The Architect's Lair

Garden update

I had a baby on May 18th, so as you might imagine, our house and garden took a backseat for a while there. However now that we are more adept at this parenting thing, we're focusing again on our garden while the weather is nice. Besides, I would feel lazy if I didn't accomplish something while on maternity leave.

So what have we been up to?

Jack has been digging, mostly. He removed several old tree stumps, then tackled the far back yard so that we can start planting beds along the fenceline. Along the back fence for the entire length of our yard is, apparently, solid with cobblestone-sized round river rocks. Unfortunately it was also a location for bonfires by teenagers, long before our house was built, so he is also finding glass bottles, broken glass, random bits of metal, and fused rock. Still, our rock pile has increased dramatically, and includes more boulders. We are now planning on a Japanese rock garden back there to use all these rocks effectively.

Meanwhile I installed a new planting bed in our front yard. I was gripped with the 'nesting' fever in the weeks before my son was born - not to clean our house, but to garden instead. This bed was the result. It is near our front porch and includes several varieties of blue hosta, a white astilbe, a couple of oakleaf hydrangea (which are in bloom now and gorgeous), a couple of dark heucheras 'Cathedral Windows' and 'Black Beauty', a dark-leaved eupatorium, and, happiest of all, a redbud tree. I've also been going through and filling in our beds with native plants from other areas in our yard. I have a lot of Jack-in-the-pulpit relocated, as well as our two surviving red twig dogwoods, trillium, wild geranium, and Solomon's seal.

This past Wednesday I weeded our southern backyard bed, and attacked the patches of false lamium and buckthorn. Evil stuff, both of them! and I found poison ivy, too. Luckily I was dressed to deal with it and I don't get reactions to it anyway (knock on wood that continues to be the case). I moved the Virgin's bower clematis - almost tore it out as I mistook it for poison ivy at first! - and hope that it bounces back alright.

Next we will cut down a dead tree in the backyard (that I think was ash), start the Japanese rock garden, and plan a bed along the ridge in our yard. My parents bought me a ligularia dentata, an amazing looking plant. It has these gigantic leaves that look tropical, yet it is a native plant that does well in wet shady conditions. Boy do I have a perfect yard for them! I haven't figured out where I want it or what to pair with it yet, but it will be fun to figure out.

And lastly, I ordered more plants today, thanks to a gift certificate from my parents. I bought a blue Hydrangea for our front woodland bed, a bright peach heuchera for the same bed, and a whole bunch of crocus. Not sure where I'll put the crocus yet; probably the front corner bed near the mailboxes, because that is the most visible bed and is the only space in our yard that gets decent sun.

Change of season

Hard to believe, but summer is gone and autumn is in full swing. We've already had to rake our yard twice, and will need to do so again at least 3 more times I think.

Last night I took some time to clean up the garden a little and bring my potted plants in for the winter. I received some peonies from my folks that never seemed to take over the summer, and most were quite dead, their brown stalks crackling in the wind. I trimmed them down to the ground and hope they come back in the spring. They are double blooms in pale pink, which isn't really the style of peony I'd like, but since they were free I figured I'd give it a shot. I picked up the many branches that fell from our old oak trees and planted one last perennial that I bought on sale, a Trollius 'Golden Queen'. I trimmed the ficus, palm, and lemon tree before bringing them indoors, and they look much happier for being out in the sun all summer. I especially cut the ficus back, since I will be repotting it and trimming some of the roots soon. I treated it like a bonsai, figuring out what branches to cut so I could keep the ones that were most vigorous or that contributed the most to an artistic effect. It should take well to cutting, as they are frequently used as bonsai specimens anyway. I also brought in the lemon thyme and rosemary. They seem to be doing well for now. I have notoriously bad luck keeping herbs alive through the winter, but it can't hurt to try.

