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.

Down the Garden Path

My idea of a garden does not include a lawn. Thus moving from here to there requires paths. How wide should the paths be? To edge or not to edge? Gravel (crushed or pea), pavers (natural or concrete), wood chips - what should the paths be made of? I had a basic idea of where the paths should go in my sketched out plan. According to the literature, a garden path should be no narrower than 3 feet and should by all accounts be wider. While the garden is much larger than our previous garden, it still seemed like a four foot path would take up an awful lot of room. I could not see making them any wider than 3 feet so that is what they are. I ended up with 297 feet of paths on one side of the garden alone. Trying to figure out what edging material to use and then looking at the cost, keeping in mind a path has two sides, was keeping me from moving forward so I just decided I would not use edging. We chose to use 1/4 minus gravel for the paths on the south side. This makes a very firm base, won't roll down hill like pea gravel and is relatively affordable. If we decide to use a different paving material in the future, there will already be a good base in place. Wood chips are free so we decided to use those on the north side.


I walked out the front door and started at the beginning where the front gate would open into the garden. Using a scrap of fence lumber that measured 36 inches long as my guide, I excavated the soil down to the harder clay layer - about 6 - 8 inches. Part of the path system is lined with newspaper and part with landscape fabric. We'll see which works better. Then it was a matter of using the wheelbarrow to move the gravel into place.

This is a picture of the raised beds that I will say more about later, but it also shows the woodchip path. The same method was used to make these paths as the gravel ones.

We Need a Fence

This is the main reason we need a fence. While it is rather thrilling to see deer in your yard, it is not so thrilling when you realize they have just devoured the plant you have been nursing along or even invited themselves onto the front porch for the better part of your potted fuscias. While many people just plan on a certain amount of deer browse, try to plant what deer don't like (they eat it anyway)or spray with anti-deer spray that makes you want to throw up, that just wouldn't work for me. Oh no, I had to have a fence around the whole yard. Jeff could build it, cound't he? Selfishly, I wanted to be able to plant something and find it in the same condition the next day.

We walked around the neighborhood and envied the many beautiful fences. The object was to keep the deer out, not create a privacy fence. We chose one we liked down on South Beach Drive. Jeff thought he could duplicate it. Our familiarity with the condition of our soil lead us to the decission to pay someone to install the fence posts. After talking to several people, we hired Heritage Fence to install 66 fence posts. It was money well spent.

We ordered the materials from Lumberman's. After much discussion, we went with the 10 foot posts. The posts were set 2-2 1/2 feet deep. The posts are treated lumber and the rest is cedar.

Our neighbor, Joe, threatened to come over one night and put large colored disks on the tops of the posts so they would look like lollipops.



After a few test panels so I could see and approve the design (I am very visual and no amount of explaining takes the place of actually seeing), Jeff created some jigs and tweeked the construction process so things moved along relatively rapidly. Of course, three new nail guns from Costco helped. Jeff started the fence in late August early September. The last big panel was done by the end of December. There is still one very small panel to do and the gates are almost done.

One more note - according to the experts, deer can jump a fence that is less than 8 feet tall. For various reasons, ours is only six feet tall. Will this be tall enough? Only time will tell. Our hope is that there is enough tasty food around that the deer will not bother expending the extra energy required to jump our fence. We have a contingency plan (add trellis where necessary) if we need one.

45 Yards of Compost

The native soil here is, well, lacking. There is a lot of clay and not much organic matter. Reading at first indicated that we should add sand and organic matter. Further reading and garden expert consultation indicated that if we added sand we would end up with something akin to cement and that we should just add compost. Jeff called around. We used Cedar Grove Compost in Kent. We were open to other options. Compost, including Cedar Grove, was available locally,but it ended up that the best deal was ordering directly from Cedar Grove and hiring a trucking firm to deliver it because Cedar Grove does not normally deliver this far afield. 45 yards was the most they could deliver and we calculated that that would be just about the right amount. This, kids, is one place all that math comes in handy. They delivered it in two big piles, one north of the driveway and one south.
 
 The piles were very large and we were very small. It quickly became apparent that we needed to call in the big guns.
 
 Jeff called up Bainbridge Rentals and said, "Do you have a tractor?" Sure, they had a tractor. So for one afternoon, Jeff got to live out his boyhood fantasies of road building or farming or whatever they were. He had a great time as you might be able to tell by the smile on his face. He used the bucket attachment to spread out the piles and then the tiller attachment to till the compost into the top foot to 10 inches of the native soil.

The Need to Grow Something

While things are under construction, I had the need to grow something. I had several pots on our deck in which I managed to grow some tomatoes, cucumbers, sugar snap peas and green beans. Very meager compared to our usual hall, but something.

