A New Home for Lilies

When we planted the new bushes, we saved as many lilies as we could during our massive weeding process along the backyard fence.  Their new home is the perennial garden on the other side of the backyard.  Since someday I want this flower bed to go all the way down the fence, I could not pass up any free flowers/plants!  Unfortunately I was a little tired from planting all of the bushes, so I may have crammed them in a little more closely than I should have, but they do look a lot happier over here now that they’ve been mulched and had a week to settle in.  Maybe they will even bloom?

We also mulched around the new bushes.  It was long, tiring work to mulch all 50 feet in the hot summer sun.  I laid down newspaper as a weed blocker, wet it to keep it from blowing away, then overlaid it with mulch.  It took a long time to cover the whole area, but it looks so nice and clean.  And will hopefully remain mostly weed-free all season.

Rainbow in Our Backyard

A sudden downpour from a thunderstorm + sunshine = a rainbow in our backyard.  How cool is that?! 

New Backyard Bushes

No offense to our neighbors, but we've grown spoiled by the privacy fences on both sides.  We've come to greatly enjoy our backyard as our own space (as opposed to a communal one where you can see what everyone else is doing all the time).  Even the neighbor behind us planted some forsythia along the fence that we we can't wait to grow in (it won't block our view of the woods, but will block our view of their canoe and kiddie toys).  All that's left is the chain link fence along the side of our garage, leaving us with a perfect view of our neighbor's compost heap, wood pile, and bright white PVC pipe garden structure.  Now I know our garden isn't going to win any beauty competitions, but at least we made sure to pick out green and black posts/fencing that would blend and sort of disappear.  Their white monstrosity is an eyesore.  A very tall and very large eyesore.

The fence before (with lilies and weeds just starting to grow)

We thought about putting up a privacy fence all the way back, but it would only be 6 ft high and not tall enough to hide the “roof” of their structure.  Plus it might make our backyard feel really closed in.  So we decided to grow an evergreen hedge out of thujas.  This particular breed of thuja is fast growing and will reach about 8-10 ft, the perfect height.  They will create a lovely thick green privacy hedge when planted 2 feet apart that will be beautiful and green all year round.  We had to buy smaller bushes than I would have liked because we need so many, but hopefully they will fill in nicely in a few short years.  We planted 25 bushes across 50 feet, from the edge of the cedar fencing all the way back to their garden structure.  We figure it's a good compromise - it will give us the privacy we crave and block their unsightly structure from the view from our house/deck , but it won't block the light to their garden (which would be rather mean from one gardener to another).

Here's a (badly done) photoshopped mockup of what I imagine our future view will look like in a few years (hopefully):

Yeah, it’s going to be awesome.  And well worth all the pain.

It was obviously a lot of work to plant 25 bushes, but it actually took a full day of prep work to get the 50 foot long area even ready for planting.  Before this, the area was completely overgrown with tons of weeds overtaking a few day lilies that could barely be seen under all the mess.  The lilies were original to the house from the previous owner and were so unhappy that they did not even bloom last summer.  So we pulled out all of the weeds and saved as many lilies as we could for transplanting.  Mike had to pull up all of the poison ivy we encountered because I'm highly allergic and he's not.  I wore gloves but sometimes that's not enough.  It was a ton of work, only made worse by the wisteria roots and vines we had to combat from a neighbor's arbor.  Those things are monsters.  There was also a lot of sod to pull up further down the fence - I feel like we've pulled up more sod this year than anything else!

Finally once everything was cleared out, we filled in the low parts of the new plant beds with some of the leftover garden dirt, then we started digging holes for the bushes.  We dug proper holes twice as wide as the 3 gallon pot - exhausting work when there are 25 holes to dig.  However it was totally worth it - it looks so clean and well manicured now, and visually my eye looks at the nice row of bushes instead of focusing on the fence and neighbor’s yard.

Next we have to mulch all these bushes.  And because I’d rather do the work upfront than spend my entire summer weeding, that means putting down a layer of newspaper first and then covering it up with a couple inches of cedar mulch.

