In the meantime, the landscapers have been doing stone work and planting. And hacking up the front yard. Oh, and they put two gigantic piles of compost right where I need to put my car to charge it up, which means I've been exploring public charging stations.
Here's the back yard with some of the compost laid down and planting started. It's feeling a little chaotic right now, but gardens are like that.
Same deal in the side yard, where they've got the right side planted up.
They also started tearing up the front for the butterfly garden along the sidewalk. That included jackhammering out the concrete in area between the sidewalk and the street (sometimes called the "hell strip") at 7:30 in the morning, for which I apologize to all my neighbors.
This is one of my favourite parts: a dry creek that fills up when it rains.
And this stone bench and small flagstone patio under the magnolia out front are coming together nicely. Not sure I'm going to want to hang out here this winter, but I can see it being an excellent place to spend a summer evening with the neighbors.
]]>They ran supply lines around and they connected all these drip lines. This is pretty much the approach I had decided to take to the irrigation over time, to infiltrate the water below soil/mulch to reduce evaporation.
The next step will be taking the gigantic pile of compost in the driveway and spreading it out over this. I was hoping more of that would get done this last week because it's blocking access to my car charger, but I can use public chargers at a few places as needed so it isn't the worst.
The living fountain here will process our household graywater and turn it into clean water for irrigation. That will even out our water supply over the end of the summer and early fall when the tank runs low.
The front bench is almost done. The rest of the landscaping there is not quite done yet, but I have faith that it will get done.
And they made a little Halloween decoration with one of the boulders in the driveway!
]]>Not much of an update today, but stonework continues for the water feature and the stone bench in the front garden, and there's been a bunch of irrigation work. I'm looking forward to seeing how it all comes together.
]]>In stone work, the back yard has most of its stone laid.
They put cardboard over the flagstones to protect them while work continues. Over where the orange cone is, they've been making a stack of stone offcuts from the paths and patios, which will be turned into a water feature with a trickle of water over it, the better for birds and insects to drink.
In the front they've started making a stone bench under the magnolia. We are very social with our neighbors and it's nice to have a place to sit outside and talk instead of just crouching on the curb.
On the irrigation front, they started by trenching around the permeable pavers to run some sprinklers.
I'm still pretty deeply resentful about having to put that parking space in, so I'm making it as unlike a parking space as possible.
I also met with the irrigation person and we went through the layout of the tank system so she could cut off unused parts and tie in to the rest.
The process of building up valve sections like this is very familiar.
Yesterday a plumber came and we shut off water in the house for an hour or so while he plumbed in a line for the sprinklers. There was much excitement among the cats because they've become fascinated with water from sinks.
The graywater system is also starting. This is pretty exciting.
The way it works is that water from the interior graywater plumbing -- put in as part of the big renovation -- goes into this surge tank and gets pumped into the back yard.
In the back yard it goes into this "living fountain" where it is recirculated through soil and plants to clean it, after which it can easily be used in the garden. As they set the system up I'll take more photos to show it, but the concept and some other installations of the same design are shown on the landscapers' web site.
Our system is a lot larger than most because we plumbed all the sinks (except kitchen sinks, which are considered "blackwater") and tubs plus the laundry into the graywater drain, so instead of the occasional laundry load, our living fountain will have to deal with 2-3 daily showers worth of water. Fortunately if we have a big water event we can just switch the system to the regular sewer and not overload the system.
]]>They've been working from the back towards the front, which is interesting.
There's a roped off area which will be a water feature. They've spent a lot of time laying out the stone just right, but this is by no means done yet (for some thing the greenhouse doors can't fully open yet).
This space between the chicken shed and the greenhouse will have a pergola in it -- I'm not sure when we will build that, as it's not part of the current scope of work. It will have a small patio and space for our locally acclimated orchids, plus a nice place to sit in the shade (the Cecile Brunner rose is going to be trained over the pergola).
The stone layout got halfway along the side last week, and you can see on the right a narrower channel which will take stormwater runoff and allow it to percolate into the yard.
And the view back from the driveway.