 I needed to have some bulbs coming up in the spring so I purchased the remnants of Bay Hay and Feed's red tulips and planted them in the space by the front walk. Despite my neighbors predictions, the deer did not eat them and they were wonderful. I think that they are now on the deer's radar and will not be so lucky this year.
 Our friends, the Koskis visited in July. You can see the fuscias and nasturtiums in the back ground.
 October is as nice as the porch looked. In front are a few of the new plants I have been collecting in anticipation of an actual garden. We kept the plants in a "nursery" area next to the garage, protected by a Scarecrow sprinkler. It is activated by motion. That was the only way we managed to keep some things from being eaten to nothing. Of course, we forgot to turn it on a few times and some things have suffered. The fuscias on the porch were browsed several times.

The Patio

After researching patio construction and material type (several days of wandering around looking at rocks) we finally settled on a Pennsylvania Bluestone, cut (as opposed to natural)paver patio.
The first step was to excavate the area of the patio deep enough to hold the sand, crushed rock and pavers. After a couple of days of watching us dig, our neighbor, David, rescued us with his bulldozer. Thank you David! Jeff installed irrigation pipe and wiring under the proposed patio. We had to guess at location and quantity.
We had 3 1/2 pallets of pavers delivered by Morrison Gravel in Port Orchard. They were off the truck and in position within 10 minutes.
First we put down a layer of crushed rock, then sand and then the pavers. Jeff figured out how to cut the ones that needed cutting to size with his circular saw and a masonary bit. We used one inch pvc pipe to set up a scree system. We later used the pipe for irrigation. "This Old House Magazine" mentioned polymeric sand that Roger Cook used in a dry set patio like this. It was supposed to harden and make it less likely to wash out and less likely to be excavated out by ants. We finally located some, guess where, at Dowell Co. in Kent, 5 minutes from our old house. They assured us that the color was gray. It wasn't. So we mixed in some of the gray sand so it wasn't quite so reddish and installed it in the final inch of the seems between pavers. This seemed to work - hardened up nicely. Time has not proven its worth, however. The ants seem to have no trouble removing it and it has sprouted many weeds. Is this because we didn't use it "straight"? Should we have made it deeper than we did in the cracks? Jeff did a great job of estimating how many pavers we would need, but we were one paver short so I had to pick up one more paver. It was a good thing I didn't know how much they cost apiece when Jeff was figuring out how to cut them and breaking several in the process. Also note the "invisible edging" that holds the final paver layer in place. We saw this as an option in the how to books, but couldn't locate it at the store. We kept looking for it in the edging section and it turns out they stock it in the paver section. I suppose that makes sense and now we know.
Here is the finished product complete with our new, Ikea patio furniture. We fit all 5 boxed pieces and the four of us in our Honda Fit. That was a triumph in engineering.

Retaining Wall

 I came up with a plan. Jeff had to figure out how to make it work. The first thing we needed was a retaining wall on the southwest corner of the house to make the space for the patio level. We order "half man" basalt rocks. We read about how to make a retaining wall. Jeff excavated the dirt, installed landscape fabric and drain pipe and then built the rocks into a wall. Ta da!

Grass Pavers

 The first project that needed to be done was to make the driveway less of a mud pit. Because of the adjacent wetland, our driveway could not be a solid surface, all concrete affair. Actually, turns out there was a way to do this, but it required some more engineering that was not done. Our driveway was made with "holes" that could not be filled with gravel which, as it turns out, is not considered a pervious surface. It quickly became obvious that we needed to install something other than just dirt and plants (creeping thyme). Jeff did some research and came up with "grass pavers". They are molded plastic rectangles with cells designed to hold dirt in place and while growing grass or another sort of creeping plant. Again, Jeff did some research and found this place in Alabama (CV Supply) that said they could ship them to us as opposed to our having to pick them up. Turns out they could get them as close as Kent (where we used to live). So we went to pick them up about 5 minutes from our old house. We fit about 1/2 the pallate in the Honda and I had to go back and pick up the rest another day. They smelled like burning plastic.

The first picture shows excavating out the "holes" so the pavers would fit flush with the driveway.
 Here is Jeff cutting and installing a paver.
 Here is the driveway mostly installed.
 Finally here we are planting creeping thyme after filling the pavers with dirt. We used woolly thyme (Thymus pseudolanuginosus) in two holes and red thyme (Thymus serpyllum 'Coccineus') in the other two. The holes closest to the garage have filled in pretty well. The other two are having more trouble, especially the red thyme. I added some Thymus doerfleri 'Bressingham' to beef them up. The holes toward the top of the driveway are at more of an angle and are more exposed to the sun as we usually park our cars next to the garage. They have been a qualified success. If they fill in more this year, they will be a success.

First Gardening Efforts

 
 
 
Part of the requirements for our occupancy permit included planting a 15 buffer between the wetland setback and the house with native plants. It was dusty and dry and very steep. The deer were very pleased with their new dining selections. The contractor building next door kept disconnecting our timer and drip hose so he could use the water. The good news is that many of the plants have survived.

From Nothing to Something

 

 

 

 

The house grew out of the dirt over several months in 2006. Note the beating the future garden space took with vehicles and equipment using it for parking.