Bye, Bye Fence Posts

We knew it wasn't going to be easy to get rid of our chain link fence posts (which is why we put it off for so long), but it was worse than we thought.  Not only were we restricted to certain hours on certain days (all of those being regular weekday work hours) to drop them off at the center, once we finally got the posts over there they refused to take them because of the cement.  UGH.  What used fence posts don't have cement on them?!  Couldn’t they have mentioned that on the phone?  So poor Mike had to lug them all the way home, unload them from the car and go buy a special (aka expensive) metal/cement cutting blade for our reciprocating saw (because the metal posts were filled with the cement at the bottom).

It was a huge pain for Mike to cut them all, but it did work.  Eventually.  All 16 fence posts were cut above and below the cement, leaving the concrete pieces small enough for disposal and then metal posts could be recycled.  And now (hooray!) our yard is free and clear of all the chain link and posts that previously plagued the side of the garage.  One more small step in a massive yard overhaul.

Hello Mr. Holmes!

  
GUESS WHO I MET LAST NIGHT!?

Yep.  That’s Mike Holmes from HGTV.  BEST BIRTHDAY SURPRISE EVER from (my) Mike.  He gave me Holmes’ new book  Make it Right for my birthday and the surprise twist was a book signing at Barnes and Noble last night!

I LOVE Mike Holmes’ shows on HGTV and we both enjoy his practical and do-it-right-the-first-time approach to home renovations and inspections.  I’m a little obsessed.   It was really awesome to meet him.  He’s a really down-to-earth nice guy - he spent time talking to every single person who came and was especially kind and sweet to all the little kids that were dragged there by their parents.  I’m really looking forward to reading his book too.

Does anyone else watch HGTV?  Anyone else a Mike Holmes fan?

(And yes we got a picture of the three of us together.  I’m grinning like a star struck fool in it.)

Hello Kitchen Island

Meet our fabulous new kitchen island.  My parents have single-handedly tripled the counter space in our kitchen with one totally awesome Crate & Barrel Belmont White Kitchen Island.  For the first time ever, two people can work in the kitchen at the same time!  It's amazing.  And this island has two spacious drawers and a large roomy cabinet that holds tons of stuff.  Plus two towel bars.  It moves easily around the kitchen on casters so we can put it wherever we need it.  The counter itself has hinges so that we have more space when we need it and less when we don't.  Even the hardware blends with our current cabinet knobs! 

It's the finishing touch that our kitchen desperately needed.  We love it.   Yes we do sacrifice some floor space, but it really helps make our very small kitchen work so much better.

Hello Citrus!

Thank you for all of the happy birthday wishes, I had a wonderful weekend.  It was filled with lots of sleep, rich food, fancy drinks, plenty of fun and time spent outdoors landscaping and working on our gardens.  All of my favorite things.

The first thing I wanted to share from my weekend are the latest editions to our garden.  Move over fig tree, we are now the proud owners of a Meyer lemon tree and a lime tree!  How cool is that?!  Compliments of my totally awesome and thoughtful sister, these patio trees will produce plenty of fruit despite their small stature.  Their ability to live and thrive in pots make it possible for people like me who live in Northeast to have citrus trees because they will spend half the year indoors in our sun room.

The lemon tree is covered in blooms and small baby green lemons.  The flowers smell amazing, almost like gardenias.   And they look beautiful.  The lime tree will start blooming sometime soon.  Did you know that lime trees have thorns?  I learned that one the hard way during the re-potting process (ouch!).  However any future pricks or scratches will be well worth it - I can't wait to start harvesting my own citrus!

Spring Update: Front Yard Landscaping Months Later

Last fall we made a huge push to redo our front yard landscaping.  We pulled out all of the overgrown astilble flowers from between the azalea bushes and replaced them with hollies, thujas, and boxwoods.  The astilbe was broken apart and replanted in a second row behind the bushes (set between them) to help fill things out in the spring - and it worked!  Everything is filling in beautifully - even the bushes grew a little bit (except for the one that died). 

This photo was taken while we were still under contract a year ago.

I love the azaleas, aren't they so bright and pretty?

We still have so many things we'd like to do to improve the curb appeal of our house this year - we have some fun plans in the works!

