Archive

General Updates

July 24, 2008

I thought I would post some general updates…

Westview Bungalow

Front of our house

It seems like it’s been a while since I’ve posted an exterior house shot. We installed some hooks this spring so we could hang up ferns – and I’m loving them! Otherwise our house is still pink, still has that ugly tree stump, and still has that beat up path. At least one of them will get worked on soon…but I’m not going to tell you which one! :)

I’ve talked about our kudzu musings and frustrations in the past (See photos from May 2007, June 2007, July 2007 I, July 2007 II, and September 2007), and took a photo of the neighbors yard last October (2007):

Lost in kudzu field

Lost in kudzu field

Well I’m glad to finally be able to present some change! Our new neighbor moved in back in April. He’s fought unsuccessfully with the landlord to get the back yard cleaned up so his kids could play in it. He has finally decided to take matters into his own hands and look at how far he got! I have never seen the back of that backyard cleared up since we’ve lived here, so I’m just amazed at the view – I’m not used to it!

Kudzu field removed

Kudzu field removed

So in the meanwhile back to our garden…

Vegetable bed

Vegetable bed

…I think we have a vegetable garden buried under those weeds somewhere! This year we had planted tomatoes, beans, zucchini, bell pepper, hot pepper, and cucumber. Our tomatoes caught some disease so we haven’t seen any harvest from them. The beans seem to grow at a steady pace, so we’ve collected beans here and there and are freezing them until we have enough to make something with. We’ve harvested a couple of zucchini’’s and were a bit disappointed with how hard they were on the outside (any tips?). The cucumber has yet to deliver. The hot peppers have had a few that we’ve collected and dried. And the bell pepper had one of decent size that was ready to be harvested when we found a squirrel had gotten to it before us! (Next one is growing now.) The weeds have yet to be removed…we’re still not quite caught up from having gone on vacation, and the torching heat, killer mosquitoes, and “convenient” rain only on weekends has hindered us from tackling the bed. (The ever-growing grass has kept us busy in the meanwhile too.) Oh yeah, and don’t we look classy with our pile of crap on the driveway?!

And more gardening…

Front yard landscaping

Front yard landscaping

This bed looked so cute last fall, but isn’t quite as cute this year. We haven’t planted anything new, but I was excited to see the fern overwintered since it indicated it wasn’t supposed to. The yellow annuals obviously didn’t make it, but I’m glad to see the mum’s have made a return. In the meanwhile I’ve been really disappointed with the boxwoods. I was really fixed on having them as the evergreen backdrop in that bed, but they’re not doing well at all. I think they may not be getting enough water – whenever it rains the water doesn’t go on the boxwoods due to the houses overhang. I was sooo determined to have them there! We already replaced one of the plants in the spring, but now only two of the plants have survived. Anyone know anything about Japanese Boxwoods? Is it worth replanting new ones? They only get morning sun and like I mentioned hardly get any rain water. I’m simply determined to have an evergreen that doesn’t grow above approximately 3 feet in that spot that will survive in Zone 7.

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Garden Updates

September 24, 2007

Since we were going on vacation for a little while Patrick’s mom volunteered to come by the house to water our plants so they wouldn’t die while we were gone. Naturally other items continued to grow as well though…

The neighbor’s unstoppable kudzu managed to get all the way to our house!

Invasive kudzu

The Hosta’s look like they grew quite a bit – one of them even grew flowers! And the Red Fountain Grass must have gotten somewhat of a beating from thunderstorms – usually it perks back up, but this time it appears to be permanently down. We’ll have to tie them together or something so they won’t stay so droopy. (Compare to pre-vacation photo)

Fountain grass

The sunflowers were such a success. Yeah…well…or not really. Next time I’ll know better than to plant sunflower seeds on a west-facing wall. Those sunflowers took one beating after another. Some of them were doing alright in the beginning (See photo), but every time it rained those poor fragile little plants were beaten to the ground. Plus the ones facing north must not have received enough sunlight because they slowly but surely shriveled up. The only ones really going anywhere where the southern-most ones…and even though a few of them are at least blooming they’re not exactly standing up tall and strong! Like I said, I’ll know better next time…

Sunflowers

Aaaaand the lavender. My sweet, sweet lavender. We’ve gone through a bit with these little ones too. Originally we had planted them in our “pond” spot where the Hosta’s are now located (See photo). We transplanted them to this (above) location because the area is much, much drier. The one on the left was the “Hidcote” variety that I had picked out; the one on the right was the “Sweet” variety that Patrick had picked.

Lavendar

Now that we returned from vacation I was sad to see that my poor lavender didn’t make it. Perhaps we had transplanted it too late? Unfortunately it had to go to plant heaven.

Lavendar

They still had some lavender’s left at Lowe’s, so we planted the “Province” variety that we also have at the front of the house.

