I see trouble ahead...

See those indents in the soil?  Those would be hoof-prints.

The neighbor has told me in the past the deer would walk through here, between the houses and through the back lot, then across the street to the golf course.  I know the dogs have been barking like crazy every night when I let them out, but I've been chalking that up to the raccoons in the trees along the fence line.  I've actually never seen a deer in this neighborhood (though I've been told they come through, both at this house and the rental, which was just a few minutes away from here).  I'm afraid this adds a whole new level of challenge and one I have not had to deal with so far.  I'm not looking forward to it... 

Progress!!

What a beautiful day today!  It was 84 degrees today, a very warm day in May (average is mid-60's)!

Last night, I stopped by Lowe's to pick up a couple packets of seeds I recently realized I need, and they had asparagus marked down 1/2 price.  The husband has been whining a bit because I didn't get the asparagus ordered, first because the beds weren't built, and then I figured it had gotten to be too late to get any.  I came home and told him if he was willing to help me build another bed, we could go get some.  I do hope they'll come up okay, they were definitely not enjoying life in the packages anymore.  I opened them right away and soaked them overnight in some water with a little splash of liquid kelp.  I figured by the time I planted them, I'd be able to tell if they looked like they just were too far gone.  Other than the one I seem to be missing- and I thought I counted all 15 of them last night, so I'm guessing it's just wound in with another root- the roots did seem okay today.  I guess we'll see soon enough.

I was so hot and tired after working outside all afternoon (I am definitely NOT used to warm weather!) I forgot to snap a new photo, so the details will have to wait.

I did finally get out to take some photos of the new garden:

This is the view from the east:

You can see how the little garlic rings we put together in the fall, really don't fit in well with what we ended up building (oops!). After the garlic is done, I'm going to take them out.  We added the asparagus bed in the grassy area in front of the larger rings on the left and will add another bed or two as well, for next year.  I hope to leave the rhubarb where it is (the small ring on the far right, on the side of the chain link fence.  That poor plant has had a rough couple of years, as I dug it from my rhubarb in Colorado and stuck it in a pot, with what turned out to be awful soil, and it spent some time on an apartment balcony, then the too shaded front yard of the rental, then to a sunny deck but with no attention due to moving and remodeling.  That it is still alive shows it is a hardy plant.  We stuck it in the ground last fall and though the stalks are small, it has put up many leaves.  I don't want to disturb it again.

Here's the view from the other end:

The arch is a cattle panel trellis.  When we rented last year, the back yard was not completely fenced- the last 15' of each side was open because I think it is technically a green belt that didn't belong to the landlord.  The way things were when we moved in, nobody could really access the space anyway as it was very overgrown next door, so we bought two 16' panels and a couple t-posts and made a temporary fence, but one that was sturdy enough to safely contain our labs, and one that I already knew how to re-purpose.  I don't think I'll use the second one this year, but it is an option if I need it.  I'm planning melons in the right side bed (where if you look closely, you can see the kitten, Fred) and winter squash in the left bed. 

This is the long bed toward the east side.  It has a mish-mash of transplants, probably too closely planted, and because these were in wintersown jugs, I had to get them off the deck before I had all my materials for bed-filling, so we'll see how they do. They're pretty much planted in composted horse manure and old, partially rotted straw.

 Anyway, that's all for now.  I'll be back again- hopefully with more regularity than I have been.  It's been hard to get back into the blogging swing.  During the past couple of summers with no garden, I had to stay away from Gardenweb and the blogs, as they just bummed me out.  I am glad to be back, and I'm really looking forward to catching up with everyone's gardens, and keeping this blog up to date.

Change in plans

I drew up a plan for the new garden quite a while ago.  I really liked the idea of the little joined rings, right up until I started to build the beds. 

My first problem was an error in measurement somewhere.  When I started to build the two beds in the middle row, to the right of the pathway, I quickly realized there was not room to build them as I had laid out.  I wanted the paths to be 30" between beds as that is a comfortable path for using my garden cart.  I was going to end up with the two beds very close to each other, so I decided at the last minute to just make one larger bed.

Next, I was preparing to build the rings, and when I calculated the extra blocks I would use and the reduced planting space of the design, I decided to change them.  I swapped the smaller triple rings on the left for two more 3'x6' rectangular beds and the small triple ring on the right for a larger double ring.  I may still add the third, smaller ring to what I ended up building as medium double rings, but that's going to have to come later.

