So, my wife and I became public nuisances last month.  Here in the great white north, there is something called Oak Wilt sweeping through the oaks on many a wooded lot, and my lot is no exception.  Each year, the city's department of forestry comes by and marks the dead or dying trees with an orange dot, indicating they require us to remove the trees in the fall.  We also receive a notice of public nuisance to make us feel guilty about it, as if it's our fault the oaks are diseased.

This year, our fourth on this lot, we had 2 trees to take out.  These were between our house and our neighbor's, near the fence for our backyard.  Last year, a friend took much of the oak for winter firewood, and so we arranged a time to take out these two and he'd again take the wood. 

The appointed hour arrived and we got started.  The first tree, the thinner one, came out fairly easily.  We made it fall towards the front of the house and in short order we had the logs in the truck and the smaller branches set aside for recycling.  Then came the bigger one.  The plan was, cut it about six feet up and make it fall towards the backyard.  We had a space between the house and the next tree of about 25 feet, so you'd think we could make it fall in the right direction. 

After the trunk was notched, the final cut was make...crooked.  So, instead of falling along the notch, it fell about 75 degrees to the left, and right onto my house! 

The next two hours were most interesting.  With the tree on the house, we had to figure out how to get it off without damaging the shingles, the windows, or each other.  It turns out, we did a little bit of all three.  First off, my friend went up on our roof and cut down most of the branches that were above the house.  We managed to get those down and out of the way, leaving us with the trunk.  After several failed attempts to pull the thing off of the roof, we decided upon a different tactic. 

We decided to cut from the bottom, figuring that the shorter and shorter tree would then slide off of the roof.  The first cut was OK, but the tree didn't get all the way off the roof.  By this time, some of those shingles on the outside edge were in tough shape, but there was nothing we could do about that.  The second cut was not so good.  As the tree came down off the roof, it rotated, sliding along the house and ending up wedged in a window frame.  Luckily, the window was ok.  Not so lucky was my left hand, which ended up pinned between the tree and the fence.  Nothing was broken, but there was a nasty gash in my little finger. 

Help was summoned in the form of my father-in-law, who recommended we tie off the remaining tree and use a truck to pull it off the house.  That did the trick and 35 minutes later, the tree was cut and loaded up.  There are many lessons, but the main one is to cut the final cut for the trunk parallel to the ground.  That one little error was the root cause of the problem... which made the project take hours longer than necessary and ended with six stitches to close up that gash in the hand.  We probably should have used the truck and rope from the start as well.  In the end, no permanent damage to life or property, but it was not the way we planned to spend our morning.

Posted by Caeli at 09:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here is a view that won't last, the crabapple in the foreground next to our deck, with the humongous lilac just beyond:

 

The fragrance is glorious in our yard.  But alas, these flowers' days are numbered.  Heavy winds have already torn off many of them today, but they are certainly going out in a blaze of glory. 

Posted by Caeli at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For my foray into container gardening, I started with the urn in the front yard that my mom gave me a couple of years ago.  I had never planted anything in it before.  It stood empty on its pedestal near our front entrance (except for the time we stuck an artificial Christmas tree in it). 

At Lowes' garden center yesterday, the kids were going gaga over the flowers, and started bringing me pots (before I convinced them not to touch anything else).  I just let them pick out a few, and then got a few filler plants.

Here's what we got:

(1) Angelonia "Angel Mist"

(1) Dianthus

(1) Snapdragon

(4) English Ivy

(1) Spike

Here is the first container garden offering:

 

Like everything we do, this project was not without its follies.  First, the shape of the urn is not conducive to planting things around a central plant because the edges are too shallow. (Maybe this is why my mom wanted to get rid of this urn?) I stuck them in anyway and topped off the soil with leftover seed-starting mix.  However, seed-starting mix is not very absorbant of water poured onto it (works best when you're misting with a spray bottle) so when I tried to water the newly planted annuals, the water rolled off the top and mud streaked the sides of the urn.  So I had to slow down, a lot, with the watering.  

I suspect plants can grow in even a shallow planter, but we'll see if these guys make it.  I hope so, it would be discouraging to have my first container gardening attempt fall flat.