Lavendar

We added some more flowers at the front of the house. Earlier we had planted the Japanese Boxwoods and some yellow annual flowers. Patrick’s mom forgot to water this flower bed, so one of the boxwood’s isn’t doing to well and we’re considering replacing it (the others seem to be doing ok after watering). Funnily enough the annuals grew bigger than the boxwood’s – perhaps because the rain still hits them but not the boxwood’s behind (See previous photo). We’ve added these white “Mum’s” because they’re quite beautiful and because they’re perennial’s. That way when the yellow annuals die the Mum’s will be there to keep the flower bed green.

Foundation plants

And lastly we have a new buddy around the house. To our shock our right-side neighbors had moved out while we were gone. They had only moved in in April, so we didn’t expect them to be gone when we got back. Unfortunately they have abandoned their two cats – momma cat and her teenager (born right around the time when the neighbor’s moved in). To make things worse we discovered that momma cat is expecting again. We are considering keeping the little teenager (above) around, but are not up for the task of keeping mom and her soon to be family additions. We’ve tried to contact animal rescue place after animal rescue place, but they are either full or claiming they can’t accept cats and to go through the city’s animal shelter instead. We’ve been hesitant to call the animal shelter because we know they put cats to sleep if they don’t get adopted within a certain time frame and we can’t bear the thought of that. So we’re in somewhat of a dilemma about what to do with this abandoned pregnant cat. :(

Neighborhood cat

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We’re Proud Parents…

July 5, 2007

We’re Proud Parents…

Tomato

…of tomatoes! So this may not be as exciting to some out there as it is to us, but as first time gardeners it’s pretty exciting when you find your very first tomato growing! Not only that, but yesterday we found a second tomato on the same vine. And this morning I was also very excited to find a tiny green bell pepper growing. Woohoo, we’re going to have some of our homegrown veggies before long. For good measure I took a picture of our first tomato with the port-a-potty in the background. Patrick put it on Craigslist, so hopefully we won’t be owners much longer?

Further Updates in the Garden…

A bigger view of our vegetable garden shows that the scrawny little squashes that we planted about a month earlier have nearly taken over the entire vegetable bed! (View photo from a month ago) In the far left we have the “Bigger Boy” tomato that has yet to create any tomatoes. In front of that is the green bell pepper, as mentioned above. Of course it wasn’t until after we planted the bell pepper next to the tomato’s that I read not to plant them next to one another – oops. In front of the bell pepper are the six squash plants, and in front of that (closest to the camera) is a honeydew melon. On the far right is our champion tomato that my parents gave us. In front of that is a zucchini plant, and in font of that (about to be overtaken by the squash) is our grape vine.

Zucchini

After planting the rose the yellow flowers turned brown and I made my first attempt at pruning. Initially I was scared I had done something wrong – nothing was happening. But about a week ago I started to see tiny growth, and before I could blink the tiny growth had grown some 6 inches on one particular branch! It looks like it’s getting ready to develop a new flower bud, so I’ll be pretty excited if it does.

Rose

Patrick likes the decorative grasses, so we planted these red fountain grasses by the back door stairs. They’re not super bushy and round, but when we planted them they were only about two cinderblocks high – now they’re a good four cinderblocks high with a ton of the little fuzzy “cat tails.”

Red Fountain Grass

On the morning of Independence Day we decided to plant the bulbs we bought at Sam’s Club. While we were shopping there the other day they sold a variety pack of 250 bulbs for $13! We just couldn’t resist and only thought about the fact that it wasn’t really planting season until we got home. What was even more confusing was that we then also realized that it said these bulbs were for the spring planting season. If anything I would have thought they were going to be for the upcoming fall? In any case, we decided to plant 110 of them underneath the Yoshino Flowering Cherry tree we had planted this spring. We planted 60 Dutch Iris (“Blue Pearl”) that are supposed to bloom between May and June, and 50 Acidanthera that are supposed to bloom between August and September. Now the question will be if they will ever bloom at all since we planted them smack in the middle of the hot summer. We still have 4 different bulb varieties left to plant in the next few days.

Planting bulbs

The sunflowers seem to be doing ok. I had planted them in three different sections and only a few were dug up by squirrels. The southern most plants seem to be doing the best. I think the rain really took a beating on them, so the majority of them are kind of mushed against the ground, but the one batch seems to be holding strong even after the rain. We also planted some cute annuals in between the sunflowers to add some color until the sunflowers will bloom.

Sunflowers

Kudzu Update…

And lastly I thought I would display an update on how the neighbor’s “garden” is holding up. The kudzu has now completely encompassed the gas meter (if there were one that is – but there is not). In addition it has crawled up the electricity meter and is presumably touching the fascia board by now. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the kudzu in the back yard was waist high! (View yard about 1.5 months ago)

Kudzu

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Blog Break

June 8, 2007

I feel like I haven’t posted in a while, but we’ve still been busy working on things around the house. We’ve been working on the bathroom bit by bit, but I think I’ll wait to post the photos until I feel like we’re done to the point where they’re worth showing. We’ve been painting the base board and medicine cabinet. I guess the medicine cabinet mirror alone took 3-4 days to prep…but more on that when it’s time to show.