This is what I actually ended up building (with some excellent help from the hubby last weekend) though the strawberry bed isn't built yet.  I will probably end up changing the two small rings to the far right (the bottom ones, the top one is at the corner of the fence and has rhubarb growing, I'll probably leave it alone).  After a  quick look at the pile of landscaping blocks after building all the beds shown (except the strawberry one) I have 100-120 blocks left.  I suspect I will add some more beds to the right side next year, but I'll figure it out after I get stuff planted and see how they do.  So far I've got about 250 square feet of bed space, I think almost twice what I had before (though I'm being lazy and not actually looking up how big the other garden was, I think it was about 130 sf) but I want to try giving the plants more space to grow than I did before.  We'll see how well I do with that once I've got it planted :-). 

Slowly Making Progress

I'm slowly making some progress on the garden. Part of the reason we chose this house was the extra 3/4 acre lot that was also available.  The house is on 1/4 acre, so we ended up with just over an acre.  You can see in the aerial view that we have almost an arrow shaped lot (both included) because the back lot is a big triangle.  The downside is it does back up to a fairly busy road, but in addition to the dog-yard fence (a little deeper than the 1/4 acre- I drew it on the photo-) we also installed a fence along the busy road.  We still have to close off the way-back from the front, but at least now if the dogs get out of the back fence, we've got a little more protection to keep them from the main road.

We moved in August, and I tried to watch where the sun was and was not during the day.  I had originally planned  to put the garden to the right of the yard, sort of behind the neighbor's house, but as I watched the sun, I learned that area was much more shaded then I had expected.  The evergreen trees are very tall and throw a huge shadow.  What I did see was the sunniest spot seemed to be just behind the fence.  I also pulled up the old aerial photos on Google Earth to try and find the shadows.  It was actually somewhat helpful as over the years the photos were taken during different months.

Because it does not rain much during the summer here, and we didn't water much (just a bit out front and enough to stop the hydrangeas from wilting), I also noticed that where the sun hit the most, there was very little grass and and it was a more bare, weedy spot.  It reminded me of the lawn in some of the hotter areas we've lived...  (lol).  While I do wish I had a handy sun calculator like the solar power guys use for site surveys, I'll just have to make do with what I have.  Noting the sparse growth meant I had some leeway once the rains came, to actually mark out the plot, as the grasses would all be green soon.

I drew in the "dog fence" and the proposed area for the main garden.  I also plan to include berries and herbs, though I don't have the details worked out quite yet.  I'm thinking herbs along the right side of the dog fence and the berries where I had originally planned to put the garden and in a little pocket of the way-back yard.  Eventually I would like to plant fruit trees as well, but that won't likely be this year.

This is the general plan I have for the main garden.  I learned today that my estimation is off by a few feet and the two rectangular beds to the right of the path (the brown textured area is a path from the back gate to the old wellhouse (storage building) won't fit as planned, so I've got to modify the plan a bit, but it's a start.

Right before we closed on the house, hubby learned they were tearing down the building next to his work.  There was quite a bit of landscaping around it, and all the blocks were going to be hauled off.  We made, I think, three trips with our little utility trailer and brought home about 400 blocks.  We were pretty positive the closing would happen, so we took them straight to the house (which was vacant) and unloaded them out back.  Luckily, nobody had a problem with it, because we did not relish the thought of unloading them at the rental, then hauling them again.  We think they'll make nice, non-rotting, raised beds, and the price was right -just the cost of fuel to get them and our labor to load and unload. 

There is another stack around that corner too.

This is the ground view of the garden area. 

We've already got a few little rings built.  We have a rhubarb, that is hopefully still alive, that I actually dug from the garden in Colorado, which did survive its time in a pot, though it was not happy.  We popped it in the ground before I had much of a plan, so it's sort of on the wrong side of the fence, but it's fine.  The herbs may go along that fence line anyway, so it won't be way out there.

I also wanted to get some garlic in the ground, so we built two more little rings to go with it.  I noticed this weekend that the garlic has popped out of the leaf mulch already.

To build these little beds, I slightly loosened the soil by sticking a spading fork in the ground a few times and giving it a little wiggle.  That's it.  No digging.  Then I laid a piece of cardboard (hello moving boxes...) with ALL the tape removed, tossed a few forks of compost on there (uhm, yeah, we sort of moved the compost from the bin we had at the rental- we didn't move far and we were trying to clean everything up and frankly, it seemed like the best plan since it was unfinished).  We planted the garlic and covered it with some leaves I scrounged this fall.  Amazingly, with all the trees we have, almost none are deciduous.  We got some from a neighbor who was putting them out for the yard waste collection, and another from an older woman we met at the first HOA meeting we went to, who made a comment apologizing for her un-picked up pile of leaves since she'd had surgery. I got her address and we went over and scooped them up for her.  It was a win-win.