UPDATE: After consulting the bequeather of the urn, I now know I should have planted geraniums instead of those "fancy" flowers... will be repotting tonight and hopefully working the other flowers into the garden at the foot of the urn.  If time allows and if we can dig them up, we're going to try to relocate the rhodies from the front of the porch where they seem to be dying from being too close to porch foundation, put them nearer the urn.  We'll see... I will post a pic when it's done!

Posted by Caeli at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Grass seed planting was the order of the day yesterday.  Now that the oak tree was out, the stump ground to nothing, and most of the landscape fabric pulled out, we finished leveling the yard and planted grass.

Leveling the yard is a relative thing.  We didn't have a roller or anything, and we weren't meticulous about checking the level.  In fact, we wanted to maintain a slight slope in the grade away from the house for better drainage of water coming off the roof.  My husband laid a long piece of pvc pipe from the part of the grass closest to the house that is about the right level, across the area decimated by the tree removal, and that gave us an idea of what needed to be filled in or knocked down.  There were also several areas that were just hard-packed sand, like where the playset was before and places that had been covered up by branches for a long time.  We also didn't really water that part of the yard last summer at all, so it all needed at least some topdressing with topsoil.

Finally it was time to plant the grass seed using a spreader.  It went so quickly and easily that I wonder why we don't plant grass all the time.

We used something called a Midwestern mix of grass seed.  It's supposed to be for sun and light shade.  I think there's enough sun there for most of the day to qualify as light shade under the trees.  I guess we'll find out! 

Then my husband spread a type of mulch/fertilizer mix.  It looks like pellets of rabbit food, and supposedly the mulch part of it will expand when wet, though I don't really see it happening.  Now that we've watered twice.

Watering is the key to growing grass, from what I remember.  We are planning to go 2-3x a day with watering, for an hour at a time.  It's such a large area that we have to use both the sprinkler system and a separate sprinkler on a hose to catch it all.  (The back part of our yard has no sprinkler system because there once was a swimming pool back there.)

 

This was sort of a band-aid approach to planting grass.  To do it "right" we ought to have ripped out all the old sod in the areas around the grass-less areas, laid down a nice mix of compost and topsoil, leveled it all (maybe compacted somewhat with a roller) and seeded.  But we didn't need to be that fancy, we just want a nice grassy spot for the kids to throw the ball around, or set up a volleyball net.

Posted by Caeli at 09:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

First the mighty oak was felled.  And then there was nothing but a stump.  And the stump was right in the middle of the yard.  Right where we want to plant grass.

So today started with a call to a hardware store in a nearby town where we already know from previous experience there is a stumpgrinder to rent.  Sure enough it was available.  They changed out the blades on it, and my husband borrowed a stepvan from my dad's water softening business, and went to get the big beast, the mighty stump grinder.

It's bigger than a lawnmower or a snowblower, but operates sort of like one.  It's just a heck of a lot longer in the front.  And it's a good thing it is so long, because that way the operator doesn't have to be so close to the wood chips and sawdust that go flying as the machine operates.

Here is the stump grinder in action, having nibbled away about 2/3 of the stump:

 

It only took about 15-20 minutes for that huge oak stump.  With another 30 minutes or so, my husband also had three other smaller stumps ground down below lawn level.  

As you might notice in the above photo, there used to be a ring of crocuses (or part of a ring anyway) around the old oak tree.  As they were buried with sawdust, I realized they would have to be moved to a new home if they had a chance of survival.  So even though you aren't really supposed to move bulbs like crocuses in the spring (or so I understand), sometimes you don't have a choice.  Here they are in their new home, around the crabapple tree beside the deck:

 

We'll see if they make it!  

That was only the beginning of our fun, as we went on to try to level the ground where the tree used to be, as it had been in something of a burm of a flower bed.  And what was under that bed but... what else... landscape fabric.  I could get on my stump and give a speech against the evils of landscape fabric again, but I no longer have a stump to stand on.

Posted by Caeli at 09:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I read today that a good time to plant peas might be when the soil temperature is around 50 degrees.  I also read that if the overnight temps are in the 40's and it gets up to 55 or so during the day it's a good time to plant.  Well, it's high 30s overnight now, and today it's in the mid 50s, though we've had warmer days recently. 