I still have a few things to do yet: cut down a basswood tree at the front of the yard; collect the rocks in various areas in the garden into one pile; add one last layer of mulch to a few beds; briefly enter my neighbor's yard to pull up the evil false lamium and buckthorn that keep trying to invade my yard (they moved out of their house, so I don't feel bad about going over & doing this while they are gone); and pull up the last of the poison ivy that J killed with Round Up a few weeks ago. I really hope the poison ivy is gone for good, but we'll see come spring.

I feel sad that my garden is dying already. The ferns are brown and shriveled, the columbine have disappeared. The jack-in-the-pulpit and solomon's seal have only a thin stalk with berries left on it. Even the rudbeckia are done flowering. The impatients are hanging on by a thread, their blooms vainly striving against the season's change. Tonight it will get down near freezing, and I may loose what's left to the frost.

Ah well, nothing for it I suppose, except the favorite winter activity of every gardener: planning what to do next spring.

Rain Gardens

I believe I first heard about rain gardens when I was on the local planning commission and the issue of stormwater came up. Around here storm water control is a big deal, mostly because one of the major creeks in the area was paved over and 'contained' as the city developed, only to unleash uncontrolled floods and high water pressures that used to blow manhole covers 20' in the air during heavy rain showers (the covers have since been bolted down, I hear).

Essentially "storm water" is all the rain that falls in a given storm. It runs off of impervious surfaces - our streets, houses, driveways, parking lots, sidewalks, and any hard surface. Problem is, water flows across pavement a lot faster than it does gardens, so with every increase in the amount of pavement comes a higher percentage of that storm water flowing out at the same time, and therefore a higher chance of flooding. Watershed planners theorize that 25% is about the limit in impervious cover for a creek or river to remain healthy. The main creek in my town is about 60% paved, hence the problems associated with it.

Three things that every homeowner can do to minimize the problems with rainwater are: get rid of your lawn (a lawn is almost no different from pavement, assuming it is all grass); install a rain barrel; and create a "rain garden". Getting rid of a lawn is easy; dig it up and replace with groundcovers, trees, and other larger plants. A rain barrel is just a big barrel, usualy plastic, that catches rain water from your roof and stores it for you to use later, when it isn't raining (especially good for areas that go through droughts in the summer). A rain garden is an area of plantings that can slow down the rainwater and decrease the amount that gets to the sewers by allowing the plants to drink it up. The rainbarrel can catch a set amount, and then the overflow would go to the rain garden. Ideally, all the water that fell on your house would be used up by your garden, at one time or another. In that situation, the local environment would act like human development isn't present, which (from a watershed perspective) is a great thing.

What brought all this up now is that my state Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has given grants for 20 houses in the major paved creek watershed to have rain gardens installed - on the state and county's dime - to study their effect. Since I have wanted to install one anyway, I applied. Unfortunately I am out of that creek's watershed by two lousy blocks, so I may not get to do it after all. The manager of the project is going to see if he can get me (and three other people that are close) into the project anyway. Since the watershed that our property is in has less than 20% impervious coverage (i.e. lots of farms not very far away), it is doubtful that the state or county would be interested in helping us do it. Of course, I'll do it anyway, eventually. It's that whole 'good for the environment' thing that I do.

I'll let you know if it happens! if not, I'll start planning my own rain garden anyway, but progress will be a lot slower than it would have been with the state behind me.

Recommended reading:

Rain Garden websites from the Wisconsin Dept. of Natural Resources  (especially Rain Gardens: A How-to Manual for Homeowners PDF)

Rain Gardens of Western Michigan, especially the Create A Rain Garden PDF

Eager for the gardening season

Today I bought seeds for my garden. I received a 'check' from Park Seed that expired today, so I indulged and ordered a few things that I wouldn't have otherwise. Best of all, my total order was only $6.50 including shipping! Gotta love a good deal.

