Category Archives: garden

Attack of the 16-foot planter!

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Filed under garden, house

I’m feeling pretty pleased with the progress Evan and I were able to make in the garden this weekend. In a total of about 8 hours over the course of two days, we managed to construct two 8-foot mega-planters. That includes the time spent buying the wood and transporting it home! Total cost? About $100 total . . . for both planters. Fifty bucks a pop!

I took a few progress shots along the way just in case someone else wants to make a mega-planter or two. The whole project was super-easy. Seriously. Anyone with a drill and a jigsaw can do this.

After cutting all of our wood to size (we used 1×6 planks that were already 8 feet long, so we really just had to cut the side pieces down to 18″, and cut up a few 2×2s to create the support posts), we got to painting. I like to use Cabot Solid-Color Acrylic Stain for outdoor projects. It has the look of a flat, solid paint, but won’t chip or peel like paint does. The stain is very forgiving and easy to apply, usually only requires one coat, and dries completely in less than an hour. It really does hide the grain (but not the texture!) completely, though, so you might want to use something translucent if you prefer a more “woody” look. Since we already have so much wood going on outside between the deck, the porch, and the fence, I really wanted something subdued. Black has a nice way of receding in gardens, too.

(By the way, one gallon of this stain goes REALLY far. We bought one can two years ago, and even after using it for a gazillion projects, the level has only dropped about two inches. I fully expect this can of stain to outlive us all.)

The assembly process was easy. Screw the posts to the end panels (we screwed through the back so the screws won’t be visible on the finished planter), screw the end panels to the front and back planks, screw on the center posts for extra support (this may not be necessary with smaller planters). We used exterior decking screws that won’t rust. For a finishing touch, we stapled mesh screening onto the bottom of the planter. With all the groundhog* action that’s been going on in our garden lately, I consider any small defense a good one.

*At last count, there are four groundhogs: Haggis, Patches, Scarface, and my arch-nemesis, Fatback.

The planters are in place! We spent a good amount of time leveling them and making sure they were sitting nicely together. We’re planning to throw in a couple of bolts to keep them in line with each other over time, too.

THE DIRT PILE IS GONE! It felt so good to shovel all of that excess dirt that’s been migrating all over the yard for the past couple of years into the planter, let me tell you. We’re going to fill the planters the rest of the way with nice, rich planting soil, of course, but it’s okay to put crummy dirt in the bottom. Ahhhh. Bye-bye, dirt pile! I won’t miss you.

I took a second-floor shot of the whole garden so you can see how much area the mega-planters take up. I’m not sure yet what we’re going to plant in there (possibly something tall and evergreen and bushy, mixed in with some brightly-colored flowering perennials), but it’s so exciting to have another piece of the garden plan DONE.

Is this progress?

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Filed under garden, house

First of all, THANK YOU for all of the feedback regarding my hesitancy to post progress photos. A couple of the comments nearly made me cry (yeah, I’m a total crybaby), but in a good way. I really take to heart the fact that sometimes we all need to see that there are other people who don’t get things done immediately, and who also struggle with making decisions and getting motivated.

Speaking of not getting things done immediately . . .

This is the current state of our garden. If you take a look through the past couple of years of garden progress posts, you’ll see that this has been taking us FOR.EV.ER. and ever. The fact that this is our 5th summer in the house and we have yet to actually enjoy the backyard is just depressing. We had really hoped to get it DONE this year, but the temperatures in New York have just been stiflingly hot and humid—it’s very difficult to get much done before exhaustion kicks in.

I think we’re kind of getting somewhere, though? Yeah, half of the garden is still just dirt (and it’s bad dirt, too), but the pavers are in, and we planted a border of dwarf mondo grass around the deck. The Japanese maple has gotten HUGE (look how tiny it was two years ago!) and the pachysandra has really filled in. I’m especially excited that we’ve started to bring gravel in (one bag at a time, carried through the basement) to cover the ugly asphalt.

This is the end goal, at least for now (Photoshopped, of course—thanks to Carin Goldberg’s garden!). Eventually we’d like to plant ground cover between the pavers, but for the time being, I’ll be fine just staving off weeds with a layer of mulch. Vegetables and herbs will be grown on raised planters on the porch—a concession to “our” omnipresent groundhog (we’ve named him Haggis).

