Some Finishing Touches in Front

I can tell you one thing. Putting together a garden during a hot, humid summer day is no fun. So after the initial landscape was in place in the front yard, I took it easy. Off tangent thought... if there no longer is any grass, can it still be called a front yard? Hmm.

Anyway, after the busy weekend planning and planting the front garden, I wasn't about to subject myself to further heat exhuastion. So I have been subsequently doing a little work after the sun goes down each day (but before nightfall).

I planted an evergreen groundcover, and then made a trip to the local mulch pile. A few weeks ago, Chicagoland had a massive round of windy thunderstorms that resulted in many trees and branches falling down. Our city picks these up and runs them through a grinder to make mulch. These are stashed in a few locations, and they let residents come by and help themselves to as much mulch as they'd like.

So I went to get some. I really missed my old pickup truck for this trip, and instead had to lay down a tarp in the trunk of our economy car, backed it up to the pile, and shoveled away.

Frequently, this free mulch can get quite rotten, but with the fresh thunderstorms that had passed through earlier in July, the available mulch was actually quite nice. I made several trips over the last two weeks, and it was interesting how the quality varied. Sometimes there was really rough course mulch (shown above), other times it was very fine wood chips. But beggars can't be choosers!

So far three trips have been made, and I plan to make at least one more to establish a nice mulch base. And, much as installing trim in a room helps bring everything together, mulch really does help give the front yard garden a finished look. And hopefully with a bit more rain (and rainbarrel water) the plants will all get properly established before winter.

Finding Place for Extra Dirt

Humphrey-house has been a bit of a mud pit for the last... oh five weeks or so, as we tore out the old concrete in the backyard and are putting in reclaimed bluestone pavers. It seems like years already. There has been a lot of digging, excavating, pain killers - and then - more digging. It's all a necessary evil as we prepare for a 4-inch base of gravel and 1-2 inch of sand under the pavers.

Given the small urban lot, we quickly ran into a problem though. What do we we do with all of that dirt? We had to creative. Fortunately, some landscape design wishes and our favorite holiday came in to save the day.

Ideas for Extra Dirt:

1) Create a landscape planter!
We always thought a nice raised planter bed with wide rails in front of our rear porch would be a great landscape feature. It would make gardening a bit easier, and also provide extra sitting room outside. If only we had enough dirt to fill it though... a-ha! Problem solved! Sadly, while this turned out great (and I will post about the construction later), this ended up taking only a few loads of dirt in the wheelbarrow, so other dirt solutions were needed.


2) Raise those flower beds!
We have a "peripheral" planting area that surrounds the yard. In the past, it's been unofficially defined as the line where we can't get the few blades of grass in the yard to grow further. Now, with several wheelbarrows (20+) of roto-tilled soil, we have sleek looking berms surronding the yard. The berms give a lot of depth and texture to the small space! Bonus: concrete chunks can be reused as a nice little "rock garden".


3) Make graves!
This was honestly the most fun way to place the extra dirt. We normally have a cemetery in the front yard at Halloween. but this year it got more interesting and authentic as we created fresh graves for the tombstones. Mwah -ha -ha!


Even after these efforts, we still have a fairly hefty mound we will need to deal with. Some will be used to back-fill in dirt around the edges of the patio, but we may have to craigslist it, or build a semi-raised planter for next year's veggie garden. In the meantime, we're ready to climb out of the mud and onto a patio!

DIY Self-Watering Planters

For Easter, we made a trip out to my mother's house and were treated with a lovely surprise fresh from my stepfather's greenhouse: Nearly mature tomato plants! John provided us with two plants each of the following varieties:

• Heirloom tomatoes
• Cherokee tomatoes (which will be purple)

What a great addition to our garden! When we got home though, I realized that with my somewhat forgetful nature, these mature plants and their containers would need some kind of self-watering system to avoid drying out. So I took some terracotta pots from last season and made some deceptively simple outer containers - all I had to do was plug the drainholes.

I came up with a crafty solution of slicing up an old cork (our running cork collection came in quite handy) into "slices" about 4 mm thick. I then planned to insert that in the bottom of the pot, and seal it like a wine bottle.

