Category: garden

Scenes from the week.

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 It’s been a busy week around here.  Here’s some of the highlights.
Playing around with the settings on my camera, I finally figured out the b&w one.  
The Planting Seeds Festival

held at the Buford Garden, had a fantastic turnout and was a success

despite the fact that Mother Nature didn’t fully cooperate.

The whole shebang was moved into the cafeteria at Buford when the skies opened up and the children took over the face painting stand. 
Face painting became full body painting.
Apparently this is what a gang of girls will do when left with a stand full of face paint.
When the headliner, Dar Williams, took the stage
there was dancing and sing-a-longs.  A good time was had by all.

Anniversary dinner of shrimp and grits.

This bug paced the top of my monitor literally all day Wednesday, back and forth, for hours. 
Please ignore the dust.  He did.
My Mother’s Day gift to myself.
A variegated leaf geranium. 
There’s practically a rainbow on every leaf!
My winning streak lately has not been limited to just new fly rods. 
I won a seed giveaway thanks to the Eco Women.
That’s a cosmos popping up from seed.
I also won some apron patterns from Lesa , but I’ve used my rainy days to clean around here, instead of sewing, despite what that picture of the top of my monitor tells you.  Sewing when your hands are covered in poison ivy is not ideal anyway. Neither is cleaning really.
While I was at the nursery, I spied a tag for Becky Mix. 
Of course it came home with me.  They are now planted in the back yard.

Near my new patchouli plant.
Who knew it was a plant?
It has a much softer scent than what you  remember.  There’s no second note of uhm, well, you know.
I was listening to the Dead as I ran errands that day and as I’d already bought and planted my scarlet begonias for the year, I thought why not?

One of the roots of that pesky muscadine vine I’ve been digging up from all over the back yard. 
It’s huge.  I need to take an ax to it.  It’s the size of my foot, maybe bigger and
I wear women’s size 10 shoes.   
I may have underestimated it’s ability to not die.  It’s the energizer bunny of invasive plants.
I threw the hibiscus in a spot of dirt a few weeks ago and despite the neglect, it’s thriving.
I guess it’s earned a weeding and mulching session, hasn’t it?
Just as soon as I dust off that computer monitor and finish hacking away at that muscadine root.
I finally found myself some new canvas gardening gloves so I am going to try to stop ripping roots out of the ground with my bare hands.  Wish me luck.

Currently…

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I finally finished getting the garden in this weekend, although I still have some raspberry bushes in a bucket (Pat & I are debating their placement) and the landscaping plan in the backyard has changed somewhat (Pat wants to add a pond or some sort of water feature.  I think he’s realized I need a new digging project.) and weeding is never-ending.  All this rain the last week or so has brought back weeds I thought I’d dug up already.  I just walk around with a shovel in my hand these days, attacking weeds and vines.  Which is how I got poison on my hands again.  I hate when I get it on the palms, really makes it hard to do stuff.  One of these days I’ll learn to wear gloves, but that won’t happen until I find gloves that fit just right.  I have been looking and tried some on the other day when I was picking up netting for the blueberry bushes, but the ones I really liked they didn’t have in my size.  All I ever seem to find these days are the type of gloves with the rubber on the fingers and palms – I don’t like these gloves at all, what happened to the good old fashioned canvas ones and why are they so hard to find?

The Planting Seeds Music Festival is tomorrow at Buford.  It’s a music festival celebrating all the Charlottesville elementary schools gardens.  I’m the food chair for the whole shebang, so today I’m wrapping up loose ends, dotting my i’s and crossing my t’s.  I got the rough draft for the flyer for the class picnic out today too.  I’ve put Edie’s class picnic together since kindergarten.  It’s really quite easy – I can pretty much tell you who’s going to bring what, who’s going to help and who’s going to call me the morning of in a panic. When you do the same thing 5 years in a row, you learn these things.  There’s also prep for the upcoming swap going on.  I’m really excited about some of the responses and what people are bringing. 

