Fruits of our Labor

Here are some of the fruits of our labor. This makes it all worthwhile.


Gemma's dahlia.

Three varieties of potatoes.


Several beautiful heads of lettuce early on in the summer.


Lots of ever bearing strawberries. We are hoping the June bearing ones do better next year.

Garden Projects

The last post had a very recent picture of Jeff's trellis project. Here are some others underway.


Future home of the garden shed.


Irrigation is in on the north side and pending on the south.


This is part of an equisetum route. They have these water chestnut like things as well as roots that look like tree branches (old growth equisetum?).


I found out about equisetum root systems and Canadian thistle root systems because I spent hours digging them out of one area. I was very proud of my root collection. This worked very well and I have very little returning horsetail or thistle. Yeah!

Where did the summer go? 4

In the foreground of this picture is the first thing I planted way back in February. Also note the ugly trampoline.


Here is the solution to the ugly trampoline. Jeff is constructing a beautiful trellis that will have purple grapes and golden hops growing on it shortly.


The porch was beautiful.

The driveway is filling in. The wooly thyme is doing better than the creeping thyme.

Where did summer go? 3

Here's the herb garden with nothing.


Who knew parsley could grow so big? The herb garden was definitely one of the most successful parts of the garden so far.

Where did summer go? 2

Note nasty thistles popping up.

Where did the summer go? 1

It cannot possibly be October! My best intentions to be a better blogger obviously did not pan out. Better late than never. We had two terrific vacations, one to the east coast and one to the mid west, and worked very hard on the garden.


Willow enjoyed the catnip (courtesy of Islandwood's garden) to death. Literally. Now he just goes next door to the neighbors patch. Except that he just had to have an abscess drained. That plus his foot boo boo from earlier this year have landed him on permanent house arrest. I will have to experiment with indoor catnip growing.


Here is Jeff planting a witch hazel way back in February just to give you a feel for how desolate things were.

Below are a series of pictures of the same areas (sometimes from different viewpoints) at different times to show how things have grown.



OK - the deal is that I can only get 4 pictures at time into a post. It is rather a pain, but you will just have to follow going backward from "Where did summer go? 1" through to 4.

Planting Begins!

On February 15th, Jeff rented the "Merry Tiller" and we started in earnest preparing beds for planting.

We moved all the pots of plants we had been collecting from our old garden and other sources from where they had been living next to the garage to the gardens.

The first thing I planted was a rhubarb.

Jeff finished the fountain. We had the parts and the "urn" for about 5 years. We discovered that the pump we had was too small and had to buy a larger one. We found black rocks at Clear Creek Nursery to put around the fountain once it was finished.


Jeff also finished the gates. Here he is with the circle gate he made for the main entrance.

We have planted two types of cherries (Angela and Glacier), eight kinds of blueberries (Sunshine Blue, Northsky, Burlington, Jersey, Duke, Earliblue, Brunswick and Burgandy), asparagus, strawberries (June bearing Puget Summer and everbearing Seascape), an espalier apple with 6 kinds of apples, an Italian prune plum, raspberries (Caroline and a few brought from the old garden Tulameen (?)). That's just the fruit side of things. Besides these, we put in shrubs and trees including a multi-stemmed white birch, a paperbark maple (Acer griseum), two strawberry bushes, two lilacs, ceanothus, Dr. Merrill magnolia, Disanthus, Pieris, Parrotia, beautyberry, two witch hazels (Arnolds Promise and Diane), red twig dogwood, flowering red currant, ninebark. Then we filled in with perennials and it still looks pretty empty. Here's a picture from today.

As we plant, I have to weed which slows the whole process down. There is plenty of horsetail, shot weed, grasses,but the worst weed is Canadian thistle. It grows on a rhizome (who knew there was a thistle that did such a nasty thing) and is particularly bad in the bed in front of the front window. I am trying to weed it out, carefully going into the clay and getting all the roots I can find. I fear I may have to resort to chemicals on this one. Note the calla lily poking up through the thistly profusion in this picture.

There is one particularly hilly spot. I planted this in natives including red twig dogwood,mock orange, flowering red currant and evergreen huckleberry. I mulched with straw hoping that it will help with the erosion until the plants are growing well.

The herb garden is taking shape. It includes a bay laurel (from my friend Karla), three different rosemaries, thyme, chamomile, sage, chives, two kinds of parsley, marjoram, lemon thyme, tarragon, and fever few (from my friend Cami).
Well, that is a very quick update of about 4 months worth of work. I will try to be better at keeping things up-to-date!

If Life Gives You Lemons. . .

... you make lemonade. So what do you do if the contractor leaves the rocks you asked him to make sure were no where near where you wanted to put a garden? Why you make raised beds, of course. The inspiration hit when I read a perfectly timed artilcle in the May 2007 Sunset Magazine - "Stylish Veggie Garden: Raised Beds Add Beauty and Structure to a Compact Plot of Edibles".

Here is the pile of rocks. Our neighbors thought we were nuts. I was good at moving rocks since we had to do the same thing at our Kent house. The builder had put a construction road through the back yard and then just left it for me to find.