The Fern Walk got nice stone, too.
And they've gotten started on the patio/bench for under the front tree. I am a little skeptical of the height of this, because it feels like the final patio will end up being almost a full step above the main entry path, but I'm leaving my mind open.
]]>So last week, the crew spent days hacking through the concrete-like dry sand, digging out the bases for the paths and patios we will have. This will help with drainage (good) and also will help keep the paths from sinking and getting all uneven (also good).
The view into the back yard from the side path feels pretty nice. That narrower trench on the side is for a dry creek which will take water from the gutter downspouts and distribute it into the garden.
And down the side yard from the driveway. Those brown bags are full of pulled/hacked out weeds, and they are heavy as HECK. I've been tossing a few into our green bins for trash night every week which has been an experience.
By Friday, this was where they had gotten:
In the front yard they've marked out a patio and dug out all the plants, but not much else. There will be a stone bench here under the magnolia which I am looking forward to enjoying.
The path down the Fern Walk was marked out but not started yet.
But the path down the side was pretty much all dug out and looking good.
And the back yard was starting to take shape.
The real excitement was that it rained on Saturday. And actually a little on Sunday and on Monday.
I was a little worried because a lot of water ran into those dirt channels, but the landscapers assured me it actually helped them see where they needed to work on their sloping better. So that was good.
This week is the week I am calling the Week of Stone.
Monday afternoon three trucks brought us an enormous pile of gravel.
Sitting next to the pile you can see the five-yard dirt box filled with dirt. This is the second one they've filled up.
Most of the day Monday they were hacking out the path down the Fern Walk, but the later afternoon was taken up by hauling gravel.
By this evening, the dirt box had been taken away, and the pile of gravel was about one third the size it had been.
The gravel is the drainage layer for the paths and the dry creek, as you can see here. They used a compactor to really pack it in there.
The back yard is really taking shape. They've been using these pop-ups to get shade. The landscapers we hired are a coop so they actually treat their people well. As you can see, an enormous amount of gravel has disappeared into this back yard.
And yet, even more gravel was delivered today. I'm pretty sure this is not a situation approved by the city, but they assured me it would be gone soon. Given how fast they went through the other pile, that seems likely. This is a final gravel for some areas.
And here's the overhead view. It's a little hard to see what is going on under the pop-ups, but they have started working on the water feature that will be in the center of the yard. They also moved my bog garden tub which is very impressive because Noel and I moved it over there with great struggling before I filled it up with peat and water, and did I mention the struggle?
In the meantime I've had a tiny house guest. Meet Nuggin, who is five days old. The shelter asked me to babysit little Nuggin for a few days while they find a foster placement for him (I think he's a him; it's a little hard to tell at this age). We've been having fun doing things like drinking milk, rolling over, and sleeping on a warm blanket. You know, baby kitten things.
]]>In this photo you can see the paths marked out a little. Between the last post and last week, I slooooowly moved the bees into the greenhouse where they would be out of the way.
And man, it was bad enough working inside where it was in the eighties (we turned the AC up to save electricity); at one point today the weather station recorded a temperature over 100F (readings from the weather station are a little suspect now because it's position was compromised by the barn shed). To help out the gardeners we put a small refrigerator in the chicken shed for drinks. But still.
So that's pretty much the update. I'm excited to see this come together. I was just looking through last year's planner for some information and saw that this time last year we were meeting with the designers and talking about what we wanted, and now here it is.
]]>1. It has not rained for at least three days
2. It is a day when we both don't have to work (I work some weekend days)
3. We are both in town
Surprisingly, the one of these we have not had the best luck with is #1.
Seriously, this photo is from July 2.
Anyway, there hasn't been much to write about. But this week things started getting more exciting. We have been working with a design/build landscaping company to come up with a detailed landscape/hardscape plan, and for a while it looked like work might start in the fall sometime, but they were able to move us up and get things going this month. They also asked if we'd be open to having them come do the demo work -- removing weeds and pulling back the overgrown landscape that exists -- in advance. And today was the day for that.