Last weekend’s bug seems to have faded into just another huge allergy flare-up.  I woke up feeling crummy yesterday, with that lovely racking allergy cough I get that just hurts.  I don’t like the stuff the doctor gives me for the cough – honestly, I can’t take anything stronger than a tylenol without some horrible reaction.  But, at least Pat was home so that I could lounge all I wanted to.  Also, it was Mother’s Day, so I had full cart blanche to lounge.  I got myself caught up on the NYTimes Book Review section. I had like 3 months worth of Sunday’s piled up.  It was heavenly.  We went to Mono Loco for dinner, where I realized the tequila in my margarita made the cough stop, at least for a while.  I think I’m going to need more medicinal tequila.

We officially have the fattest squirrel you have ever seen in our yard.  I’m going to see if I can’t get a picture to show you.  Seriously, it’s huge.  When Pat got a good look at it on the back porch today, he wondered if maybe it wasn’t a small groundhog with a bushy tail.  It is that fat.

We are hosting one of Pat’s coworkers this evening.  I had totally forgotten about it.  Honestly, since I came home from the gym this morning (which totally kicked my butt.  I definitely was aiming too high after taking most of the last week off with the ick), I have been lounging in my bathrobe coughing and answering emails about the festival.  I have exactly two hours to get the first floor of this house in presentable condition.   I want to make a better impression than I did the  last time we hosted his coworkers.  At least I have no where to go but up, right?  

Patience pays off.

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The butterfly bush is showing signs of life. 

I hacked it back and left it alone for a bit.  I looked at it the other day and saw little green nubs.  They are small, but they are there.

I have not completely killed it yet.  Yay!

Meanwhile, the fig has new growth too.  Happy, Happy fig.

The front shady bed is all abloom as well. 
From left to right, wild geraniums, may apples, trillium and lillies of the valley.
Lillies of the valley are the best smelling flower ever.  Not only were they in my bouquet when we got married, I wore a crown made of them and hellebore.  (Perhaps why both are in my garden today?).  The entire front yard has such a nice smell right now, especially the front porch, adjacent to that bed.  That bed has taken years to fill in. There really was not a coherent plan to it, we just kept dumping shade loving plants and I kept hoping the lillies would fill in, which they finally did, after I don’t know how many years. 
Gardening takes such patience. 
I think patience is one of those over-rated virtues.  I don’t have patience, but gardening requires it.
I think gardening is in cahoots with motherhood to make me a better person.

The latest of the pink trees on the corner is blooming. 
It’s a horse chestnut buckeye tree Pat planted a few years back to replace a rather large, dead evergreen tree.  It’s not quite big enough to be as glorious as the magnolia or the dogwood, but it will get there.
Again, patience.

And it’s pink.  How much do I love that he willingly picked another pink tree for the corner?
These blooms have a touch of yellow.  They are quite lovely.  I’m sure I will be spending more time standing at that tree in the next few days, staring at it, trying to capture just the right shot of those blooms.

The oakleaf hydrangeas are showing buds too.  We have two of them, both planted two summers ago and this is the first bloom for both. 
This one was literally a stem and two tiny leaves when I plopped it in the dirt.  Nothing like a little compost, love and patience to make a plant grow.

My rose bush has buds on it as well. 
That plant was a house warming gift, 13 years ago.  It has gotten moved more than anything else in my garden.  Other people rearrange their furniture, I rearrange my yard.  I put the rose bush in the ground, the trees near it grow bigger, it stops doing anything, I move it.  Repeat.  The last move, two years ago, I put it in a location where we do not intend to plant any more trees, it is a dedicated sunny spot.  And finally, two years later, the rose bush has realized I mean it and has a few buds.  I’m so excited.  The flowers from this plant are incredibly fragrant.  It’s just outside the living room window, so I’m hoping it makes the house smell sweet.

