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…

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.

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…

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.)

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.

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…

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.

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!

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!

My work days are long and tiring right now. Thank goodness I have a huge window to get lost staring out of, and plants to tend to. I can’t keep indoor plants alive at home, but somehow I’m able to get them to thrive in a midtown Manhattan office building. Go figure…

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.

When we bought our house in March 2006, the front garden was a tiny patch of dying grass, dirt, and rocks. Now we have a mass of carpet roses, lavender, dusty miller, creeping thyme, creeping jenny, phlox, purple-leaf sand cherry, boxwood, petunias, sweet potato vines, vinca, lady’s mantle, and, and, and…!

I never knew just how much I love being outside. My past experimentations with plants have been less than fruitful, so it’s quite gratifying to see that even the blackest of thumbs can learn a thing or two. There are still some patches I need to fill in (it’s tricky to find plants that can survive full sun all day long), but it’s definitely getting there. I can’t wait to see how it will look in a few years when the boxwood has grown and spread!

Lots of pictures! Read more