We've been bad and haven't made a post in a long time! Shame on us. This post is actually a week late as we finished work on the gardens last weekend. However, our aching muscles and dirty fingernails prevented us from making an entry (apparently). The former owner of the house had an extensive garden plan, he actually sent us the master landscaping plan, and some of the gardens were already planted and well developed. However, two years of neglect had taken their toll on the gardens and most were completely overgrown with weeds, which was a shame as we found hidden iris, roses, tulips, peonies half strangled by weeds. Here's the material list for the garden prep (mainly because it's a bit mind boggling):
- 6 yards of hemlock mulch
- ~1.5 yards of crushed rock
- 1800 square feet of landscape fabric (6 100*3 ft rolls)
- 80 feet of recycled garden border
- 1 yard of topsoil
But more interestingly, the gardens (you can click the pictures for bigger versions!). This picture is a bit of a cheat, as it was from the very beginning of the garden work and much of the work doesn't show up. But the tulips are just to pretty, so I had to include the picture.
This is a picture of the the left side of the front of the house, which was weeded of the most massively rooted dandelions you have ever seen! We added a border, mulched, weeded and added a stepping stone, as we always cut through here on our way to the side of the house (another garden :).
The big bank of tulips in the front of the house is very well-established and had begun to merge with the front yard. There were a number of pretty rock piles already in the garden and so I thought it might be a neat idea to make a rock border in front. My neighbor and I went to a nearby gravel/fill quarry and pilfered fist and bigger size rocks to make the border (relax, he knows the excavating company that owns it). We also swung by the creek to get a few good flat rocks. I then stacked/lined these up in front of the tulips and we had our border for this garden. Add a ton of mulch and another garden was all set (notice the tulips have passed and we are still waiting for our hosta's and siberan pea).
On the left side of the house, we had a long narrow garden that was trapped between our house and the neighbors driveway. Weeding this took both of us most of a day to rip out (at least) two different types of runner-ed weeds. One was our nemesis the Jerusleum artichoke, we're not sure what the other one was, but the whole bed was knee high with them. Getting all of them out of there left several large iris, a butterfly bush (we think), several lillies, and a half-dozen large-ish peonies. We still have some work to do here to put a gravel border between the garden and the driveway, but we at least beat back the weeds. We planted a dozen or so dahlia (and I think gladiolus) bulbs in here, so hopefully we'll see those in another week or so.
Moving to the backyard, we discovered a rose garden that we have attempted to revive. There was a garden along the edge of the fence that had daffodils and crocus in front. We discovered roses while weeding (well, Julie's mom discovered most of them I think) and the all appear to have some growth. We found the Jackson and Perkins tags for several of them, but we don't know if we've got the rootstock or the original rose growing (I assume they're all grafted cultivars). Either way we purchased one new climbing rose and we'll keep fertilizing the little old ones and see what we can coax out. We found an old broken trellis that we fixed up and painted for our new rose, it's starting to bloom nicely now! All of the old roses are at least growing, so our fingers are crossed.
Lastly, is my pride and joy our reworked pond area. Formerly known as the cess-pool, we dug out the slime and sludge in the pool, put new rock in the bottom, and installed a little waterfall and a bunch of plants. There was a massive iris clump that had been thriving in the sludge that we managed to divide so that we could have an upper and a lower iris clump. The pond is poorly locate jammed inbetween the deck and our fence, and included a small garden area in the back that had a old mounded japanese maple, several old clematis, two hostas, and some decorative grass. The pond, maple and clematis felt a bit asian, and we both thought that rock zen gardens are really neat, so we kind of combined the two ideas and bordered off the plants we liked with rock walls, removed those we didn't like (several massive decorative grasses), and filled in between with gravel. We weeded the front of the pond (the accessible portion) and mulched there and removed a few other plants we didn't want to keep with the sparse motif. Then we set up a little bench for some of our bonsai's (who have had a
rough winter). All of this is underneath a flowering redbud. It came out really nice. I included a before and after picture to help stroke my ego!
Here pictures of the garden from the front and back:
Here is a (admittedly bad) picture before we started work on it.
Lastly and not really all that interestingly, we cleaned up the LONG garden that runs alongside our house next to the driveway. The border is a faux brick border that was buried in the dirt. We dug it up, put landscape fabric everywhere, mulched, and then replaced the border at the appropriate height, so it looks nice again. We don't know what we want to do here, so it's a pretty blank slate at this point, we contemplating putting some lattice sheets up and have some vining things of some kind, but we don't really know. Try and ignore the weeds in the driveway in this shot! You can also just see the flags for our invisible fence we installed to electrocute Max. It's a bit cruel, but he only got shocked a couple of times and behaves very well in the backyard now! No more being confined to the deck and we got to get rid of the fence in the back yard.
Hope you like all the pictures of the gardens, it took us 3-4 weekends of work for the whole thing, but we're really happy with how it came out. There were so many nice specimans hidden in the gardens that it was a lot of fun pulling those back up. We have beautiful gardens and we have spent less then 50$ in plants (not so for the supplies, but hey).
Till Next Time, Happy Gardening!
This is a picture of the the left side of the front of the house, which was weeded of the most massively rooted dandelions you have ever seen! We added a border, mulched, weeded and added a stepping stone, as we always cut through here on our way to the side of the house (another garden :).
On the left side of the house, we had a long narrow garden that was trapped between our house and the neighbors driveway. Weeding this took both of us most of a day to rip out (at least) two different types of runner-ed weeds. One was our nemesis the Jerusleum artichoke, we're not sure what the other one was, but the whole bed was knee high with them. Getting all of them out of there left several large iris, a butterfly bush (we think), several lillies, and a half-dozen large-ish peonies. We still have some work to do here to put a gravel border between the garden and the driveway, but we at least beat back the weeds. We planted a dozen or so dahlia (and I think gladiolus) bulbs in here, so hopefully we'll see those in another week or so.
Moving to the backyard, we discovered a rose garden that we have attempted to revive. There was a garden along the edge of the fence that had daffodils and crocus in front. We discovered roses while weeding (well, Julie's mom discovered most of them I think) and the all appear to have some growth. We found the Jackson and Perkins tags for several of them, but we don't know if we've got the rootstock or the original rose growing (I assume they're all grafted cultivars). Either way we purchased one new climbing rose and we'll keep fertilizing the little old ones and see what we can coax out. We found an old broken trellis that we fixed up and painted for our new rose, it's starting to bloom nicely now! All of the old roses are at least growing, so our fingers are crossed.
Lastly and not really all that interestingly, we cleaned up the LONG garden that runs alongside our house next to the driveway. The border is a faux brick border that was buried in the dirt. We dug it up, put landscape fabric everywhere, mulched, and then replaced the border at the appropriate height, so it looks nice again. We don't know what we want to do here, so it's a pretty blank slate at this point, we contemplating putting some lattice sheets up and have some vining things of some kind, but we don't really know. Try and ignore the weeds in the driveway in this shot! You can also just see the flags for our invisible fence we installed to electrocute Max. It's a bit cruel, but he only got shocked a couple of times and behaves very well in the backyard now! No more being confined to the deck and we got to get rid of the fence in the back yard.