I just really want to be able to sit out there and look at something other than a giant pile of dirt.

Garden progress!

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Filed under garden, house

Remember when we built a deck? Yeah, way back when—just over a year ago. I had all of these big ideas and even drew up a plan, but since last April, we pretty much haven’t done anything in the garden. At all. Shameful!

Well, we finally got down to business over the weekend, and we laid eighteen 16″ square concrete pavers (about $3.50 each) on top of a hand-tamped, crushed stone base. We left a 4″ gap between the pavers and “grouted” the space with dirt. When the frost warnings pass in a couple of weeks, we’ll plant some sort of ground cover in the gap.

As I’ve mentioned before, we don’t have side or rear access to our garden, so everything must be carried through the basement—by hand—piece by piece. This becomes rather grueling after a while, especially when you’re talking about such heavy materials. Wielding the hand-tamper is quite an effort as well! Needless to say, I’m still feeling the effects in my limbs two days later. (Yesterday morning, I wondered what was “wrong” with the nail clippers as I was having trouble squeezing them!)

I love projects like this, though. Less than $100! Can’t beat it.

And yes, we’ve deviated from the plan, but we’re still moving ahead in the same vein. Eventually, I hope to look out of my second-story window and feel as excited as I am about what I see in my garden as I do about this garden:

Garden of Jenna Lyons (of course), as seen in LivingEtc.

Lily flower rain chain.

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Filed under four legs, garden, house

Our little porch roof doesn’t generate a lot of runoff when it rains, but it’s enough to warrant the use of a gutter and downspout. I’ve always wanted a rain chain, so this was a perfect opportunity to put one to use. We bought this heavy, copper Lily Flower rain chain and had our contractor hang it from the gutter for us (our porch roof is very high off the ground, and we don’t have a ladder that reaches!).

The rain chain has a bracket at the top that fits into the outlet hole of any standard gutter.

I was sort of hoping that it would rain today (okay, not really) so I could get a photo of the rain chain in action, but you’ll just have to imagine the water cascading down the chain and spilling over the sides of the lily-shaped cups. I tested it out with the garden hose, and it looked beautiful! I’ll try to make a little video the next time it rains.

To provide drainage, we built a miniature underground brick-sided well at the bottom of the chain and filled it with river rocks. We buried the last few links and cups of the chain to help with stability and to prevent the chain from swaying in the wind.

If you’re interested to read more about rain chains (kusari doi), Lindsay from Ouno Design did a nice post on them a couple of weeks ago.

Curious to see what the front of Door Sixteen looks like nowadays?

Four years of hard work has brought us to this point. Not bad! We still have lots more to work on with the exterior of the house (restoring/repainting the outside of the original windows and rebuilding the frames is next on the agenda), but considering how bad things were less than 10 years ago, I’m feeling pretty proud about what we’ve done for this place.

I know some of you have expressed interest in knowing how “our” stray cat, Sylvester, has been doing (I wrote about him back in November over at Victoria’s blog), so I took a photo of him lounging on the porch earlier today. Of course, he sneaked into almost every other photo I took of the house, too, but he’s a cat—that’s what they do. Sneak.

Instant deck.

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Well, almost instant. It took Evan and I about 8 hours to build the flat deck in my garden plan yesterday. Neither one of us have ever done this kind of thing before, so we’re feeling pretty pleased with ourselves right now!

We have îpe tastes but a tiny budget, so we had to go with standard PT lumber (sorry, planet). Next weekend I’ll stain it charcoal and it will look great.

We used the Dek-Block pier system, and it was really simple. The site lets you enter the size of your deck, and spits out a supply list and instruction sheets. Pretty amazing. The hardest part was getting everything level since our garden slopes from side to side, but even that wasn’t so bad once we had a system going. The total cost was just around $300 for an 8×8 deck, including the screws and the stain.

Actually, now that I think about it, the hardest part is TODAY—my arms feel like they’re going to detach themselves from my body. I had a difficult time getting out of bed this morning. Strong and in shape I am decidedly NOT.