This is what the ack yard looked like in April, at the end of the rainy season, before we whacked the heck out of the overgrown grass and stuff. Even so, it was pretty overgrown and there was a particular thicket that I felt kind of bad about.
Well, today some nice folks showed up and whacked the heck out of the yard.
(Yes, that's another tub; a client gave it to me. A story as old as time. It will be another planter.)
This photo is pretty terrible because I took it from upstairs and the screen was in the way, so here:
These are the landscape dump bags from one day of three people attacking our yard. Pretty impressive, considering what they left behind in the back, as well. I'm still pretty grumpy about the gravel that got dumped in this spot during construction, but that will end up under a path so it will be OK.
The back yard is looking a lot more opened up and beaten down, now.
As you can see there are still piles of pulled weeds, and they still have a bunch more work to do. Today was a random empty day between jobs so they won't be back until next week at the soonest, which gives us some time to clean up some of our junk that was lying around under all that grass. And I need to prune the Cecile Brunner rose back to a nub for the year.
Also, we are hoping to finish squaring the greenhouse this weekend, assuming it doesn't rain between now and Saturday.
]]>1. It has not rained for at least three days
2. It is a day when we both don't have to work (I work some weekend days)
3. We are both in town
And guess how often that has been true lately? I was most bummed that over Christmas we both took off a week to be home and there were zero days when it was dry enough to work on the greenhouse.
There was one day when we managed to get out and install the doors, but we were stalled after that because we had a bit of a mystery about a step in the instructions.
The doors do look fantastic, though. And I cannot wait to have those three things line up so we can get this puppy squared up and take the next steps.
The thing that held us up, by the way, was that the instructions told us to line up the glass channels on the beam across the doorway with the channels on the eave beam.
Do you see channels? Because we puzzled over this for quite some time. Finally I sent a photo and question in email to the manufacturer. They got back to me the next business day, as you would expect, which answered that question (the channels get attached manually later so no need to align them) but since then we haven't had all three requirements lined up, and this weekend isn't going to work, too.
Yeah. Anyway.
In other news, the magnolia is blooming this week and looking fantastic. The arborist came today to give him his annual prune but only did a light one. The mulberry got a heavier prune (definitely needed) which should help with our intense mulberry harvest this summer.
So cross your fingers for a dry weekend next week.
]]>And now. The greenhouse.
The day after Thanksgiving, some folks showed up and cleaned up the site and broke the rough bits off the walls (which will be tiled).
That's a finished greenhouse base. For those who may be curious, the tall base wall is because I don't want every inch of the greenhouse to be relentless sunshine. A high-humidity warm environment with low sunlight replicates a lot of understory jungle conditions. Hence the taller base walls than usual.
We still had a ton of work to do setting up the condo for my parents so it wasn't until yesterday that we were able to start assembling the greenhouse itself on the base.
The greenhouse was delivered in a bunch of crates, and we stored them improperly so they got wet. Not a huge deal because the greenhouse itself is made of redwood and we always intended to paint it, so some staining is not an issue. But if you might have your permit delayed for six months by a vindictive, sexist permit tech who likes yelling, you'll want to store it better than we did if you want a more natural wood look.
We got started by opening all the crates and figuring out where the parts were that we needed to start with. The first step is to build the front and back walls, then you build the roof panels.
The process of assembling the kit was fairly straightforward if you have some carpentry experience. I'm pretty sure it would have been challenging if we had never built anything before, and for sure I would not have wanted to do it alone. I'm not even sure that would be possible.
Sturdi-Built includes a couple mockups of the wall and roof assemblies that help you orient pieces correctly, and also this great little alignment tool that helps you get the vertical pieces aligned right so the glass channels line up. This mostly worked great except a couple pieces were a little weird.
When we built the walls, it was really clear why they sent them unassembled; they are large and quite floppy.
The first day, we basically uncrated most of the parts and assembled the front and back walls and the roof (the side walls came fully assembled, which was nice).
Today, the next step in the instructions was to put the wall panels in place, so we started with the front wall and the north wall (the house side).