We have a neighborhood fox.  It had some sort of altercation with a cat in our back yard the other night at 3:45 am and howled for a good half hour after that.  It woke up every dog in the neighborhood who then all had to bark. So much for sleep that night.  Yesterday, I turned around and out of the corner of my eye, saw out the back door, the fox, hanging out in the back yard by one of the canoes.  It’s big.  I later happened to notice there was fresh scat (what those naturalist types call animal poop) right there in the middle of our front entrance.  After a family viewing and discussion, Pat, who knows about these things, said that yes, it was most likely that of a fox. I do have some close ups of it, but really, do you want to see up close shots of fresh fox poop?  Clearly this creature is circling our house and making itself at home. Suddenly, I’m a little worried about the arrival of the chickens.  Does the fox know we are getting chickens and is making himself(herself) comfortable in our yards in anticipation?  I guess we’ll have to wait and see, won’t we?
It’s really all about being patient.

Current Happy Things.

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  • Yard art from an old neighbor that keeps popping up in new places.  I think among the ferns under the magnolia is the best spot yet.
  • Finding out that she was the one that moved the yard art.  And then took a picture to capture the moment.
  • The chicken statue peeking out from the may apples and lily of the valley bed. 
  • All those foot shots, with the close up on the toes and the pedi she got from Ryan’s Brooke last month. (and clearly, it’s time for a new one.)
  • She’s got my dad’s weird duck toes.
  • Her feet don’t look like little baby feet anymore.  That just happened.
  • Garden Gnome.
  • That I found all these pictures Edie shot on her camera uploaded onto my computer.  They are freaking cool.
  • That she still takes so many pictures of her feet.  They have been well documented since she learned to use my camera at the age of 4.
  • That I am ditching them this weekend to go hang out with my college girlfriends.

Progress made.

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I have no idea what that plant is, but it was all over my backyard.  And I spent the better part of my weekend digging it out by hand.
 I also ripped out oodles of muscadine plants that were popping up all over the place.  Pat had chopped the original plant down, painted the stump with plant killer and still, that stuff just refused to die.  It’s like the terminator of vines.  In order to get all the plants sitting in various containers around my house into the ground,  I had to clear spots for beds. As I ripped out vines by the root, next thing I knew, I had cleared most of the back yard.  That overflowing galvanized tin is probably a third of what I dug up.
After digging up so many weeds that I couldn’t stop seeing them as I drifted off to sleep, I got the fig in the ground, finally, after all these years.  It looks insanely happy.  All the plants sitting on my kitchen counter, save one, made it into the ground this weekend and that one, a basil plant, is sitting on the back porch as I contemplate putting a tomato in to keep it company.  I know it’s early, but what if I just plop a big Early Girl in somewhere?  Tomatoes in June are a tempting idea. 
Edie’s tiki hut got some landscaping – I moved some very delicate looking wild geraniums to one side and put some Virginia Bluebells on the other.  I am considering moving some ferns and hostas in around it as well.  I have this thin bed by the road along the very back edge of the property that gets sun that I call the ‘by the side of the road garden’.  Every sun-loving non-vegetable plant that is given to me by a friend goes there to live.  There is very little rhyme or reason to that garden, but this weekend with things just popping up, I was able to rip some stuff out (bee balm, which if you want some, come and get it), rearrange things (purple and yellow cone flowers & daisies, also available if you so desire) and otherwise just get a handle on that bed. 
 I wished I had remembered earlier in the weekend where my good gardening gloves were (in the pocket of the overalls I wore to work in last weekend, in the laundry), and also that I had worn them once I did find them, as my hands are shredded.  Pat pointed out that perhaps I just need to invest some newer, nicer ones.  He might have a point.  I’m also investing in band aids and all manner of heavy duty hand salves in the meantime.
We got so much of the back yard ripped out that we are at the point of being able to plant not just little island beds, but ground cover, in big wide chunks. Pat wants clover in lieu of grass, so that it requires little mowing and maintenance. I’m totally on board with that. I also have been envisioning some furniture groupings back there and spent some time driving around the county to all my favorite junk shops in search of metal outdoor furniture. No luck, so if you hear of something, let me know.  I’m thinking a little table & chairs between those hollies would be nice.  By the ferns.  Or a bench there and the table just under a tree outside of that shot. 
About the butterfly bush – I realized that I should have cut the butterfly bush back before I moved it. I also realized I overwatered AND overfertilized it. The only downside of this happening is that it’s not likely to bloom this year, which is good, as that means I didn’t kill it. Yet.
The weather was just insanely beautiful this weekend, we were wide open for the first and last time in quite a while, it was good to get so much done.  I was actually too tired to drink a glass of wine several evenings in a row.  Pat & Brian made some progress on the chicken coop and we set a deadline by which we will have chicks ordered.  Brian wants to see if we can’t find someone to split an assortment from Murray McMurray – either Rainbow or Ornamental Layers.  We’ve put word out about that, but haven’t found anyone yet that I know of. So, if you or someone you know is looking for some chickens this spring, let’s chat.