Today I’m going to be planting a bunch of Pachysandra graciously donated by a friend working on her own garden makeover. Next week, we’re hoping to start setting up the dog run!

Garden plan!

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(click to see the garden in context)

You guys are great! All of the comments on yesterday’s post gave me the confidence to pull together a new plan for the garden—something that will cost very little and, I think, make our garden very usable very soon. I’m patient when it comes to plants, but I’m not patient when it comes to wasted space!

I’m excited about the grassy area for the dogs. Fritz and Bruno had a playdate with their new friends Maggie and Ada last weekend, and they were very impressed with their fenced-in grass run. Fritz is one of those dogs that tries to eat everything (*cough*sofa*cough*), and I get nervous about him having free run of the garden and all of the gravel, bark chips, and plants in it. A contained area will give our guys freedom to play without us having to hover over them every second.

I’ll try to take some up-to-date photos of our front garden tomorrow morning, too. The Purpleleaf Sand-Cherry is in full bloom right now, and it’s pretty fabulous!

Garden time: Let’s get serious!

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Filed under garden, inspiration

Okay, so it’s been quite some time since I mentioned the garden, I know. Winter was a good excuse for a few months, but now that it’s warming up (let’s pretend yesterday never happened—it’s spring for real now, right? It’s going to be in the 80s this weekend, after all) I really have to get out there and get things moving again.

So this is where we were last June. Since then, two of the rhododendrons have died (the third is doing just fine, go figure), both azaleas bit the dust, and the elderberries teetered on the verge of death under the blistering August sun (they seem to be coming back, though). The fireglow Japanese maple has a fresh set of leaves coming in, the ivy is starting to perk up a bit, and the pachysandra is spindly but alive. The hostas are currently MIA (do they disappear in winter?).

The rest of the garden is basically a giant pile of dirt. I HAVE TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS. Last weekend we spent a few hours raking up leaves, getting the dead plants out of the ground, and moving some dirt around. We basically have no budget (meaning “no money”, not “I don’t need to make a budget because money is no object”) for the garden, and I just don’t know what to do. Hauling tiny (but heavy) bags of crushed stone and sand through the house became very tedious very quickly, but we’re still nowhere close to having the amount we’d need to provide proper the underlayment for a stone patio.

My head hurts. I just want some amazing landscaper to come and do this for me. (For free.)

In lieu of doing actual work on the garden, I’m just going to post a bunch of inspiration photos.


(LivingEtc)


(Domino)

Yes, this again! And still my favorite.


(I can’t remember where this comes from. If you know, please tell me!)


(these five from Modular Garden)


(heavypetal; check out the full set)


(Walter Gropius house, from catfunt)

Garden progress.

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Filed under garden, house

Evan and I spent three solid days (minus some well-timed thunderstorm downtime) working in the garden, and the results are really satisfying. It’s actually starting to look like something out there! Considering the garden looked like this (remember that dog pen, Adam?!) when we bought the house and like this just a couple of months ago, I’d say this is quite an improvement.

We made a gravel path!

First we painted some pressure-treated wood with special outdoor stain, then we made a rectangular frame with stakes on the bottom.

Then we dug and dug and dug for a really long time, and smacked the dirt down flat with my new favorite tool, a hand tamper. We took turns. Evan’s turns were longer than mine. I’m not very strong!

Landscape cloth went on top of the dirt, and then we poured in 5 of the 6 bags of gravel we dragged into the garden through our basement.

SO EXCITING! A path! Which goes nowhere! (Eventually we’ll put something at the end.)

We also planted lots of stuff, so the Japanese Maple isn’t lonely out there anymore. On the left (shady) side, there are three Rhododendrons, an Azalea, Baltic Ivy (which will eventually climb up and cover a good portion if the fence), and a bunch of Pachysandra that I’m hoping fills in nicely and gives up some good ground covering. On the right (sunny) side, there are two Black Lace Elderberries and three Big Daddy Hostas. Everything is still pretty small, but I’m sure a year from now it’ll be looking lush and full.

The next steps are the stone patio and the vegetable garden!