A prefabricated greenhouse is obviously much easier to build than a scratch greenhouse, so in a fairly short time we had all four wall panels up and tacked together (you avoid tightening any fasteners between the panels until the whole thing is plumbed and squared).
Next up was the roof. First we put in the two large beams that support the roof span, then the four panels of the roof notched into place.
The roof is made in four panels, with what ends up being a built-up ridge board at the top (a ridge board is a non-structural board at the peak of the roof; the structure of this greenhouse is the two large beams we put in earlier that at lower than the peak). The panels are basically one-third and two-thirds of the width of the roof on both sides of the ridge board, and offset so that there's a decent lap. You then bolt the pieces together through pre-drilled holes.
Before we bolted the ridge board together, I was concerned that the roof pieces were going to take a lot of fiddling to get to the right place, but that process sort of snapped everything to roughly the right place and it will take much less fiddling than I expected.
The bolts for the ridge board have these biting nuts that will not loosen over time, which was pretty interesting. Noel asked me "do you want me to line them up in the same direction?" and I said yes. This is what a couple decades of marriage is like.
One thing we have to do at a less than ideal time is install the roof vents. They ended up overlapping the seams between the panels on both sides of the roof, so none of them could be installed at grade (unless we wanted to assemble the whole roof on the ground and lift it as a whole into place which I definitely did not want to try to do). So we're going to have to get up there on ladders and put the three roof vents in the right places which will be a bit of a pain.
Next up is installing the doors, then we plumb and square the whole thing. After that we will pause construction so I can seal and paint the whole frame.
]]>Right around noon, the truck arrived and everybody got to work.
Pumped concrete goes pretty quickly and in no time at all the guys were putting the finishing touches on the walls.
They stayed later doing a bit of site cleanup (there's a giant stack of dirt they agreed to move for me, and they got about half of it out of the way before dark). I didn't even have a chance to really look at it because I had to go back to my other project which is this:
On Friday the cross-country movers showed up with my mother's library, and I got to work. My goal was to unpack about one row of boxes a day all weekend, to get a bit of a head start on getting the living room back. I started around 5pm Friday, and worked until after eight. Then was back for whole days on Saturday and Sunday. I can't keep that up until it's done because of the whole having owning a business thing, but I did get more than half the books shelved and mostly sorted.
My mother has a massive collection of cookbooks, and a total library of over 3,000 volumes. In contrast, I have about 2,000 volumes in my library. So I've had a bit of work to do unpacking and sorting all these books onto the shelves. Because there's limited floor space -- we need to leave room to do things like get to the bathroom -- I've been putting the books onto the shelves and sorting them there, which is a little more book-moving work but less space-intensive. Once we get everything on shelves, there's the wonderful job of updating the library catalog to show the new location of each book.
And somewhere in there we get to start putting up the greenhouse, too.
]]>In the meantime, a couple things:
On Tuesday, the contractor got concrete in for the slab for the greenhouse base. We'd thought it would work Monday but the forecast said rain all day which it did in fact do much of the day. So Tuesday, after a bit of a rainy morning, we got this.
All this rain has led to a bit of a boom in the tub garden.
These are probably from seeds from the assorted drosera in there, but could be random seeds in the potting media of any of the plants I bought, too. A squirrel was in there digging around and flinging the potting media left and right (and burying live oak acorns), so things got a little jumbled up.
While I was weeding some other little seedlings out of there -- grass and some other random non-bog plants -- I noticed one of the sarracenia had a dinner guest. The garden is doing nicely even with some pretty bad neglect this last couple months. The heavy rainfall has made up for any deficiencies in my caretaking.
The thing I did this weekend was order a sofa for my parents' place. I went to a few places looking for the right thing -- I needed a sofa that was not too gigantic as is to fashionable right now -- and ended up ordering one from Custom Sofa Co. in Oakland. They are not a chain as far as I can tell, and there are a couple local companies that have a similar concept. You basically build the sofa you want from the options they have and it comes in about a month.
I chose this midcentury look but went with a cherry red fabric. I think it will look amazing with the rug in the living room.