Before I even read all that though, we planted our peas yesterday.  I guess the timing was okay.

I had been wandering around the yard for a few days observing what little sunshine there was to determine if I would be able to get anything to grow anywhere.  We have lots of sun on the back corner of our lot, but we also have a pretty good spot in the middle of the yard.  There are a few trees going in the center of this plot, but it gets pretty sunny on one side.  So sunny, in fact, that the hostas didn't like growing there.  So I picked that little spot to plant some peas.

I highly doubt we will actually see any of those peas grow, because:

1) It was starting to rain and we were in a big hurry (the kids and I)

2) I didn't space them according to the directions plus they were either buried too shallow or too deep, depending.

3) (Probably more to the point...) The birds discovered them right away.

Our bichon mix dog is doing her best to keep wayward wildlife out of our back yard, but she can't chase away all the birds.  (Haven't seen a single rabbit this year though.)  Squirrels are also brave enough to try their luck with her, so they're probably enjoying the peas too.

Nevertheless, because it didn't rain for very long yesterday I decided this morning that if any of them happened to have a chance at growing, I should water them.  So I hauled out the sprinkler for the first time today.  The kids were delighted and despite it being 56 degrees out, they couldn't resist getting a few sprinkles on them.

 

Note the flag my 4 year old is holding.  I told the Diggers Hotline people they should not even bother with flags back there, the kids think they're toys for them no matter what I say.  Good thing for the spray paint they also applied liberally.

Well, if the peas fail to come up, I have a plan B.  I still have a lot of peas left from the seed packet.  I read today that many people sprout them under a damp paper towel for a couple of days before planting them.  This apparently helps avoid the risk of them rotting in cold, damp soil.  I guess it might discourage the birds too, but I'm not sure about that.  Anyway, it's worth a try.  It would be nice if some of them would grow, if for no other reason than putting some nitrogen in the soil back there.

Posted by Caeli at 03:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The only thing worse than pulling weeds is pulling up landscape fabric!  My only consolation is that at least we were not the homeowners who had this fabric put in.  We inherited it from the previous owners.  It is a really bad idea to use landscape fabric, and here is why:

1) It may keep weeds down for the first year or two, but soon it will gather dirt and/or composted mulch (that many people put on top of it) and create a lovely little weed bed.

2) Plants that you want to have grow there don't because they cannot get their roots down deep enough. They starve or dry out, unable to reach nutrients and water.

3) The landscape fabric keeps excess water from draining away.  

4) Tree roots sprawl over top and through landscape fabric, making it really hard to dig it up or to plant anything in it.

I cannot think of any situation where I would deliberately use landscape fabric.  What is this baneful material?  Here's a picture of a small portion of what I pulled out today:

Note it is a plastic mesh, and it is intertwined with roots from every species of growing thing that was ever within 20 feet of it.  

If you are cursed with landscape fabric under the flower beds in your yard, all is not lost, it can and should be removed.  Here is how to remove landscape fabric:

1) Take a steel pronged rake and scrape away at the top layer of dirt (since some very nice rich soil has probably developed - composted - on top of the fabric since it was put there) or cut away at the sod that has overgrown the edges of the garden, until you find some fabric.

2) Give it a tug.  If the top layer is light, it may come out relatively easily.  If not, move onto step three.

3) If the fabric tears in your hand and you can't get much out, use a rake or a shovel to remove the dirt/sod/weeds on top of the fabric so you can get at more of it without the weight on top making it tear.

4) You can also use the rake to roll back sections of cloth and tear it out as you go, allowing the compost to go back on the (newly freed) bare topsoil.  

5) A quick way to find more corners of fabric to pull on is to yank at the roots of trees or shrubs running through the cloth.  Most often, as you pull them up they will bring up part of the fabric with them, giving you something to grab on to and pull, or at least letting you know where to start raking or digging.

Sounds fun, doesn't it?  But the rewards will come!  Finally plants will be able to grow there.  Drainage will be better, and you'll likely even have some nice soil to start with.