Unfortunately, the corks were just bigger than the holes, so I had to make the diameter smaller. Doing this left a bit of a gap between the nice round curve of the pot and the chopped edge of my cork though, so I needed to water proof the cork somehow. I took an old candle that had burned almost all the way down, and dripped wax on top of and around the cork to seal the opening.

After letting the wax cool down for awhile, I tested the seal under the sink and it worked great. Voila! Self-watering containers! Now, the tomato plants, comfy in the plastic containers they came in, each have their own self-watering container that will allow them to "drink" from the bottom if they're thirsty. These should serve the plants well until it is warm enough to move them outside permanently.

In the meantime, I can hardly believe it but they are already beginning to flower. We may have fresh tomatoes from our little urban garden at the start of the season this year!

Developing a Garden Plan: part 1

After the hit-and-miss plantings of the last few years, Jen and I decided that this was the year to actually develop a plan for our backyard that would incorporate many of the the things both of us desire.

• space for a table / chairs
  
• vegetable garden
• herb garden
  
• raised planters
• gravel / porous paving areas
  
• solid paving from house to garage
  
• shade-friendly plants
• perennial plants
• firepit area
• compost area
  
• water efficiency (more rain barrels)
• And perhaps a bit of an oxymoron - low maintenance
  

Of course, there needs to be a lot of compromising because we're working with an area that is effectively 22 x 30, surrounded by a fence, and most of which is shaded by a large maple tree on the north east corner of the area, as well as some very mature lilac bushes. Here is a preliminary drawing we came up with that incorporates the existing site elements with much of our "wish list" items.


After this initial step, we are now working through designing the hardscaping that needs to be done to accommodate all of these features. In addition to the soft lines of the gravel-based plan above, we came up with many other ideas for the space - rectangles, a diagonal patio, a circular theme. With the goal of trying to find a plan that best fit the small space, we have pretty much settled on the octagonal patio idea shown below.


This would ideally be pavers, but may be stamped / stained concrete too. We already need to have some concrete re-done in the left-side area of these plans. The steps leading down to the basement are crumbling, and the slab there is pitched towards the house. When coupled with a large downspout that sometimes overflows, that is a bad combination.

Also, Jennifer is a little concerned about the patio area being limiting - we like to have gatherings with friends when weather allows, and the backyard fills up fast - she's worried it will fill up even faster with a small defined patio space! So this may evolve ... we shall see.

But with a firm(ish) plan in place, we can start to look at how to go about implementing it - and what will fit within our budget.

Our Garden's Solar Window

One of the neat things about instructing for the Illinois Solar Energy Association is that I have access to some pretty neat tools. My friend Jim loaned me a site assessment tool that has turned out to be a pretty neat device for determining the best location for our garden.

The Acme Solar Site Assessment Tool (manufactured appropriately enough by Wiley Electronics), is a tool that basically is a camera mount that is aligned with true South, and then takes seven photos from different positions from east to west. The neat part is the software, that then brings in all of these images and plots the path of the sun across them at different times of the year. It also determines the shading, and calculates the hours of sunlight available throughout the year.

While our backyard is clearly not a useful site for solar panels, I was more concerned with ensuring that we can get at least 5 - 6 hours of sun for our vegetable garden. So I took photos from two locations in our yard - one near the garage (shown above), and one spot near the back porch of our house (shown below).


Based on these sun paths, it looks like the first location, close to our garage, will be the best location for our vegetable garden. That will receive a bit of morning light, and a healthy amount of afternoon sun. Although, in this location, we may still have to sneak a bit of tree trimming on our neighbor's tree. We may also try to put some container-based plants near the porch and see how they do. That way, we can always move them if needed.

In any case, this was a fun way to see how the sun hits our home all year round, and we also now know where the best location for solar panels would be (our roof), should we ever decide to.

Growing a Garden

With 20-degree weather in northern Illinois, it's difficult to think about the growing season and summer coming. But, before we know it, warmer weather will be upon us. Especially now that our USDA growing zone has been bumped up to a warmer level (Zone 6), in what I love to hear described as not global warming, but global wierding.

Since most of the major renovation projects are out of the way at Humphrey House, and we don't have much money to spend right now anyway, I'm trying something new this summer: planting a vegetable garden. Jen has grown several herbs and peppers each year in our backyard. And we're slowly getting pretty decent at this. Last year our plants were quite successful.

