-to upper 40s with daytime highs over 60.  So, why not?  After all, it still looks and feels like autumn.

Lagerstroemia x fauriei 'Natchez' (A white-blooming Crepe Myrtle)

Broken Ground

I am pleased to say that the front yard redo has begun.  The guys came at 7:00 a.m. yesterday morning and brought their sod cutter with them.  I am tempted to ask them to stop here.  Look at all that bare dirt!  I could just go crazy with plants and never bring the lawn mower out front again.  

But I will resist.  For one, I don't think my wife would go for it.  Secondly, the benefit of lawn in this case is that it's actually lower maintenance for me than other options since I can just mow the often-mentioned and much-hated palm seedlings that constantly grow in my yard.  And, finally, if and when we come to a point where we decide to sell our house, I think the "average" buyer would prefer the expected American front yard which means green grass. 

Speaking of grass, in the picture above there is a strip of rock that borders what was the lawn and the walkway.  The landscapers will remove this rock and use it elsewhere.  They will replace it with even more grass.  This is fine with me as I had grown weary of weeding this strip.  I may eventually remove the grass that will be installed where the rock is now and replace it with a curvaceous planting bed or perhaps grow a boxwood hedge, but for now I'm going to let the plan of sodding this area proceed without intervention. 

In the bottom left corner of the picture above you can see a black drip irrigation line.  This line currently runs directly from a hose bib a foot or two away.  This setup has worked for me just fine, but the crew is going to tap into the in-ground system and run the line beneath the stones and re-install the drip irrigation.  This will make the area look cleaner and it will be one less thing for me to worry about.  I find that drip irrigation timers can be unreliable after a while and those pesky batteries die without my permission. 

Unfortunately, what was originally estimated to be a 2 or 2 1/2-day project looks like it's going to end up taking 9 days from start to finish.  The crew has been splitting time between my yard and my neighbor's yard which they are also re-sodding.  They expect to complete the grading of my yard today but they won't have enough time to put in the pipes and lay the sod before the day is done.  And now the rains of Northern California's wet season are scheduled to begin in earnest tomorrow morning and continue for five straight days.  They are warning of potential flooding.  Which means lots and lots of mud in my yard and not a very good time to be trenching sprinkler lines and laying sod.  [Insert grumpy face emoticon here!]

No work will be done in my backyard as part of this project but that doesn't mean things aren't changing there too.  The crepe myrtle leaves are changing and starting to fall finally.  I plan to use the time after the leaves have fallen to study the branching and do some artful shaping - paying special attention to the lower limbs so that eventually I can push the lawn mower beneath it without having to duck.  Those seeds just jump off the tree and attach themselves to my hair.  It's annoying.     

One of my Japanese maples, a 'Glowing Embers' has really gotten orange in the last week. 

The 'Red Dragon' pictured above is still red but it's not the deep maroon that it was this summer.  I love sitting in the iron chair next to this tree.  I love the way they look together.  The colors are so different.  The texture, also, so different.  This is a slow growing Japanese maple.  This is a quality I have grown to appreciate.  This tree looks just as perfectly sited as the day I planted it.  I can't say the same for every tree or shrub I have planted. 

And finally, a seldom-used but fairly old Japanese cultivar called 'Otto's Dissectum' has gone from light green to orange and red.  I've been growing this in a wine barrel for a couple seasons now.  It's such a nice tree.  Some day I hope to create a spot of its own for it - a place where it can sink its roots and grow without impediment and live up to its potential . . . a hope I'm sure we all desire for ourselves and our loved ones. 

Slow and Steady Wins the Race - Or Prolongs the Finish

I like the story of the tortoise and the hare and how the message is that the slow-and-steady approach wins the race.  I admit that I like it because it helps me justify just how long it takes me to get certain things done though.  I'm not a true procrastinator.  I'm too impulsive for that title.  I'm just slow with certain things. 

It’s been a full four months since I had the mulberry tree in my front yard removed.  With the tree gone I had to swap out a bunch of shade plants for things that love the sun.  It took me a couple weeks to figure out which plants I would use and to get them ordered, purchased, and planted, but I did it and I’ve got that dialed in to my satisfaction now.  I also got right on fixing the broken sprinkler lines in the immediate wake of the stump grinding since some things shouldn't wait. 

But in the last four months, the one glaring thing I had not done was figure out how to address the unsightly mess left behind by the stump grinding.  As was promised, the arborists back-filled the hole with the shredded-up stump.  It looks like soil but it’s not.  The surrounding grass has not encroached upon the site at all.  I suspect it has something to do with the decomposing wood tying up all the nitrogen.  The absence of the tree and its surface roots also made it painfully obvious that my yard is not level by anyone's definition. 

The "footprint" of the mulberry tree.

Back in August, I justified not doing anything about this because I figured that re-grading and then re-sodding my lawn when it was a hundred degrees out was not a good idea.  I’d put it off until September.  But then when September came I had plans that involved a week in Boston and my wife had several trips for work planned.  And it was still really hot.  It just seemed like a bad time to tackle a big project.  October, with its cooler weather would be a better month for this.  Of course, I found reasons to delay in October too.  There was a birthday I had to plan for, a 3-day weekend in Lake Tahoe I was looking forward to, playoff baseball, and still pretty oppressive heat.  At one point I did make a couple half-hearted attempts at contacting a few landscape companies to come out and give me an estimate but I had bad luck with that.  One company never called me back and I decided the other one was going to be too expensive so I cancelled their appointment. 

One of the many "sink holes" in my lawn.

Now it’s mid-November and my yard still has this big gaping hole in the center of it and there are so many holes and bumps that it looks like the template for the old Atari game Moon Patrol. 

If it weren’t for my friend and neighbor, Brian, I would probably be stuck in my tortoise shell barely moving on this.  But Brian managed to find a landscaper that would return his calls and over the past two weeks I’ve been watching these guys tear down Brian’s backyard and rebuild it into exactly what Brian wanted.  On the night they wrapped things up I approached the owner of the company and asked him if he could give me an estimate on my yard. 

I would love to do it myself.  I believe I have the capability of doing it myself.  But I also know that for me to remove 1400 square feet of sod (and tree roots), regrade the entire yard, install a functional sprinkler system and then put sod down, it would take me more weekends than I care to give up.  After some conversation with my wife, we agreed that this is one of those times when it is worth it to pay someone else to do it. 

So nothing has happened yet except that I am on the landscaper’s calendar for the week after Thanksgiving.  And I can hardly wait.  I just wish I had gotten to this point sooner but I'm going to trust that old Aesop had it right and that in the end, I'll be happy that I took the slower approach.