If you're worried about weeds, I've been reading up on this (we have had a lot of weeds to deal with here), and there are ways to prevent most of them from ever coming up without harming the plants you desire to have grow.  I am currently placing cardboard on top of areas we aren't ready to plant, and will cover this with bark mulch soon (since cardboard is not very aestetically pleasing).  If we decide to plant something later, we will be able to dig through the cardboard and plant just fine.  Cardboard turns into compost eventually.  It is a natural solution, inexpensive, and you don't have to pull it up later!  I'd much rather use cardboard than landscape fabric under my mulch.

Posted by Caeli at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"Nicely wooded lot in quiet subdivision."  A great selling point for a home in the heartland of Wisconsin.  But they were also famous last words.  The first summer after we bought our house, we looked out into the back yard to find orange dots painted on what seemed to be every other tree in our backyard.  What the? 

We soon learned that every year the city sends a forester to identify trees with symptoms of oak wilt in residents' yards.  They then give you a nasty letter that says if you don't cut down these trees and properly dispose of the wood, you will be considered a public nuisance and subject to fines. 

The first year was the worst, with more than a dozen trees having to come down.  The next year there were a couple more.  Then last summer, I met the forester as he came on my property.  He took a look in the back yard and he said, "You know which ones they are, don't you?" 

I agreed it was pretty obvious.  The biggest oak tree, in the center of our yard, was completely dead.  The one next to it was mostly dead. 

The one next to the big one was not so large, and my husband was able to cut it down himself. My sister hauled away the wood in her trailer to be burned on her land out in the country.  But that big tree was going to be a problem. We would not be able to do it ourselves.  We got a couple of quotes from tree removal people.  We were talking hundreds of dollars.  

Then one day we had friends over, and someone mentioned her husband might want the wood, but if the tree was too big for him to cut down, he knew someone who was an expert at cutting trees down who also could use the firewood and would cut it down for the privelege of taking the wood.  

The upshot is, one night the expert guy showed up with his son and his wife, and our other friend came to help, and they took down the huge oak tree.

I was amazed at the tree cutting expert.  He had this rickety-looking wooden extension latter that he propped against the tree trunk, then he crawled up there and started cutting off one of the gigantic limbs. He also tied a rope to the main trunk.

 

Then it was time to cut down the main trunk.  I was amazed as he made a few cuts on the side of the tree it was supposed to fall towards, then made a few on the other side and pounded in a few wedges.  In the meantime, all his helpers stood off to the side holding the rope.  I learned they were supposed to keep the tree from falling the wrong direction (like on top of the shed, or our deck, or our house, or our friend). 

It finally fell with a mighty crash, on top of our neighbor's chainlink fence.  It trimmed off a few branches from their trees on the lot line too, but no major damage.

 

He did a great job finishing off the stump with his chain saw, too.  All that remains of the mighty oak tree is this:

 

Our other friend, who had helped out in order to learn from the expert, was up for more tree cutting so he could get some firewood too.  And were happy to be done with this oak wilt business, so we identified the rest of the oak trees along the side of our property, and another night he and my husband cut trees until they coudn't see anymore and the chainsaws had quit anyway.  My husband finished up the last branches the other day, so this is it for the oaks now:

 

Logs are awaiting pick-up, and the rest of the debris has almost all been hauled out by my sister.  

Of course, there is still the front yard.  Next year.  

Posted by Caeli at 07:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today's lesson in gardening was to be teaching the kids how to weed, preparing a nice bed in which to plant peas.  The proposed pea patch will be on one side of what is an eye-shaped garden (I think it was supposed to be more rounded but it needs re-edging), where it will hopefully get enough sun at least part of the day to grow peas.  If we get to eat some of these peas that will be great, but I also have in mind using this method to enrich the soil in that area to plant something later (yet to be determined).  I had read somewhere that peas put nitrogen into the soil.

Here are pictures of my little helpers.  Unfortunately, agreeing to pose for a picture was about all the help they were willing to give, and Mommy did most of the weeding.

 

They all have their own kid-friendly garden tools now, even the 16-month-old:

 

Those plastic hand-held cultivators (which I usually just call "claws") are useless for weeding even when trying to pull out something as close to the surface as Creeping Charlie, of which we have way more than our fair share.