We Thought Myrtle was Dead

We thought our crepe myrtle died in November during the deck installation.  It took a serious beating from the contractors.  We were sad, but we came to terms with Myrtle's death over the winter and left her uncovered - why wrap a dead tree?  (Crepe myrtles are southern plants need to be wrapped over the winter to protect them from the bitter cold NJ temperatures.)  Then when I went to dig up Myrtle I saw this:

New branch buds!  Life!  Myrtle had survived the deck construction and the winter unwrapped! It must have been all of the snow we had, insulating it through the worst of the freezing cold.

Dining Room Hooks

My parents gave me these beautiful hooks from Anthropologie for my birthday last year.  They match the doorknobs around the house beautifully and really fit with the style of our home.  I love them so much that I've had a really hard time deciding where they should go.  Should they be hung together for maximum impact?  Or spread them out over two different rooms?  I didn't want to hide them away in utilitarian locations like behind a door in the bathroom or in the basement entryway stairwell - they are way too pretty for that.  There wasn't enough room by the front door in the living room... so finally I settled on the dining room.

We use our sliding doors to the backyard all the time so it was the perfect place.  Since the winter we've kept dog coats, human coats, even towels (for muddy paws and wet fur) on the chair next to the door.  It was a mess.  For months now I've been meaning to hang a couple of hooks here.  It took me way too long (a year!) to finally make a decision, but I'm really happy with their placement.  I love it when things are useful and stylish at the same time!

Perennial Garden Along The Fence

Last year we only had time for a small flower garden on this side of the yard.  We threw in a couple of irises and gladiola bulbs next to the preexisting bleeding heart and called it a day until the end of the summer (when we added a few more things).  As much as I love gardens and flowers (we were married in an arboretum in front of a huge flower garden) we were just too busy making the inside of the house liveable. 

Well this year I wanted more, a lot more.  A big long flower bed against the fence filled with flowers that would keep coming back year after year: a perennial garden.  A couple of weeks ago I posted about how I planted some peonies along the fence, and only recently were we finally able to finish digging out the full flower bed, pulling sod up very carefully around the existing plants.   Now the bed goes from the corner of the fence all the way back to the middle of the garage - it's huge and it took forever to get it all up.  Someday I'd like to make it go all they way back, but this is plenty for now.  We filled in the beds with leftover dirt from the raised bed garden - we still had at least 2 cubic yards left sitting in the driveway.

Then it was time to plant a few new things.  Seeing how large our bleeding heart grew (it's a monster taking over everything!), I didn't want to over-plant everything and make it too overcrowded.   I read the recommended spacing directions on the plants, which is as high as 3-4 feet for the peonies.  While the plants grow and take the time to establish themselves, I'm filled in the rest of the space a little bit with things that can easily be moved around from year to year - dahlias (smaller ones than the dinner plates in the raised beds), strawberries, and gladiola bulbs.

So what exactly is over here now?  Here's the official plant list:  bleeding hearts (original to the house),  irises (from last June), gladiolas (from last June and some new ones), a knock-out rose bush (from last August), anemone (from last August), 3 astilble (from the front yard redo in October), 6 peonies (new), 2 lupines (new), French lavender (new), daffodils (tied up and dying back - original to the house), dahlias (old and new), strawberries (old and new), and ah ydrangea (new - donated from my mother who received it as a potted gift).  I also technically threw in a few alyssum flower seeds leftover from the raised bed garden because we have the space this year while the larger plants (like the peonies) establish themselves.

Once everything was planted, we spread out a layer of newspaper because it's magic at blocking weeds (seriously) and then covered it with cedar mulch.  I think it looks lovely and I can't wait for it to fill in.  I'll share the progress once things grow!

Deck Furniture

My birthday isn't until the weekend, but an early birthday present arrived for me and it's too pretty not to share!  My wonderful Grandparents sent me this beautiful furniture set for the deck.  Don't mind the water droplets, we had a very wet weekend and a very rainy week ahead, so I just decided now was as good a time as any to snap a few pictures. 

It's the perfect size for such a tight space and I LOVE the stone mosaic pattern on the table and chairs.  The galvanized iron construction is very sturdy and the chairs are super comfortable.  We can now enjoy the beautiful spring mornings by having coffee on the deck and even dinner alfresco.

