Each Little World

Apple scruffs — in bloom

Mark usually tackles the job of pruning our two old apple trees in late February or early March, when there is still snow on the ground but it's warm enough to spend an afternoon working outdoors. This year there wasn't the usual late winter kind of day to do that job, so it got done as the garden was actually springing to life. 

Over the years we've made a habit of saving those apple tree prunings to use as an edging for garden paths. This year was no different and I put them in a number of locations as I cleaned up and mulched the beds in April.

For whatever reason — the warm winter, late pruning, unseasonably hot spring — a number of the apple hoops that I stuck in the ground have sent out new leaves. Just another sign of a year in which none of us know what kind of weather to expect next — or how it will affect the garden!

Boxes of rocks

We're not the kind of people who take vacations along white sand beaches. We like lakes — great or otherwise. Before I moved to Wisconsin I lived on Lake Erie and then spent a few years on Lake Ontario. Wisconsin is bordered by two Great Lakes and has endless numbers of inland lakes. Madison itself is built around four lakes. What that all means is that we tend to spend a lot of time walking along rocky shorelines. We've rarely taken a lakeshore walk and returned with empty pockets.

Like many people, we love rocks and helplessly pick them up wherever we go. We actually have three shoeboxes filled with souvenir rocks. We used to line them up along the windowsills, but these days they mostly live in the basement. Until this week when I realized they would be the perfect mulch for the two potted boxwoods on the deck. The shrubs look better and grow better when the soil isn't exposed; but squirrels tend to toss bark mulch all over, making a constant mess on the deck. The rocks are a much more attractive solution and it was wonderful to pull them out of hiding and bring them out into the sunshine again.

 

Madison memo: Olbrich begins mulch sales early — today!

Double click on this poster to enlarge it so you can read all the details.

Recycling paper bags and newspapers

I recently bought a beautiful Japanese ikebana basket from SRI, which is located in the NYC area. My bamboo basket arrived in a big but lightweight cardboard box. When I opened the box I discovered my basket lovingly secured in the midst of packing material created by loosely hand-rolling newspapers up into fat sausages. A piece of tape held the edge in place. The same technique was used on brown grocery bags that had the bottoms cut off and a cut made down one side to flatten them out prior to rolling. Small bags were stuffed with newspaper and even all the bottoms from the grocery bags were combined into their own plump roll. I had to take a couple of pictures and share this wonderful idea from Stephen at SRI to create a soft and environmentally friendly packaging material with the things that all of us have on hand. 

Final foliage follow-up

For the last month we've taken advantage of dry weather to gather all the fallen leaves from our trees in order to chop them up to be used as mulch next Spring. We've got 18 big contactor's bags filled with them, along with two bags of white pine needles that our neighbor helped me to rake up in his yard. They will be used to refresh the pine needle paths in the Sacred Grove come Spring. It's like having a pantry filled with home canned foods that you put upn yourself. But the garden — and not the gardeners — will be getting fed as a result of our efforts. 

The east side of our house is currently the junk/storage area. As you can see our neighbor uses the adjacent spot for the same purpose. One of these years this will be turned into more garden — as soon as we can figure out how to make it a workspace that is as attractive as it is practical! 

My Garden Odyssey: Tea house stucco, Pt. 1

We wrote 36 Garden Odyssey episodes describing the process of designing and constructing our gardens. We're still on that journey but we've given up the numbering system! That said, this is the first of three posts describing the process of covering the tea house with stucco.

HE SAID: We planned from early on that there would be a "tea house" located at the top of the rise near the upper pool. It's indicated in the plan below by the small black rectangle on the upper right. (The large black shape in the center is the house and deck).

While we worked on the pond and other structures in the garden, I went through a whole series of design ideas for the "tea house." Sometimes it took the form of a tool shed; sometimes a roofed bench. At least one design combined the two.

Eventually there came a time when I had to make a decision. After working with a mock-up made of a few blocks and boards to get a sense of an appropriate size, I committed to a 7 x 9 foot building. 