This little "helper" was no help at all, but sat and posed right on cue when I said smile:

 

Actually, my son was helpful by dumping pail-fulls of weeds into the compost pile.  He just refused to get into the actually pulling of them, though.  And my 4 year old is in a phase where she will do almost nothing I ask.  Well, whatever the lack of assistance and questionable learning to weed that went on, we had a nice day together.

There is a lot of work to do out there.  But I think we may actually be able to get a start on planting that pea patch tomorrow.  I bought some yellow plastic tent stakes from Wal-Mart for just over $2 which should be great for helping mark the rows with string.  I can't decide, though, if we should do plain old straight rows, or something more in keeping with the curved shape of the bed.  Maybe a slightly curving straight row or two.  (Depends how many peas I have to plant.)

One thing I can say for sure:  it was great to get outside.  Not too much insect life out there yet, no mosquitos until the sun started setting.  By weeding this bed (which we had barely touched last year), I even discovered some little shoots of Hostas emerging beneath the carpet of Creeping Charlie.   There may be hope for my perennials yet!

Posted by Caeli at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Gardening for the brown-thumbed busy homeschooling mom, should be the title of this inaugural post in the gardening category of the Home Remodeling Help blog.  Our refrain has always been, if you're going to do something, check if we've done it first to learn from our mistakes.  I'm sure there will be plenty to learn from as I share my gardening experiences yet to come.

I've always wanted to have nice gardens.  My mother has beautiful perennials beds under ancient trees around her Victorian home.   Many of her perennials and bulbs have made their way to my yard: hostas, sedum, chives, irises, and I can't remember what all.  The first year we were inspired by having to somehow fill in what used to be a wooded part of our yard - denuded by oak wilt.  Our neighbors complimented our efforts, "It's starting to look good!"  Their hopes were dashed the following year when we let everything get overgrown with weeds, having no time whatsoever to garden.

This year, verily I say, will be different.   It already is.  We're starting much earlier than usual.  However it is later than we should be starting, at least one of our projects: starting seeds for the vegetable garden.

My son is in first grade, and part of his science this year is learning about plant life through having a garden.  He loves tomatoes, so we are trying to start tomato seeds indoors to later transplant to the garden (or at least outdoor containers, I haven't decided about that yet).  My mom tells me it's kind of late to be starting the seeds.  But I am optimistic that there will be enough summer left for us to get some tomatoes off these plants.  If not, I do have a back-up plan, more on that another day.

My son's science book is, ironically enough in my case, called Green Thumbs - A Kid's Activity Guide to Indoor and Outdoor Gardening by Laurie Carlson.

 

In it there was a cute little project, making seedling pots out of paper.  In theory, you can fill the little paper pots with potting mix, plant your seed, grow a little sproutlet, then when it's time to plant it outside, pop it into the ground, pot and all (preferably after removing the piece of scotch tape on the bottom, which will let the roots out).  It sounded fun.  Unfortunately I knew my six year-old would not be up for making these little pots.  They do require some dexterity.

So I made them myself.

Here are my materials.  I used cubes from my son's math manipulatives to measure with since the dog ate his ruler and I was too lazy to go around the house and find a tape measure or other measuring implement.  You can even see a couple of my first attempts, before I started measuring the paper.

 

To make the seedling pots from paper, I used construction paper and cut 4" x 6" rectangles out.  You fold over 1/2" on the long side, then roll it into a cylinder.  Tape it.  Flatten the cylindar so the taped seam is in the middle.  Cut a 1/2" slit in the folded over part at the bottom, all the way through all layers.  Make it back into a cylinder and flatten it the other direction.  Cut another slit, same thing.  I then folded the bottom part over (as far as the slit went).  Then I opened the cylindar again, now more rectangular actually, and folded the tabs made by cutting the slits onto each other, and put a piece of tape there to hold it.  Voila!

 

 

Now just repeat a 100 times...  well, actually there were only 30 tomato seeds in the first packet, so that was how many pots I made the first time out.

I hope to show you the progress in future entries.  They are actually all filled now and planted with tomato seeds.  I didn't take a picture of that yet.  But I hope to!  Yes, my hopes are high that my homeschooling motivation will carry out into the garden and bear much fruit this season.

Continue reading "Starting Seedlings in Homemade Paper Pots" »

Posted by Caeli at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)