Native-born

 In the summer, we were too hot and unmotivated to do any home improvements. Now as the weather turns to fall, we're too busy WITH home improvements to post about them. Well, yard improvements anyway. Tis the season to plant! We have a lot of goals for the yard and garden this fall. The first was to mostly gut and re-plant this garden bed. 

I really thought I'd taken a good before picture, but I did not--this wasn't even supposed to be a picture of this garden--it's of the maple tree in front of it. But you can see how overgrown the garden is behind it. It wasn't just overgrown, it was full of plants that never really thrived, or ones that we decided we didn't like. Just about the only plants there that were happy AND beautiful were the rose bushes (which we planted) and the camellias (which we inherited from the previous owners).

Now we've already done a dramatic garden remodel once, when we took out as much of the dreaded liriope "border" as we could, because it had taken over the garden entirely (we STILL find liriope in the garden to this day but I rip it out whenever I can and it's only in small spots). The Black-eyed Susans that we planted in 2014 and had done so well were in a disastrous state thanks to being eaten and likely also being crowded out with weeds. Weeding around them is very hard because the little violets that have invaded look similar at first glance to the leaves of a Black-eyed Susan, except more heart shaped. Here's an example where I was weeding - the yellow outlines are for the flowers and the red are for the weeds.

The "weeds" do make cute flowers for a small portion of the year - here's an example from spring. But they are invasive and take out and aren't particularly good pollinators or valuable, so this year I finally decided to do battle with them. Among other things.

So onto the garden makeover after that aside about weeding. We did a lot of weeding, but we did much more than that.

Besides the gardens just looking "messy," the main reason we started over was to refocus our garden beds on native pollinator plants. We had a great time learning about what was local (which, as an added bonus, should mean that they are hardy!).

Here is the full view of the left garden:

And here it is in parts. In this picture, besides the rose bushes (and a few tree seedling that planted themselves that we plan to try to transplant this winter), there are, from left to right:

Callicarpa Americana "American Beautyberry," Asclepias "Red Butterfly" and Asclepias swamp milkweed (more on these later), and Lobelia "Cardinal flower":

Moving along, there's some Russian sage to add to one very leggy one that we planted years ago that had been struggling as it was crowded out, there's the camellia and hosta that was already there, and then bee balm monarda "Jacob Cline." All along the front, we refreshed the Black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia) and cone flowers (echinacea) too.

We are doing less of a major overhaul in the right garden, but we did some major weeding and mulching (all those pesky violets) and rebuilding the Black-eyed Susans and coneflowers. We also used some of our leftover patio bricks to make some pretty edging.

Further down in that garden, we cleared some space of unwanted plants and put in a second beautyberry bush (these plants produce beautiful purple berries that the kids are really enjoying playing with, being mixed into concoctions or used as props for "fairy houses"--thank goodness they are past the age where I'm concerned someone might eat one). The other major change here was replacing our butterfly bush with an as-yet-very-tiny Lindera Benzoin "spicebush" - it's the little yellowish green plant on the right side of this picture. It should eventually get big enough to cover our window and give us some good privacy like our butterfly bush did, but is ACTUALLY attractive to--and healthy for--butterflies and a better part of our local ecosystem. Some very smart friends helped educate us that our purple-flowered butterfly bush, while pretty, was invasive, crowding out local pollinator plants, while not being particularly helpful to butterflies during their whole lifecycle (more info here).

We still have three more Lobelia to plant, this time a deep magenta "Starship Deep Rose" (I would love to have the job of naming these, but I suspect I'd have to be able to actually invent/discover these variants to do so) in addition to our new our red ones. 

I'm so excited about our new garden and hoping that they stay alive and flourish. Even better if they manage to attract all the pollinators that we hope to attract, like bees, hummingbirds, and butterflies (more on butterflies soon!). And best of all, we debated at length whether we should hire someone to do this project and we did it ourselves in three weekends and about $300 in plants.

Rain rain

My to-do list keeps growing, but I'm getting no home or yard things accomplished. So I thought it would be a good time to look back on something that happened almost exactly a year ago. A big storm flooded our yard more than ever before. We were lucky that no lasting damage occurred, but it was scary to watch:

Another view of the swing set:

We had to dry out the shed and all the items that were on the floor of it:

It was clear that the gutters and downspouts couldn't handle the volume of water--which itself wasn't surprising given how much rained down. Rain gushed up backwards from the pipes, which was especially bad since many of them are right near the basement stairs. It's hard to see from this picture but water was flowing UP the pipe and back onto the rocks.

This caused water to pour under the door to the basement, thought fortunately we were able to wet vac it up before it spread to anything it could damage.

The downpour also showed us that there were holes in the part of the downspouts that were underground--and under the patio--where water belched up to the surface in weird places. It was one of the reasons we decided to get a new patio, to give us an opportunity to see what was underneath and also to re-level it, since all the soggy spots had produced a really uneven surface. What we found was a mishmash of different sized clay pipes, most of them clogged and some of them smashed or broken:

When we had the patio upgraded, the work crew paid attention to the pipes running under the patio, even identifying and repairing a giant hole in one. We knew this was our only chance to fix everything. They also installed a rock garden at the wettest part of our yard in the hopes that it would help move the water along. D then dug a trench though that rock garden for water to collect in when we get downpours.

So has it worked? Well we've had a few big storms since (but nothing that bad) and the yard does seem to drain better, mostly collecting in the rock garden at the far end of our backyard. And we've certainly had quite a lot of rain to test it out in:

But we know that one of our drainage pipes under the patio must have sprung a leak, because after our last heavy rain, we had a bunch of gravel on our patio, pushed up from water spurting out a pipe. It seems unlikely we'll be able to fix this so now that the new patio is installed, unfortunately.

So I guess we just brush off the gravel and hope it isn't so bad that it weakens the ground underneath it. Fingers crossed...