From the beginning I pretty much made it up as I went along. There were constant adjustments based on standard sizes of materials. For instance, I didn't want to have to cut any of the tumbled, colored cement blocks I used for the foundation. So their size determined the final footprint.

As much as I might have liked to use traditional Japanese joinery to construct the frame, I knew my carpentry skills were not up to it. But about this time, I inherited a radial arm saw from my father that allowed me to make a reasonable facsimile of traditional joints.

Roofing the tea house with cedar shingles was also a challenge for me. I'm grateful for all the great information available on the internet. I'm not sure I could have managed this project without it. An interesting side note on the roof: because the underside was going to be exposed, I used four different lengths of roofing nails, depending on the thickness of shingles in any given spot, so the nails wouldn't poke through.

After doing the mockup in 2004, the roof in 2006, and making little progress in 2007-8, I was finally able to install the 2-inch pink styrofoam in the walls in summer of 2009. I then made temporary windows of 1 x 2 inch frames covered with plastic sheeting to fill the window and door openings. This protected the interior from the elements — and squirrels — for the next two winters.

My concept was to fill the 3 and 1/2 inch wall spaces in the timber frame structure with a "sandwich" made of 2-inch styrofoam with a 3/4-inch layer of stucco on each side.

The only place I had seen something like this was in factory made panels that would be assembled on site. There was little or no information about how to do what I had in mind. Once again I found myself making it up as I went along.

The problem was how to get the stucco to adhere to the styrofoam and how to get the whole sandwich to stay in place.

I started by "nailing" expanded diamond lath to all the styrofoam surfaces, inside and out, with plastic headed nails. The lath has a proper up and down as well as a back and front. If you put it on wrong the stucco will tend to fall off when you try to apply it.

Everything seems to be harder and take longer than you expect. Cutting the lath to fill all of the odd spaces on the tea house was definitely hard on my hands; but over several weeks I got it all cut and installed.

The plastic headed nails I used to hold the lath in place on the styrofoam were only temporary. They didn't have enough holding power in the insulation to be of much use in holding the stucco on. To create the "sandwich" I drilled sets of holes through the styrofoam and tied the interior and exterior lath together with loops of stainless steel wire. I made a wire loop approximately every square foot. This may have been excessive, but I figured better too many than too few.

The tea house nearly ready for stucco.

. . .

SHE SAID: For readers using the metric system, 1 inch = 2.5 centimers and 1 foot = 0.3048 meters to give you an idea of the size of the elements that Mark is using.

Mulch madness: Three chances left

Olbrich Botanical Gardens

fall bulk leaf mulch sale.

Get it now! Need I say more?  

We got a scoop on Saturday and I can tell already

that I'll be back for more. You can see what I've said

in the past about this great local resource here.

And nothing is nicer than mulching after

a good soaking rain like we've just had.

Down the garden path — again

In the summer of 2009, we redid the main paths in our pond garden, changing them from wood chips to gray gravel. We did it for aesthetics, for the sound when you walk on it and to reduce maintenance and the cost of replacing the wood chips. You can read about that project here (Pt. 1) and here (Pt. 2). This spring we tackled the front path that meanders through the geraniums along the street side of the garden. I do mean meander; this path curves in, out and around the trees and shrubs that dot this area.

We actually started this project a couple of years ago when we took up the old mulch but we never got any further than that. I got the easy work; my job was to widen the path to three feet along its 100' (30.48m) length. Mark made me the equivalent of a yardstick with a handle to use as a measure to make it a quicker and easier process. 

I, of course, wanted to wait 'til the geraniums (three varieties of Geranium macrorrhizum) were in bloom so I could transplant the white and pale pink ones I pulled out and mainly discard the magenta ones. Our neighbors were also doing a big project at the same time and were happy to take lots of the geraniums for their garden, so I didn't have to feel bad about tossing tons of plants. 