A Quick Catching Up...

First, please excuse the unfinished changes to the blog page.  I've still got some work to do on it, but I was so frustrated just trying to get the picture to fill the top section (which is now too blurry, but will just have to do for now) that I'm leaving it alone for the time being. 

As you know, we sold the Colorado house summer of 2011.  It wasn’t financially pretty, but at least we got it sold, which at that time, not selling it was a real concern.  We moved to a rental house in Olympia, which was too small and turned out to be underneath too many trees.  We did a little container gardening that summer as my husband had started a couple zucchini on his apartment patio before I moved up here.  As we grew to really dislike that house, it did make us realize that when we purchased one, to really watch out for how much sun there was, not just for the garden, but also for the house itself.  We looked and looked, and even passed on a few that might have worked, due to lack of sunlight.  Then one day last summer, my husband calls and says to check out a new listing.  It was a house in our neighborhood (well, technically a neighboring neighborhood, but they’re connected) that a few times when we’d walked the dogs, he’d commented how much he liked it.  The house is very 1970, it still had red shag carpeting in the living and dining rooms, it had off-white shag in the bedroom (and still has, for now, blue shag in one bedroom).  We still have an apple green kitchen with brown appliances.  We had to do quite a lot of work, some of it unplanned (we discovered some water damage and found that rodents had just trashed what little insulation there was in the cathedral ceiling in the living room, so we re-insulated and replaced the ceiling).  We still have a lot to do, but it will take some time.  Here are a couple of pictures, but if you want to see more, click here, here, and here

 

 

What this house DOES have, is an adjoining ¾ acre lot that the seller also owned.  It also has a well that used to supply the neighborhood (which is now on city water), but it is currently disconnected.  We will have to replace the industrial sized pump, which may or may not prove economically feasible, but it is my understanding that we can irrigate up to ½ acre without needing a water rights certificate.  We aren’t going to deal with the well this year, so we’ll work that one out later.  This house also has a nice sunny backyard, with a nice sunny deck and big windows to let the sunshine in.  Can you tell, sunshine is a very important asset here?  

We fenced in a little more than the ¼ acre parcel that the house is on, extending back into the second lot, so the dogs could have a little bit bigger yard.   Last summer, I tried to watch where we had sun and where it was shaded throughout the day, and I actually had to adjust where I had planned to put the garden, as it was more shaded than I had realized.  We had a few more containers for the second summer, and as it turns out, I do much better in-ground than container gardening.

Sadly, in October, we lost our beautiful Gabby to kidney failure at the age of 18.  He had gotten very thin, and his bloodwork showed his kidneys were in decline.  We did what we could to help him feel better but he declined rapidly and in about a month, it was clear what was to come.  Gabby is the silver tabby.

 

Later in the fall, we were leaving the grocery store and there were two kids outside trying to find new homes for a litter of kittens, and though we weren’t quite ready for it, and had not planned on it, we brought this little guy home.   

This is Fred.  He’s just about 4 months old now, and he’s a crazy kitten.  Annie, our 16 year old cat, is not thrilled with him yet, but I think she’s slowly warming up to him.  I keep trying to tell the little monster that she might like him better if he’d just quit touching her, but he’s a kitten, and he just can’t help himself. 

Before Christmas, we learned our dog Wilson has cancer.  Because he is only 6 and to the best of our knowledge, the cancer had not yet spread beyond the tumor that was removed, he is undergoing treatment.  We are hoping to have him with us for a while longer.  

So, that’s the quick rundown.

The next post will be about the garden.  :-) 

Pardon the Mess

Pardon the mess, I was trying to update the blog with current location, information and photo, and apparently I need to do some reading to see how to fix this the way I want it.  I don't know what they did to Blogger but they sure didn't make it more user friendly.  I don't remember having this much trouble before.

Coming Soon...

I am working on my garden layout this week, and I will be coming back to the gardening world soon!!!

More to follow soon!
Amy

The Disappearing Act

Hello Friends!

I know you must think I have forgotten about you, but it is not so. Hubby did finally get back from Korea, but we were not able to stay in Colorado. There was no real garden for me this year, and I stayed away from my gardening haunts as it just made me sad to think about it.

We've moved to Washington (state). The Colorado house finally sold in August, and we're looking for a house here near Olympia. I really hope we find one soon, so I can start to plan my spring planting!! Finding what we are looking for is proving to take longer than usual, but the right one will come along in due time.

When I can really allow myself to think gardening for real, I will be back...
Amy