In progress.

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I currently have no less than 4 various containers, including a 7-11 coffee cup, sitting on my kitchen counter holding plants that were gifted, acquired or are in process of moving from one spot in the yard to another.  I moved the butterfly bush to it’s new spot in the back yard but it’s looking awfully droopy.  I wonder if I should have cut it back before I moved it.  I wonder if I should chop it back now.  Would that kill it? I thought they were supposed to be hard to kill. I might have a green thumb, but that thumb can turn black at any time.  It’s all a giant experiment, I really have very little idea of what I’m doing out there, although my garden seems to say otherwise at times.  There is a partial hole dug for the fig to move into, bags of mulch and compost scattered here and there in the yard.  I did manage to plant the strawberry plants I thinned from a friend’s patch, but the hibiscus someone gave me is still sitting in a pot on the front porch with zero signs of life.  I suppose I could just go set it in the sun and see what happens.
I finally got to see the building Betty has been rehabbing since her return from NYC in December.  We realized we need to schedule time together weekly because entire weeks have gone by where we haven’t talked since she moved back. Which seems slightly insane, since she lives two doors down and for years we saw each other several times a day without effort.  Life being what it is, even though we now have time set aside for each other on a weekly basis, sometimes other things pop up.  Which happened last week and so Friday morning turned into a spontaneous adventure of the sorts we used to have all the time, just rolling with things.  I had to run back home and grab my camera to capture some images after finally seeing the interior of the building that really is just up the street.  I love crumbling old plaster walls, I love layers of old paint.  The building is just a nondescript square box, but it has claw foot tubs, hints of pink & that green I call Southern Gothic Green that was visible through the crumbling layers and a view of Brown’s Mountain through the second floor rear windows.  Some of those things won’t be there by the time construction is completed, but I always like knowing they are there, just under the surface. 

Long Term Reality

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Can we talk about my back yard?
That’s the current state of it, as seen from the back edge of the property. Well, overlooking the back edge, which is the creek that runs though all the back yards on this side of the street and is then diverted into a pipe under the road.
I don’t have any pictures of what the yard looked like when we bought the house 13 years ago June. 
It was, for lack of a better word, overgrown.  My nephew, who was a wee one at the time, called it ‘a jungle’.  For about 10 years or so before we bought the house, it was a rental.  The interior was maintained, the yard not so much.  Before that, a woman lived here who was apparently quite the gardener who had a fondness for pink, but the last few years she lived in the house, her health was declining and her yard suffered.  What we’ve figured out from neighbors is that the yard, specifically the back yard, was ignored and just left to run wild for oh, a good 15 years or so.   
That’s the view standing at the back of the house. 
We have a large lot – .33 of an acre. Our first priority when we bought the house was to get rid the ivy growing up the sides onto the roof and then cut down the trees growing into the house. The back yard could wait.
13 years ago, we started by taking a lawnmower and a weed wacker to cut a path through the jungle. We laid down newspaper, covered it in mulch and over time, grass grew and it became a path.  When Pat mowed the yard, he’d cut in closer to the jungle every time, so that every year, we claimed a few more inches. We’d walk through, dig up big stuff, cut down smaller trees we didn’t want, pull weeds.  For years, I had a constant patch of poison ivy somewhere on my body between March and November.  There were times it would become a full blown nasty case that required steroids.  Pat spent a lot of time pulling all the poison ivy out by hand (He’s not nearly as allergic as I am.  Also, he knows what it looks like.  Me?  Ha!)
When the sandbox got installed and the tiki hut built, he cleared those areas to be used, but by and large, big parts of the back yard were left untouched.  For a few years, he mowed it all down early, we covered the yard in straw and if anyone asked what the plan was, he’d refer them to me and I, him.  “Oh, Pat’s got something going on down there, you’ll have to ask him.”  It actually did help us get a handle on what was going on back there.