Plants on the front porch.

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Filed under garden, house

Black false shamrock (black velvet clover) in pots close to the house, away from the blazing sun. I love these. I’m going to plant more of them in the window boxes at the back of the house, since they do well in the shade.

The weather is amazing right now, perfect for being outside and planting things! This is the time of the year when I get impatient and want to plant MORE MORE MORE instead of waiting for things to grow and fill in. I have to restrain myself, though, because otherwise by the time July rolls around, the garden will be overrun and crazy and I’ll be wishing I hadn’t planted things quite so closely together.

I’ve limited the pots on the porch to ONE white geranium each, plus some dragon’s blood sedum (which should trail over the side eventually), and two of something which might be black elephant ear. GROW! NOW! (It’s been three days. I should probably relax a little.)

Japanese maple in the garden.

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Yay! Something is now intentionally growing in the back garden!

My mother and I planted this Fireglow Japanese Maple in the garden yesterday. It’s beautiful! I love Japanese Maples. We bought the biggest one we could fit in the car. I’m crossing my fingers really tightly that it doesn’t die, because, well… it wasn’t cheap. I’m always shocked by how much plants cost (especially the bigger, more established ones), even though I know what to expect. It just seems like plants should be free.

Evan and I also panted three Rhododendron bushes, but I was too exhausted to lift a camera to document them when we were done! If they haven’t died by tonight, I’ll take a picture.

Pictures of the front garden (now in its third year and coming along quite nicely) coming soon…

Clean slate (dirt, plywood).

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My mother and I spent a couple of hours clearing out all of the remaining weeds and grass in the garden. I feel so inspired! She also helped me to come up with a pretty great new design for the landscaping, and I’m going to try to break it down into stages so we can move forward with the whole thing at a manageable pace.

Oh! And I think we have a new tile guy, which is very exiting. Evan and B spent the weekend rebuilding the subfloor (and the sub-subfloor) in the bathroom, so things are moving right along…

Flowerpots by Maija Louekari.

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Filed under art & design, garden, inspiration

The pots are saying: “Hey ya!” Make your neighbourhood more alive

I love this idea! These flowerpots are by Maija Louekari (I’ve mentioned her before). So fun!

What would you make pots on your windowsill spell? I’m thinking “Go away!”, personally, but that’s not very nice of me. Maybe this is an idea better reserved for the back garden for those of us who are less…gregarious.

New fence & new/old chairs.

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Filed under garden, scavenged

Look! It’s a fence! We knew we couldn’t do it ourselves, so we broke down and paid someone to come and install a fence for us. It makes a massive difference, despite the rest of the garden still being no more than a few clumps of grass on a plot of dirt. I can’t even describe how wonderful it is to go back there and not have to look at anyone else’s plots of dirt and patches of grass, and to just be limited to our own.

I know it’s not some incredible modernist construction, but it’s a little bit of privacy and containment. Fences are expensive to have installed (much more so than you’d think), so there was no way we could do a great horizontal cedar one or anything like that. This one will go gray eventually, since we’re not going to treat it with any preservatives. I’ll like it more when it’s gray.

This is the other side of the yard, warts and all. The cement that I want to cover with pea gravel, the too-small (yet also too large) fake-old porch, the awful white door with the fake muntins (oh, how I loathe fake muntins!), etc. Gross. This needs a lot of work, I know. It’ll get there.

We also drove out to Westchester to pick up a couple of original Knoll Hardoy/BFK butterfly chairs that I found on Craigslist. They have new covers made out of Mechoshade that’s safe to keep outside. The cloth has a really nice weave that reads as a light gray from a distance. I love these chairs! They’re going to look great with our new table.

A little at a time…

Edible Estates/Animal Estates.

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Filed under art & design, four legs, garden, inspiration, new york city

Los Angeles architect Fritz Haeg narrows the divide between residents and their communities with projects like Edible Estates, an international effort to convert front lawns into working food gardens.

Watch it all the way through. It’ll make you feel great, I promise. (From Dwell.)

Read More »

Garden frustration.