The list:
- Ornamental millet, Pennisetum glaucum Purple Majesty Hybrid. I have maybe two tiny patches of my yard that receive full sun, but this plant is so gorgeous that I'm quite willing to dedicate the space to them. I'll probably pair it with Dusty Miller or yellow French marigolds.
- Joe-pye weed, Eupatorium maculatum. It's a perennial native plant with big lilac flowers. I'll probably put it in the far back reaches of our yard near the future pond.
- Pansy flambe Terracotta Shades, Viola x wittrockiana Flambe Terra Cotta Shades. My favorite flame colors all on one plant, that will even do well in my partly shady yard? sign me up.
- Sweet pea, Lathyrus matucana. This will get the other sunny patch in my yard, probably along the southern edge of the driveway on a trellis we'll build.

I wish I didn't love the sun-loving plants so much; it's hard for me to stick to just the shade ones. But oh well, I will experiment and if they don't do well I'll give the seeds to someone who does have sun around here.

Last gardening of the season (outside)

J and I took the fine weather offered this past weekend to do some last gardening of the season. Technically, he did the gardening outside, and I did the 'gardening' inside, but still - we messed with plants, and that's really what matters here.

He raked the leaves, mowed the lawn, and then started in on the back garden bed - yes, the one with the poison ivy nearby. He was careful and did not catch it. (yay!) Thanks to some work with a pick-axe and shovel, he dug out the bed, worked in 3 bags of topsoil, and moved all the plants to it that I had - 2 hemlocks, a zigzag goldenrod, a Virginia creeper, and a Solomon's seal. Because they didn't really fill up the bed, J also added in two beautiful golden arborvitae that we saved from a neighbor's yard. Then he lined the bed nicely with more stone found in our yard.

Meanwhile, I tackled the last of the brush piles, and made good headway on it, filling a trash can. One more trash can's worth and it will be gone. Luckily, all I need is a 'compostables' sticker and the city will pick it up. No more using paper bags if I can avoid it. Seems like a waste.

Architect 2, Poison Ivy 0

I felt the home-improvement bug in spades last night, so I decided to tackle the last garden bed of the season. Or rather, I started clearing the space where the bed will be, eventually. In our backyard there is a tree-line about a third of the way from the back fence. In front of this line, we have a nice mossy yard, relatively flat and open. Beyond this line, the ground drops by as much as a couple feet, there are many trees, damp ground (or outright ponds) in spring, many wildflowers and native plants, copious amounts of rocks including several boulders - and poison ivy.

Now this is an area which, eventually, we'd like to make into a koi pond and meditation garden. We want to build up the ground near the fence and dig down the pond area, so the elevation change is even greater. We'd like to plant some tall dense evergreen shrubs along the fenceline for greater privacy (the trick being that they can't grow too tall on the back fence - that's where we have overhead power lines). The boulders are in the center back of the yard, and could easily be surrounded by white gravel to get a Zen garden sort of look.

But until I can get the poison ivy out, J can't work back there. He reacts to poison ivy, VERY badly. Even when he takes precautions, such as long sleeves and long pants, he still gets it. As for me, I have been through poison ivy at least three times that I know of, but never had it. *knock on wood*

I have decided, therefore, to get rid of all the poison ivy myself, and preferably without using chemicals like Round-Up. When we moved in, it was climbing up our shagbark hickory tree and had vines all over part of the slope. I did several hours of yanking a few months ago, and now the area it covers is roughly 10 square feet instead of 20. I did a little more last night, paring the area down to perhaps 6 square feet, though that is a little misleading because this is one dense patch of the stuff. More importantly, I have cleared it out of the patch where I want to put our little bed, so J can come in and work in it relatively safely.

I hope to get rid of all visible signs of the poison ivy before winter. I fully expect to have to do the same thing next year, since these are old and deep vines. Eventually they will be gone, I'm determined. Now I just have to hope that my ivy resistence holds out that long!

