More experiments in yard trash

This old cement block has been floating around my yard, looking terrible and growing moss, so I'm going to try it as a lavender pot.

This is Grosso lavender, which is especially straight and spiky and it smells AMAZING.

It's probably too small a container, but we'll see how it does. Besides, a dying plant emerging from yard debris never looks bad, right?

I need this.

I found this at Portland Nursery and I need it.

 

 It's a birdbath. And it's a tiki dude.

DUDE.

The view as of today

We still need to work at making this look less like a giant square of cedar chips but for right now we needed to suppress the hoards of weeds that were sure to colonize the area.

Next up: evergreen plants, rain garden, new tree, deck. Go!

Edited to add: here's a reminder of the before:

I am so traumatized.

Remember this?

 

We had a guy from craigslist come and do this. Listen for when I tell him to "watch the peonies, brother."

Removing the concrete slab from ChuckT on Vimeo.

Everything looked so good at first. He was removing big chunks of concrete without disturbing the plants around the slab. I mean, check this out:

Unfortunately, the lawn looked like this. And he dropped a piece of concrete on one of the bloodgood maples on the parking strip.

Our front yard looks BUSTED. I don't even want to post photos. It was incredibly stressful watching him barely skim past the side of my house, over and over. He started dropping pieces and I started worrying he would take out my chimney. Remember your mantra when hiring people: "Are you licensed and bonded?"

I have no idea if he was licensed and bonded because I FORGOT TO ASK.

But now my yard, my beautiful yard, looked like this. It was traumatizing. I felt like someone had raped and pillaged my happy place.

Greg and I got up the next morning to start moving the raised beds (I swear I'll post The Plan soon) and Greg discovered that my Oregon Iris is about to bloom for the first time since I planted it 18 months ago.

And I swooned and I was happy again. Luckily, nature is good at recovering. We are both trying to remember that. I was shocked at how viscerally I reacted to seeing my yard torn up; I was even more shocked that Greg was upset too. So last night after dinner with his family he thatched and reseeded the lawn in the dwindling light. I took photos of parts of the yard that are still pretty.

The good news is that I can see the plan coming together now. We dismantled the dog bone and reassembled it where the cement slab used to be. Our shape inspiration was two wine glasses (the stemless kind).

 

It the corner behind the wine glasses we're going to put in a Colorado spruce. This will give us some height in that corner and something green to look at in the winter. We're gaining more planting space in front of that and I'll need to really work on getting stuff that's evergreen. And of course I'll need to finally yank the weird mystery willow. 

So yeah, short evergreen plant suggestions . . . GO!

Cedar bark is being delivered so we can lay down pathways before everything turns to weeds. Then the boy and I can get down to the sweet business of arm wrestling over who gets to choose what kind of hippie lawn to plant on the old dogbone space. I want something flowering and low water; he wants something that looks like a traditional lawn.

Of course, he rescued me from a LOT of garden spiders this weekend (new and interesting ones that were SO scary!) and he removed the biggest slug I have ever seen, so I'll probably let him have his way.

He's all curled up here--he was HUGE

And now, your moment of zen.

We destroyed our yard this weekend. Pictures of the carnage soon!

In the meantime, here's something pretty to look at.

Deer fern, columbine, lady fern, swoon!

Shut up, it worked.

I waited too long to order peony cages and then they took forever to get here, so my plants were HUGE. After denuding the smallest plant of a lot of its foliage trying to get the cage on, I decided to try wrapping the peony stems in tinfoil.

 

 Whatever, it worked.

Weeds

Five dollars to whoever can identify this weed. It's new to my yard this year and it's EVERYWHERE.