So for 2009, I figured it was time to leap into a full-fledged grow-your-own-food garden this year. Sort of a victory garden for self-sufficiency. After all, you can't get more local then your backyard! We're beginning by starting to grow plants from seeds ourselves. To make things easy, I picked up a seed starting kit made by a company with the deceptive and tempting name, "Jiffy". I'm hopeful that it really is *that* easy to start seeds, and the hardest part is thinking far enough in advance. We will see.

So with the help of a Mother Earth guide to growing your own food, I've started some seeds for a garden that hopefully isn't too ambitious for us:

Current seeds:
Broccoli
Onions
Eggplant
Thyme

To be joined later by:
Carrots
Tomatoes
Basil
Peppers
And maybe even some sweetcorn growing along the garage!

Coming next: Time to find and start planning space in the backyard to grow this garden!

Green Goodness

We have a lawn in back again. YAY!

Patching in a lawn with drought tolerant grass

My feeble attempts at getting some kind of lawn in our backyard seem to be continually thwarted each year. Upon moving in, our original backyard had a massive pit full of sand in it from the Previous Owner's sandbox. Since we started working on the house, the backyard has been a massive traffic area and a natural construction staging area full of all kinds of debris and materials for our second floor remodel and kitchen renovation, ruining any attempts we make at reviving it.

Add in the fact that our backyard is small to begin with, has several tall trees and buildings surrounding it, and receives probably only 5 hours of sunlight, it seems like a continually futile battle. So futile in fact, that Jen has repeatedly said she is ready to throw in the towel and just make our backyard grass-free and turn it into a big landscaped area with pea gravel or pavers etc.

Since we still haven't decided what we're going to do with this space (we need a plan!), I am making a last ditch effort this year to once again plant grass seed. Since I want to avoid watering the lawn, I found a hardy variety of grass called tall fescue that is promised to be drought tolerant once it's established and good for cool areas and even shady spaces. After some research, this showed up as one of the "greener" species of lawn grass that would be appropriate. I especially liked this description of tall fescue:

Low maintenance. Tall fescue has excellent tolerance for heat stress and drought. It will tolerate moderate traffic and infrequent mowing. This species is not well adapted to high altitudes.

So I've sowed some seed in one last desperate attempt to salvage a grassy spot in our yard. I figure we'll eventually carve out some kind of plan out of the grass anyway, but it would be nice to have a "green" canvas to begin with. It will be interesting to see how this blends in with the existing (spotty) lawn grass, which I believe is typical Kentucky bluegrass. I'll have to get some photos up of our yard soon to show its progress.

Installing a Loopy Rain Barrel

The city of Chicago offered a rain barrel initiative this year so people could purchase these at a discount. The city benefits because, during a period of heavy rains like we had in August, less water goes into the storm sewers, reducing the chance of basements flooding. Personally, I just like the idea of using natural water for our garden plants rather than treated chlorinated water.

Jen is cool with almost any idea that helps keep her plants green. Normally, a rain barrel is installed directly beneath a downspout. The problem is, none of our downspouts are near our backyard plants. When I mentioned this idea to my friend Mark, he said he had just watched a TOH episode where they not only installed a rain barrel, but did so with a neat backflow diverter kit. Once the barrel is full of water, this sends the excess water back down to the gutter. That sounded perfect for our situation, so I picked one up when Jen and I checked out a green building supply house in Chicago.


So last weekend, with the supplies in hand, Mark and I set to modifying our gutter system to install this two-part system. Our setup was a bit more challenging as the gutters were much larger than what the diverter was designed for, but we finally decided to create a loop branch off one of the main downspouts.

As shown here, most water continues uninterrupted through the downspout, but some water is caught by a flap and brought IN to the rain barrel loop. Once the barrel is full, the water level will feedback and rise to the diverter, and excess water will flow through the OUT branch of the loop.

Since this downspout was about 12 feet from the rain barrel's desired location in our backyard, we couldn't install the supplied hose that came with the kit, and had to adapt a longer garden hose shown in the photos above. I think I may need a can of spray paint to make the white diverter brown, but other than that, the system is complete.

After a quick hose test, the barrel started to collect some water, so all we need is a nice downpour to see how quickly the barrel fills up!