The reason, by the by, that I want to get this last little bed done is that I have had a handful of plants patiently waiting for transplant since June. There are 2 small hemlocks (from JW), a zig-zag goldenrod, a false Solomon's seal, and a Virginia creeper (which is near death, I think). I want to get them in soon, and then hope and pray that they all make it through the winter. I am such the procrastinator, I really should have known better.

Backyard north garden

It strikes me that somehow, I have not shown any pictures of our yard. Well, let me fix that!

We have had good luck putting in beds throughout our yard - front back, south and east. A little clay, but nothing too bad... until we got to this northern bed. It was solid clay, to the point that it was really unworkable to me. I knew it would need a lot of help in order for anything to grow there. And what better opportunity for a before/after shoot than this?

Here's the 'before', although it is better to say 'in progress'. Thankfully, J is willing to put in the hard work to get a good looking bed, and he dug it out for me. The poor guy even went out and bought a pickaxe for the occasion. The chainlink fence borders our neighbor's 'wild' yard. This was taken mid-July.

Here's another 'before' picture, looking east. J dug out all that dirt, isn't it amazing? The plants in the foreground were hostas given to us by a friend MR, and some native plants given by a local member of the Wild Ones native plant group. The concrete stairs beyond are our 'front' stairs, which go up to our front door, and then back down to the front yard. J mixed the dirt on the tarp here with roughly 10 bags of topsoil and a bag of soil lightener (terra cotta pebbles).

And now, the after picture! This was taken just a couple days ago. The rocks all came from our yard, and the mulch is cypress because I like the scent of it. You can see how much moss we have in our backyard, here. Hopefully it will grow back on the dirt patches in front of the bed too. Yes that is invasive myrtle on the bottom right corner; someday it will all be gone, but I have to take it out in patches.

Here is a detail of the plants that are in this bed. The lower left is a woodland poppy (Stylophorum diphyllum). The center is a variegated hosta. The lower center-right is wild ginger (Asarum canadense), and to the right is a blue wood aster (Symphyotrichum cordifolium).

More plant details, from left to right: blue wood aster; zigzag goldenrod (Solidago flexicaulis, which blends in with the goldenrod of our neighbor's yard); woodland poppy; more hostas, some variegated, some not. In the front of the bed is wild ginger and rue anemone (Thalictrum thalictroides). Unseen are a few corms of white trillium (Trillium grandiflorum), as they have died back alrady for the season.

Last plant detail, showing the various hostas at the end of the bed. They are surrounding a baby redbud (Ceris canadensis), which I got free at a Wild Ones plant exchange. I'm hoping it survives and does well here, as redbuds are some of my favorite trees. In front of the redbud is Solomon's seal (Polygonatum biflorum) and rue anemone, with more woodland poppy to the right front.

I want to plant an all-native (or mostly native) garden, but I have to phase it in over time. It's hard to beat hostas for a shady garden like ours, and they are so low-maintenance. Besides, I still have a lot to learn about native plants.

Trees to lumber, follow-up

Talked to Chris of Last Chance, and it looks like we won't be able to use the cherry tree, and probably not any of the other logs in our yard. His minimum, to be really worth it, is a diameter of 14" for most trees and 12" for hardwood cherry. He can take trees up to 32" dia, but prefers to work smaller than 25".

When I go home tonight I'll measure the oak and hickory diameters, just to make sure we couldn't use them... but I don't think so.

At least his costs seemed about fair. He said that a neighbor of mine had some 18" oak and shagbark hickory sawed up, and it generated some 1200 board feet with a total cost of $350 or so. Not too shabby, considering how much more it would cost to get the same wood at a lumber yard.

By the by, he did suggest that I keep the cherry wood - and maybe carve walking sticks or something. Heh. As if I needed another hobby, or had the space... though the crafty side of me thinks "hmm, I could do that!"

