Summer Garden

Last fall we uprooted a lot of plants from our front garden to fill it with native pollinators. We had two goals. The first, of course, was to get rid of invasive species and plant things that will attract and nourish birds, bees, and butterflies. The second was to plant things that could thrive in our native soil and with our local weather. So it seems like a good idea to check in, now when our garden should be in full bloom.  Let's compare:

Last fall, we planted cardinal flower

Now, with lots more color!

Let's break it down. Starting at the leftmost edge, near our troublesome downspout, here's the view last fall:

And here it is now (the angle is a little different to highlight some of our less successful areas):

Visible here should be a few different varieties of milkweed but our "Red Butterfly" Asclepius doesn't seem to have come back, just the swamp milkweed. The American Beautyberry is also looking pretty sad:

Just some spindly twigs. We tried loosening up the earth last weekend (it was packed down, maybe due to some of the water drainage issues) and are wondering if there is simply too much sun here to grow certain types of plants. It's clear this corner still needs some work, we're just not sure exactly what.

Moving along, here's the fall view:

You can scroll back up to see the first summer picture for a good overall scene of this, but here are my favorite images to capture this section:

Coneflower (echinacea), Black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia), and cardinal flowers (Lobelia cardinalis) all came back, as did some of the Russian sage. The bee balm (monarda) "Jacob Cline" came back too--about a month before the rest so it's already on the way out. 

Moving to the garden on the other side of the house, here's fall:

And here's summer. It's not particularly exciting because the deer seem to have gotten to the yellow Black-eyed Susan flowers but at least the plants themselves seem to have survived.

Then further down, we planted more Black-eyed Susans, another Beautyberry bush, and a Linder Benzoin "spicebush":

Many of the Black-eyed Susans have come back and this Beautyberry bush is looking very happy, unlike the one on the other side of the house. No little purple berries yet, but that's to be expected. It blooms in June and July and grows berries in August and September, so we're right on track.

Here's the spicebush--not particularly exciting at the moment. It's not even taller than our iris greens. But on the other hand, it is green and not wilting or anything so I'l call that a win. I do hope it gets bigger though, since a quick google search suggests that it can grow 1-2' a year and this little guy has barely budged.

Given our track record, I'd call this a success so far. One corner of the garden really seems to be struggling as is the Hawthorn tree nearby (more on that later), so maybe that side of the house just doesn't have enough...something (not sure what that something is). But the rest seems relatively happy and full of native pollinators.

Drinking Problem

We have a problem with our alcohol. No, it's not what you think. We don't drink enough of it. Or we don't drink enough of it based on the rate we buy it. Our liquor, a modest selection, has lived in our pantry closet since we bought this house. But thanks to maturing taste buds and a pandemic that led us to become our own fancy bartenders, we've accumulated more than we can fit. It's starting to become an issue of survival. I recently found myself asking: "Do we really need that rice cooker? I need to make space for these bottles."

We decided that the best solution would be to buy a liquor cabinet or something like that to store at least some of these, but exactly what to buy and where to put it is a challenge. We have filled up nearly all available space in our house for furniture, and it wouldn't really. make sense to move this far from the kitchen/dining area anyway.

This is pretty much the only wall available to us in the area. 

I really love our sideboard and the pictures above it, so we're trying to avoid adding a whole china cabinet-style thing here, or stacking something above the sideboard. That only leaves space on both sides (the small rolling open storage our instant pot lives on can definitely get moved out, especially if said cabinet solution offers some hidden storage for the water bottles and lunch boxes that live on the bottom shelves). The cat water fountain (yes, our cat only drinks from a fountain) could move to the other side of the sideboard, freeing up the corner on the left. And...that's pretty much it for space options.