I did some small landscaping around the tiki hut, per Edie’s request, by moving some wild geraniums back there.  I have some more I will move back there.  Another work in progress.
During the microbusts a few summers ago, we lost some big limbs as well as some smaller trees back there on the side that had been previously still jungle.  I started noticing that maybe there was a new sunny spot to plant sunloving plants.  We only have so much sun in our yard and most of that is dedicated to tomatoes and basil.  Any sunloving flowers I have are in a thin strip ‘down by the side of the road’, along the edge of the back yard.  They are running out of room.  I have a lilac and butterfly bush that really could use some space to spread out. 
I have a fig that has lived in a bucket since before we had Edie because we can’t decide where we want to plant it.  We want to give it space to spread out and with sunny real estate at a premium around here, we just haven’t been able to agree to a spot.
The other day it dawned on me that we could start moving into the space of the back yard that had yet to be fully tamed.  We could actually start making inroads to the master plan of what we eventually want the back yard to be.  This was pretty revolutionary. 
Pat and I walked around there the other day, pulling up the first signs of weed life, and put out markers for what is going to go where.  I’m excited to have new holes to dig and super excited to finally feel like we have a plan and a vision to move forward with the back yard.  It has taken us 13 years to get to this part.
It was that or start terracing the hill next to the house into the most macdaddy vegetable garden in the city.  It’s a steep slope, it’s going to take retaining walls and alot of work.  Every winter I consider it, every spring I stand out there and think about it…..and bag it.
This year though, the back yard is finally happening. 
Stay tuned for updates.

Not Quite Full Bloom, but close enough.

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The magnolia is almost in full bloom.  With this warm weather, it opens more every day.
It’s delightful to look out the windows and door on the front of the house to see those blooms.
We are definitely feeling spring around here.  This past weekend was social and productive, with lots of work getting done in the yard, including the repair and re-installation of the compost spinner bins, weeds being pulled, more spring greens planted, a garden work day at Edie’s school, brunch with friends and of course, with us working in the yard and lots of folks out walking to soak up the sunshine, there were a number of little visits with neighbors.  Brian popped in Saturday to share some seeds and ponder if the tree would make it this year, without a frost.  There was a good bit of speculation about that this weekend, with everyone saying that our magnolia in bloom is the first sign of spring to them.  Us too.  
The peach tree is blooming now too. 
The greens I planted back in February are popping up. 
As Brian said the other day, all is right with the world again now that spring is upon us.
It’s true, nothing revitalizes me like spring.  I’ve been cooking up a storm, working up lots of new inspired recipes that I will share just as soon as I work out the kinks.  I’ve pulled that Amish Friendship Bread starter out of the freezer and am baking with it, only I’m determined to make it without adding pudding mix.  First batch turned out pretty okay, although, it was better with Vikki’s Salted Caramel Pear butter on it.  (Recipe please Vikki.  By the way, I made that granola recipe you told me about last week and it rocked.  Thanks.) I’m also experimenting with cutting back the sugar in that recipe.  I’m comfortable winging it in my kitchen, but not when it comes to baking.  Baking is chemistry and I was excused from participating in Chem Lab in high school because of the small fires and explosions heard from my corner of the lab each week.  Just like math, who knew I actually needed to know that stuff some day?  I thought they were just saying that. Turns out they were right.

From out of nowhere.

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Remember how I said I seemed to be missing some photos of a scarf I had knit and I suspected a certain smaller person who lives in our house that likes to play with my camera to be responsible for their going MIA?  Well, I owe her an apology.  I took some shots of the magnolia tree in our front yard yesterday, which is now opening up and gloriously pink and when I uploaded them to share here with you what came up instead were the missing shots from our Baltimore weekend.  My camera has been on the fritz lately and I’ve been worried it was the camera – I’ve been saying when this one goes, I’m moving up to a fancy camera and not another point and shoot, and quite frankly, that kind of toy is nowhere near our current budget.  But after a few different incidents, I’m starting to suspect that my memory card has gone bad, which is actually a much cheaper fix.  Phew. 

