The Yard, Garden & Patio show

So I did finally make it to the Yard, Garden, and Patio show after mistakenly arriving at the gun show. Gun show people are really different than garden show people. They don't smile, they don't share coupons in line, and they don't compliment your scarf the way the ticket guy did at the YGP. 

I have never been so happy to arrive safely at the Convention Center. And thank you, random people behind me at that seminar, for being nice when I rudely eavesdropped on your conversation and demanded that you show me your hellebores. Gardeners are really wonderful people.

Once there I rushed off to the Japanese Garden Elements for the Home Garden talk by Sadafumi Uchiyama. I took a Japanese art history class in college that left me permanently enamored of all things Japanese. They can take an artform from China, Korea, India, or wherever, and do it better.

Winter Landscape by Sesshu

Mr. Uchiyama was a lovely man who spoke about his work at the Portland Japanese Garden, his training in Japan, and about how gardening is great because it's a level playing field--you just need to push that wheelbarrow across the yard a hundred times and you'll get really good at it, regardless of whether you're an idiot or a genius. That's probably why this accidental-gun-show-attendee likes gardening so much. I take terrible notes and I have a crappy memory, so if anyone attended this session and feels I'm misquoting, please chime in.

He spoke about gardening mostly being maintenance and how the Japanese look at the life of a garden in terms of more than 50 years. One family might tend a garden for ten generations, during which time trees will die and need to be replaced but the structure will largely stay the same. He showed us pictures of the Japanese garden thirty years ago and how it's changed (or not changed) throughout the years, including some dramatic photos when a Douglas fir fell and took out the waterfall.

Photo from the Portland Japanese Garden's Facebook page

Finally, he offered some practical tips to incorporating this tradition into your yard. The first lesson: 

• Kill the corners

Ease the corners of buildings, either by planting on the corners of the back of your house or building a fence that defers the edge of the house, even if it doesn't offer privacy. 

He said that foundation plantings in a yard "kill the corners" by easing the transition from a vertical fence to the horizontal ground. He talked about how important rock is to Japanese landscaping and how it must look like it does in nature. He said you can use them to kill corners, like if you're transitioning a wide footpath to a narrow one. Stick a rock at the corner and the width change won't be so noticeable. I'd think that plants in ceramic pots could likewise be used to kill corners.

Second lesson: 

• ease the transition from one material to another. 

Instead of letting grass grow right up to a cement path, he showed us a picture of a sidewalk edged with a trim of poured cement with stone embedded, which was abutted with four inches of river rock, which was edged with clay ceiling tiles turned on their sides, which finally lead to grass. It was gorgeous.

This wasn't the photo he showed us but it's a close approximation

Or use pavers on top of your cement slab to ease that transition to a flagstone pathway.

Click to embiggen

Last lesson (and what landscapers always say): 

• group your plants. 

Don't buy one of each. I hate this advice because HOW WILL I EVER FIT ALL THE PLANTS I WANT IN MY YARD IF I HAVE TO BUY MULTIPLES OF THE SAME THING? He says he tells his students that it's okay to leave a bare spot rather than putting a single plant in. I say phooey to that, Mr. Fancypants with your multiple landscape degrees and years and years of experience!

He said that Japanese gardens don't use annuals or perennials. Their gardens rely on an relatively unchanging lanscape of trees and shrubs that don't die down to the ground at the end of the year. The winter garden has the same bones as the summer garden. Lastly he talked about what a Japanese garden is not. It is not lanterns or footbridges or water features or tchotkies. I was so happy he said that because those lanterns and bridges to nowhere drive me crazy.

I also attended a panel on hot plant picks for 2012. Sadly, there was no projector for diplaying images of the plants they were discussing. Good thing there was June Condruck from Blooming Nursery to deliver the horticultural equivalent of phone sex. She was so good at talking up plants ("An absolutely stunning blue eye surrounded by petals that fade to a dusky purple atop an unfurling mass of shiny green foliage . . .") that I didn't really need visuals. I think I put a star by everything she described.

WANT. Eryngium 'Big Blue'
Photo from High Country Gardens

And then I bought some hellebores and some hot pink bleeding hearts to drown out the mousy and diminutive pale pink native variety that I have in the shade garden. 

All in all it was a very good time. Be sure to check out Scott's photos of the feature gardens over at Rhone Street Gardens. And if you're interested in attending the Spring Home and Garden Show, THAT'S at the Expo Center next weekend. 

Because I'm an idiot

Ask me about the time I didn't check the location of the Yard, Garden,
and Patio show carefully enough (or at all) and ended up here instead.

Spotted in the yard

I think thought this was a red-breasted nuthatch but its eye stripe doesn't match what I see on the Internet.

Sitta canadensis?

Anybody know what this guy is? Sorry the pictures look like they were shot on a convenience store's security camera.

It's unorthodox but it works

We wanted to reroute more gutters to the rain garden but I didn't want to do anything permanent until we'd really tested whether it could handle so much more water. My first thought was a racquetball over the downspout hole (I don't know) but Greg didn't have one, despite the fact that he owns every piece of sporting equipment ever.

But a measuring cup worked. Don't laugh.

