A Change of Color

Spring has come to Sacramento and I took advantage of our beautiful, sunny and low 70s weather and did some painting over the long President's Day weekend.

I always forget what a pain painting can be.  And the older I get the more literal I mean that.  My quads have been on inactive duty since around October so after just a few hours of squatting, stretching, bending, and climbing I was feeling like rubber.

Although I'm a big fan of color - who isn't - I'm also becoming a disciple of the school that says gardens should have a limited color palette.  To that end, I'm trying to move toward the classic brown, white, and green color combo.

That meant that my red and white shed would need a latex bath of Behr's Sweet Molasses.
 

This is the view from our back porch.  The shed dominates the scene in all weathers.  While many guests (and at least one member of my family) have remarked about how quaint it looks, I found myself wanting to notice it less often.  I want the plants to be the star when they grow in.  

After a couple days, this is what I ended up with:

It still holds some visual weight, but I think that's more of a result of its size than its color.  

Growing up on either side of the window are climbing roses that will someday cover a majority of the shed in profuse white blooms for months on end.  I'm looking forward to that.

One more thing: I had a poetry teacher that used to tell us that we needed to know the rules before we could break the rules. Well, if my rule is a color palette of green, brown, and white, I broke that rule with abandon when I let my daughter pick out the paint color for our Adirondack chairs.  

We went from weathered (which I liked) but dirty (which no one liked)

To this eye-assaulting pop of color:

I really wanted to paint these a matching brown, but since this was a family project, I deferred to my daughter's choice.  One of the best things about painting, and gardening, is that you can always change your mind.

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.

Years of Learning

Temperatures in Northern California finally cooled off into the upper 90s making it possible to devote some of my weekend hours to finishing one of the first main projects at my new house.  All that remains of this project is to think of a name for this part of the garden.  Why is that gardeners have a need to assign names? 

I have spent the last decade watching Gardening by the Yard, Yard Crashers and the innumerable P. Allen Smith shows.  I have read garden design books, books about specific types of plants, and books about the lives of gardeners.  I have read, subscribed to, and written blog posts about gardening.  And all that information, all that time and energy has led me to this point.  In my new garden, I feel as if I have to prove that I actually learned something and that I can apply it to my own life.  What good is knowledge otherwise? 

With that in mind, here are some of the lessons I have learned and how I applied them to this project:

Lesson – Just Live With it for awhile

I waited a couple months before I even tackled this project.  I stood at the window in the house and just looked at this corner of the yard and wondered what it would look like if I did X, Y, or Z.  I checked the sunlight at different times of day.  I went back to the window and imagined some more.  When it came time to break ground I did one thing at a time and then I stopped and went back to the window and lived it with it some more.  From start to finish, this project took 5 or 6 weeks to complete as a result.    

The view of the new bed from our patio

Lesson – Take your time and do it right

Most of this area was grass.  There was an Aristocrat Pear tree and an Oleander that had to go as well.  I dug all these out by hand and with the help of a new “Mr. Diggy” (heartfelt thanks to Calvin).  Then I put in the drip irrigation lines because nothing non-native will grow here without supplemental watering.  And then I went back to waiting.  I waited for the grass I missed to show itself again and when it did, I dug it out with my hori hori (best garden tool I own).  That left me with a bare patch of dirt for a while and I ached to get it planted, but I knew that if I got ahead of myself I could spend a lifetime weeding unwanted grass and that it would be so much easier to do it now with nothing in the way and nothing to disturb.

Lesson – Curved beds look better

My wife doesn’t often offer up comments on my gardening.  She sees it as my realm.  She’ll comment and compliment when I show things off to her but for the most part she lets me do whatever I want and is learning to trust that I have some kind of vision for things.  But after I carved the outline for this bed she broke from tradition and told me “I like the shape of that new bed.” 

Lesson – Paths don’t have to be made of stone

I’ve always loved stone pathways.  But stone is expensive and it’s labor intensive to install.  Plus, there’s the added and ongoing chore of weeding the cracks between the stones.  This time, I’m letting the lawn be the pathway.  Besides, a green lawn when used as a foil to the rest of the garden can be quite charming. Check out these pictures I added to my "Grass Pathways" ideabook on Houzz.com:

Grass Pathways

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Lesson – Repetition

When I go for a walk or take a drive and notice other people’s gardens I am almost always drawn to the gardens that use repetition in their plants.  There’s something wonderful about a garden filled with ferns or large patches of ornamental grasses.  And yet, when it comes to my own garden I have always wanted to use as many different plants as I could get my hands on.  There are hundreds of Japanese maple cultivars so how in the world is a gardener supposed to live with just one?  But in this case, I really did try to limit my plant selection.  I used mondo grass along the border and punctuated the garden with Japanese blood grass.  From there, I pretty much broke the rules though.  I planted a Baby Blue Spruce, a Snow Fountains Weeping Cherry, a Jubilee blueberry bush, a Mr. Lincoln rose that was given to me last month, and a Black & Blue Sage.  Even along the symmetrical trellises, a natural place for repetition, I failed.  I planted a climbing Iceberg rose on the right but planted jasmine on the left because . . .

I love the way Japanese Blood Grass (Imperata cylindrica) catches the sunlight. 

Lesson – Never plant thorny things where people walk

I really wanted a climbing rose to grown up this shed.  It would have looked awesome to have two climbing roses growing up over the window.  But I remember how annoying it was to walk under the arbors at my last house and get my hat or my shirt sleeve stuck on a thorn.  So I planted jasmine on the trellis near the pathway because it is easily trimmed and it won’t wave a thorny fist in my face when I walk past it.

Non-thorny jasmine on the left

Me So Thorny rose on the right

Lesson – Plants will grow

In my gardening life the times when I have been most pleased with something I have done was initially after I finished planting.  I arranged the small little plants just so and I stand back and congratulate myself on having an aesthetic eye.  And then the plants grow up and things don’t look like they used to.  Why I neglect to conceive of a plant’s ultimate size is beyond me.  Perhaps because I didn’t have the experience of watching them grow to maturity?  This time around I did my best to leave room for things to grow.  As a consequence, there is a whole lot of mulch being used as ground cover right now but I think that in a year or two, much of the mulch will be composting in place and the plants and trees will be filling in.  If not, I can always buy more plants to fill the spaces.