Herb Garden

Once the patio was built by professionals, our real work began. We took on two fairly large projects to help turn our patio into what we wanted. The first was building a raised herb garden on one side. We used lots of bricks we'd saved from our old patio and started stacking. D resisted using adhesive except at some of the corners, just in case we decided we didn't like the outcome. But the weight of the soil on both sides and the patio itself seem to be holding it in place for now. Because our yard has a slope, we built the bed up 5 bricks high on the low side and X on the highest side. We decided that higher than that would definitely require gluing the bricks in place.

We hauled in a lot of compost to help build up the sides and also to fill the garden and swapped out bricks that had too much visible mortar on the exposed sides, to make the whole thing look neat.

We planted a bunch of herbs, moved the big pots nearby, and called it a day (weekend, multiple weekend).

Stuff started popping up pretty quickly, but I'd gotten a late start on planting when I realized that many of the herbs said to start indoors in February, so I also cheated and bought some baby plants.

We moved a very sad looking, leggy rosemary from the front yard and bought thyme, sage, oregano, lavender, and dill plants, plus an additionally happy looking rosemary. We planted cilantro and borage (it sounded cool and has pretty blue flowers) directly from seeds. We planted kale in the pots and had various mint varieties growing in two other pots already. We have basil (Thai and Italian) also, but that's been planted among the tomatoes in our vegetable garden.

My awesome friend made me these beautiful markers that go with the blue furniture we seem to be acquiring (more on that later).

Here's the whole scene, freshly watered, back in April when we finished it.

Fast forward a month and everything still looks healthy and green (except the kale - that never seems to grow well for us). We rearranged our flower pots to tuck our giant shade umbrella in the middle, but otherwise have been very happy with how this garden has turned out. We find ourselves going outside regularly to pick herbs as needed.

Next year, I will add parsley to the mix as well. I didn't think we used it very often but we've needed it a few times this spring. Anything other herbs I should plant?

Rocky River

So after the final tree at the back corner of our yard died and we were unable even to keep grass there due to the damp, we realized that we had to do something a little different. As we got quotes for a patio, we asked for suggestions for what to do for this back corner, as well. First, we considered a true rain garden that could pass a perc test and maybe even qualify for some rebates and grants. But one of the landscapers pointed out that you don't want to create a rain garden where there's already too much water - it already attracts too much water and has trouble absorbing it. Rain gardens are better suited for areas where you can redirect water to help spread it out. So we abandoned that idea but still decided to put in water friendly plants and replace the grass (actually, mud) with rocks. And finally, we wanted high enough plants to help cover up the fence line and provide privacy. Here was the proposal we went with, which included 4 cubic yards of river rocks:

They put it all together pretty quickly, given the little trucks that they were able to bring through the yard to deposit all that rock. They put in landscaping cloth too, to help reduce the weeds that might sprout there. Here's the view before everything woke up - you can see the birch in the back corner most prominently.

It makes a lovely sweeping arc from our yard and was the perfect place to move our giant concrete bench.

Here's the sedge, with a red chokeberry behind it. Sedge looks a lot like a spider plant:

There turned to be just one little problem. Apparently, if you raise up a wet spot (by putting rocks on top of it), it just moves the wet stop, it doesn't get rid of it. So the area in front of and to the side of this lovely rock garden ended up being constantly damp--and that included the area next to our shed. That was a big oops. So D took on a huge project. He moved a bunch of the rock, cut into the landscaping cloth, and dug a little channel in between the new plants. His thinking was that this would give the rainwater a place to collect inside the rock area, instead of in front of it. It was a grueling process, made more frustrating knowing that he was undoing work we'd just paid for:

The good news is that it seemed to work pretty well. He left it uncovered for a while, to test the concept when it rained.

Satisfied it was doing its job, he overlapped the landscaping cloth over the cut and put the rocks back into place. Here's what happens now when it rains (and we are going to try to be diligent about tossing in a mosquito dunk). The water drains within a day or two, depending on how wet the soil beneath it already is, and the ground in front of the rocky area has been staying pretty dry!

Fast forward to today and here's what the scene looks like. The plants have all woken up and there's a little (dry) channel running through it. You can even see the random metal sheet that D uncovered when he was digging the channel, resting on the fence.

I'm not sure why the landscapers covered the old tree trunk with landscaping cloth (after they took another couple of inches off the height of it) and left it like that. We put a flower pot on it but didn't love it. We could free it from the cloth so that it at least is a tree trunk and not a random gray circle. Any ideas?

Another Two Trees Come Down

This post is necessary just as a scene-setter for the next one, since it's about stuff we did last year when I wasn't blogging. Sometime last spring or early summer after all the leaves came in, we realized that two of our trees that were fine the year before were definitely not fine anymore. The mimosa (the arrow on the right) didn't grow any leaves at all, and the oak (on the left) either leafed out and then died or maybe just never dropped its leaves from the previous year. This corner of our yard, always damp (more on that in future posts), appears to be a major tree killer. A small one fell about two years ago and 9 years ago, several of the trees there died off.

D climbed up into the mimosa to see if it was still alive, despite having no leaves. We wondered whether we should give it another year. Nope, brittle and dried up. We probably could have cut down the mimosa ourselves (or ignored it for a while) but the other tree was too big to ignore. It couldn't hit the house but could potentially fall on the shed, so it had to come down.

And so in the pandemic year without too much to entertain us, we have a fun afternoon show watching the tree come down. We have a perfect view from inside our sun room, looking out the back patio doors. They cleared the lower branches first and then started taking the main trunk down, chunk by chunk. We even got some action shots:

And nothing fell on the shed, yay! They removed the mimosa for us too, while they were there, but it was much less dramatic and pretty much all from the ground.

So that was last summer. Then affter a very wet fall and watching this corner stay muddy for months, we realized we needed a better solution. It was too wet there even to sustain grass (or weeds). Time for something else.