(All that stuff on the sofa is part of the process: clipboard with details of the sofa wanted, bundle of fabric samples, and measuring tape.)
So the week starts with us in this place:
After the slab cured for a day or so, the contractor showed up and started the formwork for the walls. I need to meet with them tomorrow morning to talk about a couple needed blockouts for services -- water and electrical need to get through the wall. But I look forward to being able to start building the actual greenhouse on top of this soon.
]]>We got started in September when we got the condo. It was not going to be worth shipping every piece of furniture from the house in New York all the way to California, so Noel and I made a list of furniture we needed to get ready for them and got to work.
Most of the furnishing we did was very simple: a bed, new curtain rods and drapes, rugs, and bookcases. I did spend one afternoon there hemming drapes to fit around the radiators. In the process I managed to lose half the finials from the rods, but eventually they will turn up.
Then for six weeks we alternated flying to New York and packing the household up there with each other, so we barely saw each other.
In one week, I packed 58 boxes of books, which was about half of them. This was my childhood bedroom which my mother used as an office because it had this great floor-to-ceiling book wall. I'm sure when we get the books to California we will get rid of some of them, but I didn't want to spend the time on that process on that end. Pick your battles, right?
IN THE MEANTIME.
The garden designers we hired to come up with a new plan for the garden presented their work to us, which was really interesting and I need to give them some feedback on it when I have the time. We'd like to get them started on working on it soon so the landscape is less of a complete mess.
And we finally got our permit to build the greenhouse, and the contractor had space in his schedule to start last week. Which was when we were actually going to be in New York doing the actual move, loading my parents and the maximum allowed amount of checked luggage onto a plane and getting them out here.
They got started with a lot of digging and layout, and made good progress.
By Friday last week the rain had started and they took the day off. Then basically four inches of rain fell in one weekend, which made everything more exciting. And of course our weather station stopped working the week before and we didn't notice until after we missed recording the biggest rainfall in a few years.
I swear, the fact that the chickens refuse to stay indoors when it is raining and then get so angry about getting wet continues to be one of the funniest parts of having them.
]]>Our honey strainer was loaded with honey and we'd put it out in the sun which was a minor disaster. Basically, the wax melted and a bunch of slumgum -- bee cocoon sheaths and other gunk -- got stuck to the strainer. Step one was to clean it out by straining the honey out from the wax and other crud:
Fortunately this is actually pretty easy and involved just running the honey through a double sieve into a honey bucket. It takes a while if you don't have a room heated up to make the honey run faster, but I just set it up, made sure it wouldn't overflow, then went into my office to work.
After a while, the blobs of wax were plugging up the honey gate, so I scooped them out and put them in the sieve to drip off.
All told, more than 30 lbs of honey was easily salvaged. Maybe another pound or so was crystallized onto the wax and not worth trying to save.
I thought I'd leave the honey in the bucket until I could get jars, but the next morning it was clear I could not do that, because the honey gate on the bucket was leaky.
So I ended up just decanting it into pint jars. This is the size I prefer for honey jars, anyway. But I do have more jars on order.
After all that, I rinsed the blobby wax out in the sink to get the honey off it, at least as well as I could. Then I made a cheapo wax melter with a cooler, a piece of glass, and a foil roasting pan.
As you can see, this is an AMERICAN wax melter. As such, it does not really work very well and tends to make a big mess. If you try to adjust it, you get burnt. The jokes just write themselves.
With the old honey out of the way, I was ready to start working on this year's harvest. I have four total boxes of honey to deal with. And let's see our first candidate.
These bees make me crazy sometimes. The comb on these frames is build sideways, making it impossible to pull one frame out and deal with it. So I turned the entire box of frames upside-down into the strainer.
This is the other side of the same box of frames. They made a herringbone of comb.
So how to deal with that? A knife, a willingness to stick your hands in honey up to the elbows, and a bit of patience.
Here's the comb cut out of the frames and ready to be processed.
We mostly process honey with crush-and-strain, which is exactly what it sounds like. That means combs like these crazy combs are not a huge problem: we just cut the comb out, crush it, and strain the honey out. It's time-consuming but it works OK at the small levels of production we have.