Otherwise I guess we’ve done a little bit more garden work. We planted more vegetables in our “vegetable garden”: squash, another tomato, green pepper and a honeydew melon….

Squash and tomato garden bed

Squash and tomato garden bed

In the meanwhile the neighbors kudzu is doing fabulous. I keep trying to fling the growing vines back into their yard when they come onto our driveway. Then I try to go along the fence to tear the ones that are creeping through to our side. What do you do in a situation where your neighbors kudzu is out of control and you care more about it than your neighbor? We bought some weed killer that I’ve utilized a little bit on the neighbors kudzu, but there’s only so much I can reach. It’s a weird situation.

Neighbor's kudzu

Neighbor’s kudzu

The last few days I’ve been working on prepping a flower bed against the back house wall. I discovered a pack of sunflower seeds and a pack of phlox that we hadn’t used, so since we’re probably already past the point of being able to plant seeds I figured I’d at least give it a try. Before we just dug a hole and planted plants. Now that I have the proper tool (“cultivator”?) I’ve been prepping the bed, loosening all the soil, etc. We should have been doing that stuff all along, but since we’re not only first time homeowners, but also first time gardeners we’re still picking up new stuff. On that note, it’s amazing what all I’ve found while digging up the dirt! I feel like an archaeologist with the items I find. It mainly seems to be tons and tons of rusted nails, and tons of broken glass. Definitely a “WTF, what were these people doing??” moment! In the picture you can also see that we need to repoint our bricks. The mortar is crumbling and disappearing, but through our research we’ve discovered that it’s not as easy as putting new mortar in. Due to the age of the house the mortar and bricks used to be made of softer materials than today, and if the incorrect (modern) mortar is used it can damage the brick and therefore the foundation. They offer mortar testing for something insane like $500 – so we’re kind of at a point where we’re not sure how to proceed.

Sunflower seed bed

Sunflower seed bed

Other than that we’ve worked on slowly removing the giant pile of roof shingles that have been sitting by our shed. We’ve been putting a stack of them in our herbie curbie every week, so I think we should have another 2 or 3 weeks before we’re rid of it all. Much better than paying $300 for a dumpster. ;-)

And as I’m typing this it is finally raining. I don’t think it’s rained since my last blog shows the picture of the “drowning” plants. I mentioned the drought and rain deficit we’re having…and it’s only gotten worse. As a matter of fact, before today our deficit was greater than the rain we’ve had for the entire year! I’m sure after this rainfall we’ll have made up for some of it. Every day the news reports about watering bans or show trees whose leaves are crumbling because they’re dry and brown as though it was fall. Since our grass consists of weeds anyway we’re not too worried about our lawn (still trying to decide which type of grass we’d eventually like to get). It’s funny how much I never cared about rain until owning this house and garden. Before I was sad when it was a rainy day – now I know what it feels like when people are hoping for rain for the garden!

Enough for today. Like I said, I’ll post some pictures soon of our progress in the bathroom. I’m sure it won’t seem like much, but it’s been taking enough damn time!

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More Gardening

May 10, 2007

Today we got busy planting those plants we bought from Lowe’s yesterday and received in the mail a few days ago…

On the left is the Spring Hill Nursery catalog “JFK” rose, on the right is the Lowe’s yellow rose whose name I can’t tell you because Patrick threw away the tag. On the left is the $7.50 rose (after 50% rebate), on the right is the $6.98 rose. I think I’m starting to feel a little bit ripped off with this catalog order. I’ve heard bad things, but I thought it would be good to give it a try nonetheless. Maybe I should have listened. All I know is that rose better make a hell of a recovery and have a hell of an amazing bloom to make up for things.

Roses

Our little garden buddy. This is the little shy boy from next door. He comes and plays in our yard while we do work, but he usually runs away when you try to have a conversation with him.

Confederate Jasmine

Our attempt at starting a vegetable garden. In the far back is the grape vine. We’ve had it sitting in our dining room bay window in the plastic container it came in for probably 2 months now. When we bought it there was one tiny leaf. Before we knew it the thing started growing and getting bigger. Now that we put it in the ground the leaves started turning white, so we’re not quite sure what that’s all about. In the middle is a zucchini plant, and in the front a tomato. My parents brought those back for us…hopefully they’ll do better adjusting than the grape has.

Vegetables

One of our wishes has been to get two big ol’ flower pots to put by the front steps. We’ve seen so many bungalow’s with them that we wanted some of our own. On our past searches we’ve only come across concrete or plastic containers – neither of which felt very attractive or otherwise pleasing to us. Yesterday we finally found two glazed clay pots that we liked. It’s funny how such big pots can become so small once you put them next to the big house. I’ve always been fond of my parent’s jasmine, so when we came across some at Lowe’s I decided that I wanted to put it in the big pots. We bought some little ground covers to go along with it.

Neighbor

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