The Garden Gate

Over the weekend Mike built me a garden gate.  We wanted something that was simple to make and inexpensive, but functional.  I wanted a gate wide enough to let a wheelbarrow through which required a custom creation.  After scouring the internet for inspiration, we settled on a wooden gate built out of two 2x4s, wood screws, two basic hinges and a hook and eye latch.  Easy and cheap!

For the posts, Mike dug two very deep holes and installed two 2x4s cut to size on both sides of the opening.  He filled in the holes with pea gravel and dirt for a snug fit (but not as permanent as cement because we don't want that).  For the gate door itself, he built a box out of 2x2s - a 2x4 cut in half cross-wise with a circular saw.  Using thinner pieces of wood kept the weight down - important for such a wide gate, especially when the posts are not cemented.  The box was put together with a drill and a few wood screws.  Using a staple gun, he attached chicken wire at the bottom and deer netting at the top to keep the animals out.

Mike attached the gate door to the posts with simple hinges from Home Depot and attached a hook and eye for a latch.  It swings open beautifully and works great!

Garden Watering Setup

Our garden is watered at 5 am while I'm still asleep.  I read online that very early morning is the best time for the plants to be watered, but there's no way I'm getting up that early.  We got a handy timer from the folks at CSN and so far it's fabulous**.  You get up early once and turn it on at the time you want it to go off, and after that it remembers what time to turn it on.  And it has lots of different options and settings for how many minutes you want to water for and how often.  Right now we're experimenting with how much water the garden needs.

From the timer we have an extra long hose that snakes around the side of the driveway.  We set it up this way so that we 1) don't run the hose over with the car (which ruined our other one) and 2) the hose won't burn the grass in the heat of the summer.  It runs along the side of the garage until it reaches the garden enclosure, where it runs through a small hole cut into the fencing and into the soaker hoses that are buried in the raised beds. We went with soaker hoses because they only water the plant's roots, reducing water waste (from evaporation and runoff) and helping to prevent leaf fungus and mold by keeping the plant leaves dry.  Sprinklers water everything and get water everywhere - good for lawns, bad for vegetables.

Yes it looks a little bit like a Frankenstein science experiment... but it's efficient!

 

**Our watering timer was provided by CSN.com, but my opinion of it is completely my own.

Garden Planting

Now that the raised bed garden is set up, I thought I'd share our plans for planting our organic garden.  We have four raised beds for optimal crop rotation and that means planting certain things in certain beds. 

Here's the scoop on crop rotation straight out of an email from my Grandfather:
"Crop rotation can also break the cycles of pest and disease problems that build up in soils planted repeatedly to the same crop. The idea is to plan your rotation so that no two crops subject to similar diseases follow one another within the disease’s incubation period. The same principle holds for insect pests - crop rotation makes it harder for emerging insects to find their preferred food each spring."

For example - tomatoes, peppers, potatoes and eggplants are all part of the nightshade family and should be kept together.  They attract awful pests and are terrible for the soil.  Meanwhile beans and peas amend the soil and are good companions for carrots, lettuces, and herbs.  Cucumbers, squash and melons have similar needs and do well together, though they take up a lot of space (which is why we are trellising our cucumbers).  Beets, onions & radishes can be planted with any group (though we are skipping them). In our fourth bed, instead of doing broccoli, kale, cabbages, cauliflower, etc. we are doing a flower cutting garden.  Every year each group will shift over one bed so that each raised bed will only see the same group once every 4 years.

Bed 3 - Nightshades: I may have gone overboard with the tomatoes and peppers this year...

Bed 1 - Vines (Cucurbits): The cucumbers are trellised to leave more room for the squash/zucchini and melons.

Bed 2 - Flowers: Everything in this bed is from bulbs and seeds so there's not much to look at yet.

Bed 4 - Beans (Legumes), Herbs & Carrots (Parsleys): The pole beans are trellised on a bean tower.

You may have noticed that the marigolds are planted with the tomatoes and peppers instead of in the flower bed.  They are an excellent companion to nightshades and repel many of those nasty invading pests.  All fruit producing bushes and perennials are being planted elsewhere in the yard so that they don't interfere with crop rotation. 