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Filed under garden

Following the wake-up call that was the landscaper’s quote on our original garden plan, I feel like I’ve hit a wall in terms of planning our outdoor space. Landscaping is expensive, hard work. Work that we don’t have the time, expertise, or energy for. Also, because we live in a row house with limited access to the garden beyond walking through the house or basement, it’s very difficult to see how exactly we would be able to get, say, 2.5 tons of pea gravel back there.

It’s a 35′x20′ lot, and I have no idea what to do with it. Somehow, I thought that having the mulberry tree removed would get things in motion. It’s gone (and I’m glad—the thing was a berry-dropping, sunlight-killing, ant-attracting beast) but I’m still at a loss. All I know is that I don’t want grass, it has to be dog-friendly, I want to grow some vegetables, and it can’t cost a fortune.

All puppies, all the time.

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Filed under four legs, garden, house

I know, all I have to talk about right now is FRITZ, FRITZ, FRITZ. It’s all-consuming! Things are going well. Bruno has left the “if I ignore him, maybe he’ll just disappear” stage, and has entered the “I’ll play with him, but he can’t sleep next to me” stage. It’s so fun to watch them play! Bruno chases Fritz, Fritz zooms around the house like a maniac, Fritz does a war dance in front of Bruno, Bruno chases Fritz, Fritz falls asleep, Bruno falls asleep (in a separate bed, of course), etc. It’s great. Fritz is also starting to get the hang of the whole housebreaking thing, so it’s possible our living room rug could make a reappearance as early as next week.

Fritz looooooves to chew! He’s also a fan of his new bed from Otis and Claude (seen here with a LUDDE sheepskin wrapped around the cushion). I dream of the day when he and Bruno are curled up in it together!

Meanwhile…
→ the plumbers are on their fourth day of work (!), and the roughing-in still isn’t done
→ the quote came in on our garden plan from the landscaper, and it is INSANE
→ a tree guy is coming to remove the offending mulberry tree today (for a very reasonable price)
→ maybe we can build a fence ourselves after all…

Scavenged (sort of): new chairs for the garden.

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Filed under garden, house, scavenged

Yesterday we brought home a pair of Bertoia side chairs to use in the back garden. They weren’t a true scavenged find as they are new, but I’m counting them as such since they were reduced in price by more than 75%. Yes!! They both have a wee bit of rust staining around some of the welds—barely noticeable, really—but since we’ll be using them outside anyway, it doesn’t matter.

Honestly, when a single wire chair retails for $421, the only way it’s coming home with me is if it’s DRASTICALLY discounted or if I find it in the garbage. I am forever grateful for the existence of the DWR Annex!

You wouldn’t know it from reading my posts, but there’s 500 SF garden at the back of this house. Sadly, we haven’t done anything with it other than clean up the trash, remove a chain link dog pen (thanks, Adam!), and level the ground a bit. Before anything is planted, it desperately needs a tall fence to hide the neighbors’ yards. There’s also a rather annoying mulberry tree that we want to have removed, as the copious amounts of squishy berries it drops all over the place during summer render the yard virtually unusable.

It’s an ugly little patch of land right now, but you’ll see—these chairs are just the beginning! It’ll be looking like Carin Goldberg‘s garden in no time.

I need more plant life!

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Hot pink tulips in the office, and white mums ready to be potted for the dressing room.

It’s muddy and gross outside, the groundhog says it’s going to be six more weeks until winter ends, and we don’t even have any snow to speak of. What’s the point of winter if there’s no snow?

I am ready to start gardening outside again!

Regrouping.

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Filed under garden, house

I’m off work until the end of the week, and I used my first day of vacation to clean, organize, and listen to T.Rex and Joe Jackson, mostly. Tonight I’ll cook two big pots of soup to put in the freezer. This is the window next to my kitchen sink. The sash needs to be repaired and painted, the radiator needs painting, and the plants really should have been properly potted by now…but it’s lovely anyway. I can’t believe the impatiens in the windowbox are still alive in this freezing weather!

Blooming.

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Filed under garden, house

All at once, the purple aster in the front garden is in bloom! Fall is definitely coming. The days are already getting shorter, and I need a coat when I leave the house in the morning.

purple aster