So, since they showed up from nowhere, I thought I’d share.  First up, seen on a front porch on Falls Road, near Hampden hon, in Baltimore as we ran around town one day during our visit there last month.

Yes, that’s a Christmas penguin hanging out with a member of the nativity, who is wrapped in a feather boa, with a half full (or empty, depending on how you look at things) large malt liquor beverage under his chair. 
I love Baltimore.
Also suddenly back were the pictures of the scarf I had knit my cousin’s girlfriend for her birthday.
Ginger, as we call her, is a lovely gal and has built quite a relationship with Edie.  I’ve told my cousin Mark, her boyfriend,  if it doesn’t work out with Ginger, then he is the one who has to break the news to Edie, because that is not going to go over well and he is going to suffer her wrath.  We hope it doesn’t come to that though.
I have a scarf I knit for myself a few years back in this style – just loose and freestyle, changing yarns as the whim hit me.  I thought Ginger might appreciate one, so I whipped this up for her the week before the party.
While most of the yarns were white, I did throw some pink and green eyelash yarn in for color.

I also did some cables, as I find them fun and I find when I knit cables, the process seems to go faster.
This section is in the eccentric cable pattern.  ( I used A Treasury of Knitting Patterns by Barbara G. Walker.  Which was also one of my best thrifting scores ever.)
There you can get an idea of the different yarns used – green eyelash yarn, a bulky chenille, a pink eyelash yarn with bumps of color mixed in, a boucle, a fingerweight yarn, a multicolored eyelash yarn I mixed in with the fingerweight and lastly, a worsted weight cotton.  (If you need a reference on yarn weights, look here). I kept to just a knit stitch outside of the cabled sections.

That’s the basketweave cable stitch. 
I’m knitting a scarf in a similar vein for the silent auction at the annual luncheon for the Jed Foundation, using primarily blues, from the stash Kristin gave me.  February has been quite conducive to knitting, as the second sleeve on Pat’s sweater is really coming along as well.  I’m almost up to the elbow on it.  I’m even starting to kick around ideas of what my next big knitting project is going to be. 
Meanwhile, the shots I meant to show you.  What a difference a few days make!
What I call the tulip magnolia, Pat calls a saucer magnolia.  It’s the pink magnolia in the front yard.  It’s the first thing to bloom every spring and it’s starting to bloom.   Now let’s hope it gets to open up without a hard frost, which will turn the beautiful pink blooms brown.  The top is opening up, but the lower blooms have a few more days I think.  (Clicking on the image will give you a better view of the glorious pinkness.)

The peach tree is also starting to show some opening buds.
I love looking out my windows at the pink trees in the front yard.
Such a nice sight.
Hello spring. 

Happy Sights.

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Things in my back yard that are currently making me happy:
My purple Hellebore.
It’s going to be gangbusters this year.
It was really hard to get a shot of all the blooms in a close up.  
I’m just not up to the task.
It took 3 years for it to bloom after I planted it.  I was close to digging it up and moving it.
Which probably would have been the kiss of death.
So glad I found some patience for it.
Patience is one of those over-rated virtues that I don’t really have.

My ‘neighbor’ hellebore is putting out some blooms too.
I got it at a neighborhood plant swap hosted by The Barns down the street.  
I love walking through my garden and seeing all the plants from friends and family.
When they shoot up out of the ground and then bloom, it’s like a little ‘hello’.
Yesterday afternoon, I looked out my back door and saw the empty red recycling bins going up the hill on Rose Hill.  As I walked up the road yesterday, the trend of red recycling bins continued up around the bend.
As we have green ones, I know it’s not a uniform thing, and maybe they are out there every Thursday and I just now noticed.  Either way, something about it made me really happy.  At one point the sun seemed to make them all glow – little spots of glowing color in the otherwise drab winter landscape on a spring like day.