I mentioned this before, but we mulched the beds with cheap black plastic.  It looks a little unsightly, but the pros outweigh that one con.  The black heats the soil and the plastic isn't water permeable so the moisture inside the beds doesn't evaporate.  The plants are planted in holes in the plastic so when it rains all of the water is directed to the plants instead of to weeds, which are also suppressed.  Once the plants get bigger, the shiny plastic will also be much less apparent.  The rocks on top of the plastic are to keep it from blowing around.

Garden Fence & Pathways

*Apologies in advance.  I had every intention of capturing this process step by step, but my camera battery died and we couldn't find the charger until we were almost finished*

We wanted to be green, we tried to be thrifty, we tried reuse the fence posts leftover from the chain link fence.  It didn't work.  And we didn't figure out that it wasn't going to work until we installed 6 of them.  The idea was good in theory, but the execution was a disaster.  All of the fence posts had concrete at the base from when they were part of the big fence.  We buried them in the ground, concrete and all.  Then realized that one can't bury 6 inches of chicken wire (to keep out rabbits, chipmunks, and groundhogs) through concrete.  In our minds we thought we could bend the fencing around the concrete and still attach them to the posts, but it just wasn't working.

So we went back to Home Depot and picked up proper chicken wire/deer netting posts that have little fence hooks to grip and hold everything in place.  Installation was so much easier.  These posts could be shoved into the ground by hand or with a mallet instead of digging a giant hole.  And the fence hooks made the fences a cinch to put up.  If you ever have to install a garden fence, buy the proper posts!

The low fence is green vinyl coated chicken wire, which I mentioned before is to keep out the lower burrowing animals such as rabbits, chipmunks and groundhogs.  We used two different sizes of fence posts because we already had the shorter ones and the chicken wire needed more support on the long sides than every 12.5 feet.  We buried the fencing underground by digging out a 6" trench all the way around the garden, placing the fence in the trench and attaching it to the fence posts.  While we had the trench open, we also installed vinyl 4" black edging all the way around to help keep the grass from creeping in and provide an extra layer of protection. 

Once the chicken wire and edging was installed, we filled the trenches in with dirt, tamping everything down to create a compacted level surface.  From there we installed weed blocking fabric over all of pathways.  This water permeable fabric will let water drain away but block weeds for years to come.  Basically all you do is unroll the fabric to the length you want, cut it, and fold the extra fabric underneath for a clean edge.  You secure the fabric to the ground with inexpensive ground staples.  The fabric frays wherever you cut it, so leave extra fabric at the ends to fold underneath before stapling to keep everything together (this was a very helpful tip from my grandfather).  It was windy during our install, so having a partner to hold down the other end was necessary to keep everything from blowing away.  Most of the staples went in easily by hand, but we needed to use a mallet for a few.  We put staples in the corners and on the sides when needed, overall we probably used about 75 staples and 1.5 rolls of fabric.  I highly recommend putting down weed blocking fabric on pathways unless your favorite hobby is weeding  or you're a masochist.

We had 3 cubic yards of smooth rounded pea gravel delivered (in a pile next to the 5 cubic yards of dirt!) to cover the pathways.  We have a lot of water issues behind the garage and we wanted a pleasant and dry surface to walk on while gardening instead of the mud pit.  Also the gravel pathways look nice - my dream garden and backyard is straight out of my favorite gardening store Terrain (a concept nursery-shop-cafe owned by the same company as Anthropologie).  They use a lot of pea gravel on their pathways so I took a cue from them.  Of course they would use hand hewn fence posts made of reclaimed 200-year-old barn wood to hold up their fence, but we're not maniacs.

Hauling the pea gravel as a team wasn't as bad as I thought it would be and went a lot faster than we estimated (hooray for small victories!).  Of course the stone was really heavy and it took a lot of trips in the wheelbarrow and a lot of scoops with our shovels to cover the entire area with 2" of gravel, but it wasn't as bad as it sounds.

Once the stone was down, we installed the second fence - deer netting.  Deer are everywhere in our area and they will make quick work of any unprotected garden.  We installed this in about 5 minutes thanks to the hooks on the fence posts.

Up Next: Garden planting, our watering system and the custom garden gate that Mike built!
Note: The black plastic on the beds is for warming the soil and blocking weeds.