So I've started exploring our options. As always, I started with IKEA and found I really liked this option, the BILLY/OXBERG:

Or the GODMORGON (I guess this technically is a bathroom cabinet but I think it could look good anywhere):

D is worried that these would look awkward right next to our sideboard, since the styles don't really match and the sideboard has elaborate scrolling and trim that wouldn't let us push this cabinet right up next to it. So he's thinking a corner cabinet might be better, so that we don't have to try to line them up together. Summon good old HEMNES:

This would take some work because we both agree we'd like a glass door to display the prettier bottles, along with maybe some lighting, like a much smaller version of this hack we found on the internet (if you haven't guess already this post is really just my "mood board" and an invitation for you to make suggestions):

I'm also not sure that the HEMNES could hold more than a few bottles, which makes it feel sort of pointless.

Then we departed from IKEA's choices to see what is out there. And oh boy things got expensive quickly. This cabinet, from a furniture company I've never heard of--Ballard Designs--immediately seemed like it was exactly what we wanted:

Over $1,000...great....Maybe I should get back to that $100 BILLY bookshelf and door.

Here's another random internet picture for what I think I want:

Now that we've seen it, D and I both think that a rounded front looks elegant and that having trim would help it blend more into the corner almost like it was part of the house (we've even talked about potentially painting something to match our walls so it looked more like a built-in).

We're not even close to a solution but I thought it would be fun to post this and see if anyone else has ideas. We need something that won't take up much room and offers some storage behind clear glass doors (because some of those bottles are really pretty) and some closed storage, but minimal open storage where things can get really dusty. It can't take up much space and ideally has to go next to the existing sideboard at the edge of our kitchen (either alongside it or caddy corner with it if it's a corner unit). If we can find the time, this is probably a good time to go antiquing...Leave a comment with your ideas (besides the obvious one to buy less liquor--we're too far gone for that one)!

Our Minds are in the Gutters

It was pretty obvious that our front gutters had a problem. This was the way the water was flowing during our last summer thunderstorm:

Isn't the water supposed to go INTO the downspout?

The gutter is a little bent up from when a tree branch fell into it years ago, but it has always worked just fine despite that. We thought this was an installation issue after we got new siding. The siding company had had to come back and tighten the new back gutters, so it was possible the blockages was related to re-installing the front. But since these were our original copper gutters and downspout, we didn't want to drag them back out if it wasn't due to their installation. We figured we'd see what we could do first.

Cue a very long morning that involved attempting to send water down--and a plumbing snake up--the downspout. Here we are trying to fill the downspout with a hose to see how quickly it filled up. It seemed like the clog was at the bottom, based on what we could hear. We also couldn't push the hose all the way through to the bottom, so something was likely in the way.

Time for the snake (well, first, time to spend 10 minutes trying to *find* the snake in the basement, shed, and garage...). After detaching the downspout from the corrugated pipe, D spent quite a while trying to unclog everything, since it seemed like our best option. The snake did make it all the way up the downspout and barely dislodged anything, but repeated attempts to send water down it made it clear the clog was still there. He spent a while doing this over and over again, each time pulling out only a small amount of debris.

We hesitated to move on to the next step but reluctantly decided to cut the copper pipe. From knocking on the downspout and listening to the sound, we were pretty confident the clog was just past the bend. We didn't want to lose the angle though, so we cut to where we figured we'd be able to reach up and get it. We figured we could always cut higher if we had to.

And there it was! So much debris. Lots of leaves and decaying gunk. Fortunately no squirrel bodies this time (you think I'm kidding but note there's a link to an old post so...). I guess the plumber's snake was just too thin and flexible to break up all the debris.

This time we could send the hose all the way through. 

Obviously we couldn't reattach the copper part that D had sawed off (we have a lot of fancy toys but not a heavy duty soldering iron). So we just used more corrugated pipe to bridge the gap.

The next step, obviously, is buying some gutter guards. Our gutters are narrow (the siding folks said they don't usually install this width anymore, opting for greater capacity) but it does seem like a few options are available for sale. We're just trying to figure out what to purchase. Hopefully we get the guards on before everything clogs again.