Since there were no instructions with the article, we had to make up our own method of construction. Jeff was the main achitect, as usual. We decided to make 4 beds, 4 feet wide and 10 feet long. The beds are spaced 3 feet apart to match up with the paths. I cleared the area for each of the four gardens down to the clay layer. Jeff cut treated 6"x6" timbers into 3 foot sections. These were put in the ground at the corners of the beds. Since the beds are on a slope, we excavated down between the posts until it was level so the cages could be all the same size. We made "cages" out of 4 foot wide pig fencing. First we cut the appropriate length, leaving enough to fold the ends into a box. We placed a 6"x12' board that we were planning to use to cap the rocks down the center and folded the fencing up on each side. This made the bottom. We cut in from the end about 6 inches on on each side of the bottom, folding up the bottom and in the sides to make our cage. The cages were fastened to the corner posts using staples. Because of the way the cages fit between the posts, there is very limited exposure of the treated lumber to the dirt in the garden. We then put a length of rebar into the ground in the center of the long sides to give it more stability. We tied wire at varying intervals throughout the cages to keep them from bulging. The above pictures show what the cages looked like before rocks.


Then I went to work filling up the cages. I tried to develop a method, placing large rocks along the bottom as a base and then spacing large rocks as evenly as possible throughout the cage as I progressed up. I tried to put the flatest side facing out. We also had a lot of concrete chunks lying around so I incorporated these as well. Even with the huge pile of rocks and concrete chunks, we still had to use some to the half man basalt rocks we had left over from the retaining wall to finish up. Once the cages were filled, Jeff capped them with cedar boards. I went around and filled the gap between the cap board and the rock wall with smaller rocks.

Once the beds were complete, we ordered 10 yards of Emu 5 way garden soil and filled them up. There was about 4 or 5 yards left over which we used for an asparagus bed and a raspberry bed.


Moving rocks can be a dangerous business as this blood blister boo boo illustrates.


We found a couple of these salamanders in the rock pile as we moved the rocks to the raised beds. I hope they will find a home in the rock walls.

Things we learned along the way: I would make the beds at least 4 feet apart instead of 3. Jeff and I disagree about the width. I think they would be better 3 feet wide because then you could reach across the whole bed from one side. He thinks they are fine the way they are. The cap board might be wider as some of the walls bulge beyond them. So far they work well to sit or kneel on while I'm working. The ten foot long sections seemed a bit too big to remain minimally bulgy after they were filled. It might have been better to dispense with the rebar and make 2 smaller cages to make up the big sides. The more cross wire ties you can put in, the better.

Dry Stream and "Brimming Urn"

Experts say every garden needs a water feature. Ours will require some imagination. Spirals are an intriguing shape. I was especially taken with the spiral made by the people who created the buildings in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico http://www.solsticeproject.org/science.htm. A circle represents life, the seasons, the shape of the earth, and so on. A spiral takes the idea of a circle but adds the element that each time you come around again, you see where you have been and where you are going from a slightly different perspective. When I drew what I wanted in the garden, I drew a dry stream that begins with a spiral. We have had the pump and pot for a "brimming urn" fountain for about 5 years now. Don't you think it's about time to actually make one? What better place to put it than at the beginning of the dry stream.

The dry stream began the same way as the paths, excavating down to the clay layer. At the center of the spiral, we dug a hole for a plastic basin we bought at Home Depot. We purchased the larger size on the advice of the sales person. She had experience with a home fountain using the smaller basin and it tended to evaporate pretty quickly. The urn is now resting on pile of concrete blocks waiting for the next step. Jeff has wired a plug, but still needs to connect the power under the house.

I dug a ditch down the center of the non-spiral portion of the stream, lined it with landscape fabric, and installed a four inch drain pipe. The idea is that water can collect there and be directed down the hill into an area that will serve as a rain garden. During the heavy rain in December, we discovered the urn's basin would fill and overflow into the center of the spiral. Also, water would collect at the bottom of the spiral. We installed pipes from these areas to feed into the main drain pipe. This is one advantage to not finishing things quickly. You have an opportunity to see where your design has a weakness which you can fix without having to modify a completed project.


We needed a rounded rock to evoke the water, or at least the action of water. After deciding "rainbow rock" was too expensive, we settled on 1 1/2 inch drain rock (doesn't rainbow sound much nicer than drain). Vern's Topsoil delivered 4 yards and Jeff and I used the wheelbarrow to move it into place.

I used some bigger rocks on the hill to try to slow down the rock movement on the steeper slope. We'll have to see how that works.

We also used the drain rock to fill in the areas next to the driveway. I had weeded and put down landscape fabric and Jeff built forms to keep the rock from sliding down hill. This gives us a little more room to maneuver in the driveway.


Naturally, we ran out of rock before we were finished. Our math failed us (104 ft. of drystream, 3 inches deep of 1 1/2 in. drain rock and roughly 2 ft. wide. . .). So our neighbor Nick came to the rescue and let us borrow his truck. Jeff picked up another 1/2 yard or so of rock and we were able to finish. It takes a lot of good neighbors to build a garden.