Mark was hard on my heels with his shovel, cutting sharp edges and digging out the dirt. Both sides of the path had been bermed up along this curve, so we added rocks to keep the soil in place and add a sense of contrast and definition. The rocks had actually been sitting in the grass at the beginning of the path near the driveway for the last few years waiting for us to get around to this project.

As Mark removed dirt, he sifted it through a riddle he made a number of years ago. That way we wind up with clean "fill dirt" to use elsewhere in the garden. Of course, a 100' path gives you a lot of soil to stockpile so we're lucky we still have one side of the house where we can hide such things!

As I mentioned, this path is in the midst of many trees; most of them are older and have very large root systems that go everywhere. That, and the extremely hot and dry conditions made this a long, tough job. 

The temperatures were in the 90s while Mark was doing much of this work. When he took a break to sit in the shade and drink more water, he left an impression of "angel wings" — made with sweat instead of snow!

The temperature was only 87 degrees F. (30.55C) the afternoon the crushed orange gravel was delivered! 

He managed to put down weed barrier and then get about 2/3 of the gravel put in place before he knocked off for the day.

The view below is the same as the first image, but with the gravel in place. Leading off to the left is a shortcut up to the central Moon Garden. This path remains a wood chip path as does one on the opposite side of the garden in the Birch Grove. It also functions as a wheelbarrow access to the central garden area without having to circle all across the front garden to get there.

The view below is the same as the third image showing the bermed-up curve. Mark estimates he still needs about another half ton of gravel to finish the project. The original gravel was delivered, but this time he will have to make a couple of trips to the stone yard himself. He is not looking forward to having to get it out of the truck and then still have to haul it across the garden.

Luckily the temperatures have dropped back to normal which will make finishing the path a bit easier. It sounds wonderfully crunchy when you walk on this path, and unless it is really rainy and wet, it doesn't seem to be sticking to our shoes. 

If you look at the 2nd picture and compare it with the image directly ablve, you can see how lush the street side plantings are. From the curb you can barely tell there is a path here. When you walk through this part of the garden, it feels more isolated from the street than it obviously is. Part of that is the steep slope down to the street, part of it is the shelter provided by the trees arching above you and part of it is the fact that your feet on the path are lower than the plantings all around you. I've always loved taking the long way though the garden, and the change from wood to gravel on this path makes the trip even more pleasant.

Ready and waiting

As part of our remodeling project last summer, we insulated the garage ceiling and wall adjacent to our front hallway. The intent was to make the entrance area and the rooms above the garage warmer and to make the house more energy efficient. Judging by our comfort level this winter, the project was a success.

But we had to literally take everything out of the garage from the start of the project until the entire job was completed. Some items were stored outdoors and some in the basement. We put the essentials back in the garage in the days before Thanksgiving right after we finished the upstairs rooms. But we decided to finish up the garage storage this spring.

So this past week, on our one warm dry day, Mark drew a diagram on the floor of the garage to determine how to fit all our tools into the space. The wall where they hang was previously plywood and is now drywall, so a new hanging system had to be investigated, purchased and installed — making sure there was room to accommodate everything. You can see he did a superb job. Now we are just waiting for some decent weather so we can start gardening and see how the new system performs. And we're enjoying the clean white walls before we get them dirty from our grubby garden tools and hands!

Mulch madness

If it's April, it must be time to get a bag or two or ten of the fabulous leaf mulch offered for sale by Olbrich Botanical Gardens. Olbrich actually has 9,000 bags of mulch on hand and the annual sale starts today. But don't wait too long to get yours; this cooler weather will make it easier to spread the mulch on your garden beds before the plants have filled in. As you can see from the photo below — which is in the current issue of Olbrich's newsletter — we use this black gold throughout our garden and buy it by the truck-load. You can find all the details of this year's spring mulch sale here. 

Mark unloading mulch from Olbrich's fall mulch sale. We usually buy it both spring and fall. And no, we don't actually use it on the driveway.