Happy Hawthorn (and other things)

Our new hawthorn seems to be settling in nicely:

The bees like it too. These pictures are from a few weeks ago. Now the flowers are gone but the flower remnants (not sure what they're called - if this was a rose, they would be the rose hips) seem to attract squirrels. I wanted to snap a picture yesterday when we saw one hanging out on a tiny limb, but he was too fast for me.

A long, mild, wet spring has made our garden finally come alive. Plants that we'd given up on are in full bloom and plants that bloomed last year, like our clematis, are stronger than ever. I'm sure it will all look dried out and downtrodden come July, but at least it's pretty now.

We've been continuing to clear out the space in our backyard to about where we think our property line ends (we still haven't gotten it officially surveyed and it borders an empty lot). We kept the two strongest looking trees that must have grown from seeds/acorns. However, they're too close together to both live, so we're trying to decide which to keep (it would be too hard to dig one up in tact and move it, plus we don't really have another space for a new tree).

The nearest one is a tulip tree - we even found a flower to prove it:

Not sure what the second one is. The leaves have two different distinct patterns. Any guesses? I'd like to figure it out before deciding which one stays.

One more pretty picture to leave you with - another creature enjoying our yard:

(Never seen a blue one outside of special butterfly gardens!)

Magical Corian

About a month ago, I did this to the counter:

We weren't entirely sure what kind of counter we had, and I was almost certain the previous owners said it was Silestone. But it turned out that looking up at the underside of the counter from inside the cupboards revealed a label and we have Corian in "Midnight." That still didn't help us know what to do though yet again the care instructions make it sound invincible (or certainly invincible to an essential oil which, I confirmed, would merely cause mild irritation to the skin at full concentration).

So, for a while, we did nothing. And that may be the best thing to be doing. Just going about our normal business, here is the same spot as of yesterday, in different lighting:

I tried deliberately to choose angles and lighting where the ring was most dramatic, so you can see it has faded significantly. Not a clue why or how. Are we somehow re-adding oils? Orange oil is a known cleaning product so maybe the essential oil just "overly cleaned" the counter and now it is becoming shiny with grease? Regardless, it looks like if we continue to ignore this problem, it will go away on its own. For once, benign neglect seems to be the way to go (now if only that same strategy worked with our yard...).

How to make your room bigger

The red rug in our living room was a discount buy that I have regretted for years. It started shredding at the corners within months of purchasing it. Therefore vacuuming it became particularly challenging (occasionally I would forget to be careful, drag the vacuum to the corner, and suck up a nasty chunk of threads) and small red yarns made it to every room of the house. This, for example, was one of the better corners:

Unfortunately I could not find a rug in a similar color that I liked. I'd been checking all the usual suspect websites for a few seasons, to no avail. And then, this weekend, we wandered into an estate sale...The rug must have been meant to be because it was still waiting for us the following day when we went back to see if they would take less (and, in fact, it already had been marked 50% off, which was exactly what we wanted to pay). And so with a little muscle, we had it rolled, into the car, and then into our house.

One problem:

Yeah, it's a little big.

We knew that already, of course. We knew that our red rug was 5'x8'. And we measured for the 8'x'10 on Saturday and new it fit tightly, if at all. But it was a beautiful Bokhara rug made in Pakistan. The first "Persian" style rug that I ever liked, mostly because it was very simple. And, even better, it was only $300, which was far cheaper than even smaller, less high quality rugs at stores I'd been checking out like Pottery Barn and Crate and Barrel.

So we resorted to the back-up plan. The sitting area of our living room had a little extra space to work with.

In fact, it fit fabulously! Just under the front legs of the sofas - enough to tie the space together (and also to anchor it in place until we get a rug pad). I was worried that such a big rug, especially a patterned rug, would make the room feel small. But in fact, we now essentially have more usable space in the living room because we usually tried to stay on the rug (especially now with the baby requiring a little extra padding while she learns to roll over) and so we now have a few extra square feet to work with, right up to the furniture.

And the teal rug works well in the entry way. Though now the room color scheme is a little too divided, with blue on one half and red on the other (there's a red fan above the fireplace, if you recall). So I have to try to bring more blue elements to the sitting area.

Sadly, I think the best way to do that is to refinish the coffee table, which now clashes with the rug in a slightly different shade of red. Refinishing it the first time was awful, but hopefully the current paint job will act as a base coat to prevent some of the problems that I encountered. Or the project will end with me throwing the table to the curb in a fit of rage and hitting Craigslist for something else. But either way, teal is the name of the game.

Reclaiming more yard

We have a sizable backyard but much of it isn't usable lawn. We've been cutting away at it little by little, beginning with the big project of 3 years ago when we pulled back a ton of ivy. Last week we made a little more progress after a long hiatus.

On the side of the house next to an empty lot there is what must once have been a garden set off with railroad ties. Whatever the original intent, we inherited a mess of ivy, random plants, and even a few stray saplings that had found a safe place to root. It seemed like a small and manageable area to tackle this spring. We didn't get a true "before" picture but this is early in the process:

 And here it is when we wrapped up for the day:

 And an arial shot:

We pulled up almost everything up to the first railroad tie divider except for the biggest tree (think it's an oak - we'll take a picture next time we're out there) and some random strawberry plants we found growing in the corner. Once we clear the second half, we'll pull up the railroad ties (ugh!), rototill up the remaining bits of ivy and weed roots, and try our best to entice some grass to grow. This area of our yard is dangerously close to our property line (we can't figure out where it is and haven't cared enough to have someone come survey) so we're not going to do much more than that.

What else have we been up to? Well we've been lucky to have some great spring weather and a very tolerant baby, so we've been setting her up outside with us in the shade and doing our usual annual yard maintenance (mostly to no avail, but apparently we are eternal optimists in this regard...).

Baby next to her hawthorn tree:

Thatching up some dead grass, followed by over-seeding with new seeds that didn't actually seem to root, followed by - quite a bit later - some fertilizing weed and feed when it became obvious that we had a weed problem more than a lack of grass problem. This year, remembering your advice last  year, we saw we had those little flowers in the lawn and tried to take action. But unlike last summer, we are not going to spread compost and reseed the whole thing again. Too much work. D would like to hire someone to aerate the lawn for real, since last time we thought we'd hired someone to aerate the lawn they did it by poking holes in it, instead of pulling out plugs to loosen up the soil

We realized - to our annoyance - that we are much better at getting grass to grow from nothing than from fixing what we already have. Especially because the front lawn is inundated with liriope that had spread and mixed with the grass. Sometimes I'm tempted to try to uproot the whole front lawn and start over. Or get a professional to do it for us. Our best attempts at over-seeding, fertilizing, etc. seem to be going nowhere.

And of course we couldn't focus on the lawn without some serious care of the gardens. Here we are weeding and mulching the flower beds:

We never get everything we plant to come back but this year our plants have definitely filled out a bit (except for losing our giant rosemary plant to the harsh winter). This fall for the first time since we put these things in the ground, I want to start dividing up some of the heartier things like the irises to spread them around.

Have you done any gardening lately?