And after I went at it with the potato masher for half an hour.
After crushing it, I let it drip through tray overnight at least. Then I can go back to the beginning of the post and decant it through the sieve into a bucket. Of course, I can't decant it into our bucket because it has a leak, but once the replacement honey gate arrives I can get this back on track.
At the very center of the mess of comb was some brood comb. I don't crush that into the honey, but I will wash it off, then send it through the wax melter.
One box down, one more in the back hall to go, and two more still outside. We are going to have a silly amount of honey.
]]>In the meantime.
Some folks have asked for full shots of the bog garden. It's really hard to take pictures of because it is in full sun, so I have to remember to go out in the twilight to take pictures. By which time the flowers have closed up.
And here we are. The drain end feels like it's sinking a little, so I need to get under there with a jack and lift it up to even it out.
(Please admire our patio umbrella, which is lying down because in the evening we get a strong wind off the bay that will easily pick up an open umbrella.)
And yes, I did even attach the shower part. I have a dumb idea of actually plumbing the shower head into the irrigation and occasionally spraying everything down. This is one of those incredibly irritating low-flow "mist" showerheads. You know the kind where you basically can't get a decent shower because the spray is so fine? Where better to use such a shower head than as an irrigation tool? Otherwise it would just be trash. The hard part is going to be getting the water pressure high enough to make it mist the right way.
The way I water the entire tub is by filling this sink up. It directs water down under the plants so they don't get drowned but always have wet feet. I'm still working on a constant dripper for this; mostly I just need more time when I don't have a hundred other things to do.
I'm also still pondering whether I need some kind of top-dressing on the planting mix. It does get a little crusty on hot days. But I'm not sure what I would use.
The plants are really happy. As you can see from the overall shots, I went for smaller plants that can grow and fill in the space. I have more of a "buy small and grow them in" budget than a "buy large, impressive plants that will look amazing right now" budget. This drosera I got from our neighbors is blooming now, and I have some hopes for self-sowed seedlings showing up. From what I know of other bog gardens, the plants can grow quite rapidly to fill in the space, so in a year it should look much more decorative.
The "Feist Dog" sarracenia is really happy. Every time I go out to fiddle with the garden there is something buzzing in the pitchers, and they have a decided lean from lots of bugs inside (surprisingly, as far as I can tell only one bee; the pitchers are still fairly small). In the center you can see several new pitchers starting to come up, which is a good sign.
Speaking of the bees, I requeened one hive successfully, and they are going mad putting up lavender honey (it's about the only thing in bloom now and every lavender plant in the neighborhood is alive with bees all day long). In the other hive I could not find the queen for the life of me. They had one really ugly box full of combs that were built sideways on the frames and I could not get in there to look for her. So I split the hive into one side where I knew there was no queen -- they got my fancy new Italian queen. The other side has the yucky box and a queen excluder and I'm going to just spend a month or so finding her, and then I can recombine those frames with the split with the new queen.
The reason for requeening the hives was that the bees were very irritable, and in an urban back yard I won't allow that. Even in dearth they need to be mild-mannered or they have to go.
Anyway, I went out today and did a quick inspection and both the big hives were running out of room so I added honey supers on top. The tiny split hive was having trouble releasing their queen so I helped them out a little. And I need to go into the middle hive again later this week and resume looking for that stupid queen.
Out front, the plum tree is doing well.
I was going through my notes on this tree and this is Parfumé de Septembre, even though I think I've called it Golden Transparent repeatedly; that one died off early on for unknown reasons. I am quite fond of this tree; every year it produces so many of these tiny, sweet plums. People walking by on the street eat some of them, and we have plenty for ourselves.
Every year we learn important lessons about how many tiny plums you should eat in one sitting. It is less than you think. They are just so easy to eat. I've gone out and picked several collanders full of them so far. Once the fruit is over, I'll prune the tree back for size. Next year, I'd like to plant more kinds of these tiny European plums out front. We will see what the garden designers think of that.
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