From trees to lumber

When we moved in, I asked a friend of mine - who is a trained horticulturist - to walk around the yard and help me identify the trees. I remember most of them, but the ones that stuck out the most were the hardwood cherry. He said that if we ever cut one down, we could sell it for a lot of money, because this is the wood they use for furniture (which is not the same as the cherry trees that produce the fruit we eat).

Well, J & I noticed a couple of weeks ago that one of our hardwood cherry trees is near-death, with only a few branches of green leaves on it. It is in our front yard and fairly easy to get to. But of course, I want to cut it down and have the wood milled. It may even be worth our while to get the oak and walnut logs we have sitting in our yard milled too, though that will depend greatly on how much they have decayed since we cut them down in May.

Today I saw the following in the paper:

Chris Last is working on milling trees on a smaller scale. He is the owner and operator of Last Chance Logs and Lumber, headquartered in Livonia, a company he founded two years ago on an idea that grew out of his job as a municipal forester in Oakland County.

"I've always seen these beautiful (trees) being ground up, even before they confirmed the ash borer was an epidemic," he says.

Last used his $50,000 grant to buy a portable mill, a hydraulic loader and a kiln, which is being built at his yard in Howell. With the equipment, he can go anywhere there's a fallen tree and cut it up on the spot.

That can be someone's house or a municipal yard, says Last.

A recent customer called and wanted a cherry tree in her yard cut into boards so her son could make her an end table. There was so much wood, "I told her she could have a whole bedroom set," Last says.

Another woman, whose old red oak tree died, had it cut up and made into chests for her children.

He also works with cities and counties to mill logs they might have. Normally, Last says, municipalities will pile up a certain number of downed trees, then call in a grinder that could charge $325 an hour for a two- or three-day job. "All the municipality gets is a bill and a big pile of wood chips, that it has to pay someone to take away," he says.

Last's company saws the logs into wood that could be made into things like picnic tables. What they don't use, they can sell, to recoup some of the costs, he says. Last says he charges mileage and $70 an hour.

His goal, says Last, is to set a national precedent for what he calls "tree-cycling," using downed trees for a variety of items, including pool cues and church pews. "I even saw one gentleman made an old English-style treehouse from ash," he says.

So I looked them up. Sure enough, I found information for Last Chance Logs to Lumber online, although not at a website of their own. Fair enough. Now I should call and see how much it might be to get them out here. J would be so happy to have the logs go away.

The problem with gardening outdoors

When I lived in an apartment, gardening was actually pretty easy. Our place faced south, lots of light, and we had a 3rd story balcony where I grew tomatoes, herbs, and flowers that liked a lot of heat. Nice thing was that animals didn't really disturb them, other than our cats knocking them over every once in a while. I had a couple of jade plants that were really tree sized - more than a foot tall each, 2 regular jades and one hobbit's foot jade. Before we moved I cut one of the regular and the hobbit's one to make many smaller jades and gave them away to my friends.

But in our new house, we get a lot less sun. We have only 3 windows that face south, and none of them are very good for having plants at. One is the kitchen, where the window is too wide; one is the upstairs bathroom, where it may be possible but a little awkward; and the last is in our bedroom, where the only possibility is 4' tall plant stands (which we haven't got).

So I did the best I could, putting them in the north and west windows, but the jades didn't like it. A couple of weeks ago, they started falling apart, rotting from the inside. Too wet, not enough sun. I put them outside to dry out and get more sun. A few animals nibbled at them, but there were still a few healthy ones left, and they seemed to be improving.

This morning I looked out at the pots, and they were empty. EVERY single one was gone. Eaten, torn apart, gone. The succulents were, I suppose, succulent after all.

I'm not as upset about the regular jade - I still have a big tree left, plus another one at work. But the hobbit's foot jade was one of my favorites, and now it is completely gone.

I could get another one, I suppose, but there isn't any guarantee that I wouldn't kill it again. The house doesn't seem suited for this type of plant; just not enough sun. I guess I'll have to settle for low-light plants now, like philodendrons and the like. *sigh*