Believe it or not, this is effectively blocking that downspout and the water is now dumping into the rain garden (which is now filling a lot faster). I can watch it during heavy rain and see if it's in danger of overflowing. If the extra rain overflows or overwhelms the rain garden, I can just yank the measuring cup out of the gutter and take the pressure off.

And if it continues to work we can have that downspout removed professionally. And I own three measuring cup sets so I should survive without this one. Everyone wins! Now stop laughing.

One last obnoxious reminder

Our Portlandia episode airs tonight! If you get IFC you can watch Fred Armisen play video games in our basement. Since I have never been married, I have no children, and Ed McMahon has never showed up on my doorstep brandishing an enormous cardboard check, this is verrrrry exciting.

And then I will shut up about it. We're going over to my friend's house (whose dining room will be in the episode too!) to watch, but we'll have it on our Tivo. If anyone is in Portland and doesn't have the fancy cable, shoot me a message if you want to come over and watch and you can hear me say, "That's our yard. That's our basement! That's our yard. That's our bedroom! That's our yard."

It sounds fun, right?

Bloom Day February 2012

Here in 8b we've had a very mild winter and yet this is the only bloom I have in my yard at the moment. Good thing it's showy.

Helleborus x ballardiae 'HGC Cinnamon Snow'

We have lots of bulbs starting to poke up, my daphne is *this close* to blooming, and I'm hoping that by next month my flowering currants may be putting on a show. Note to self: plant crocuses and snowdrops for next winter so you have as many blooms as some of the others on the garden bloggers' virtual tour.

I think we have a color

House colors: I was leaning toward Peppercorn. Greg was too.

And then he told me that he thought it was too dark but he would go for it if I loved it. I want both of us to love it (and if it looks terrible I need someone to be complicit with me) so I thought about it a while. I mixed some white with the Peppercorn, since he liked the tonality of the color, just not the darkness of it, and put that up on the house. And he liked it! The resulting color actually looks like the picture above.

I swear the difference is more dramatic in person

Of course I didn't measure anything, just glugged some of the Summer White into the Peppercorn and threw it up on the house. I took it into Sherwin Williams and explained what I did. The dude scanned it into his computer and said, "Okay you're all set."

"What do you mean?"
"I scanned it in and we'll give the information to your contractor."
"No, I need you to mix up the paint. The computer is never right."
"Really?"
"Yes. Go mix it."

An hour and half later and 12 iterations and remixes and we had something close enough. I am so glad I am a pain in the ass because that scanned in color wasn't even close to correct. While one of the batches was mixing the two guys at the store started bad mouthing other paint stores and their computers and the fact that they are often too busy/too lazy to have a human look at the colors.

I very tactfully didn't point out that just 45 minutes prior they were going to send me on my way without ever even looking at the computer's color choice. I would like a medal for that.

So the final color choices are Peppercorn-light on the body of the house, Saucy Gold on the door, and Creamy for the trim. Thank you to everyone who chimed in with their opinions--this decision is a huge one and crowd sourcing it made me feel a lot more secure about it.

SWOON.

And soon I'm going to buy all the plants! All of them.

He's flying over our heads in a million pieces!

Because we're painting the house, Greg felt like it was time to finally fix this nonsense that Comcast foisted on us.

Cables across the front of our house.

Cables across our threshold.

Cables across our chimney and across the side of the house . . .

. . . which came in the ceiling of our basement and ran across the length of the room because Comcast doesn't care what your house or rooms or cables look like when they are charging you $85 an hour to give you overpriced cable and Internet service.

So Greg donned this suit, crawled into our scary crawlspace, and ran the cables the right way.

He cheerfully informed me every time he found another spider egg sac, ensuring that I will never ever get in there to help him.

But sometimes your dude is in the crawl space and you're in the office, trying to fish a cable out of the wall and you're trying to figure out where the fuck he is, and you keep tap-tap-tapping on the floor, as if that will help, and he's like, "Heather, that's not helping. I'm underneath the bathtub pipes and I can't hear anything," and sometimes you drill too many holes in the wall trying to figure it out.

But that's okay because I am good at patching holes. Or I am willing. And that's a good thing because we made a LOT of holes in the basement.

I don't even want to explain what happened here, but it involved an unexpected horizontal beam that necessitated a six-inch hole in the middle of the wall, the purchase of a 45-degree drill attachment, and more patching. But we now have a hard-wired ethernet connection to the basement and the office and Greg has plans to install network drops in every room of the house, but probably through the attic next time.

Oddly, my sewing kit came in handy with all of this work. We used the forceps my mother gave me (super handy for sewing AND retrieving cables from the wall), safety pins for attaching the Cat 6 cable to the fish tape, and a seam ripper for undoing all of our safeguards with string.

We're so tired but we have almost no visible cables on the outside of our house and Greg can copy files quickly between his XBOX and his computer and I didn't care about any of this, but it was great to be the helper instead of the instigator, for once. And now I don't have to feel bad when I inform Greg that we're spending next weekend removing sod, right?

(Hat tip to Jess for the Willy Wonka reference in the post title.)

It has to get worse before it gets better

Our house looks like a crack den right now.

And we still don't have colors picked out.

Paint swatches!

Get your judging pants on. Our house painter put up some swatches yesterday..

Scene 1:

Pewter Green, Saucy Gold door, Ivoire trim

I think it reads a little grayer on the swatch. For the record I hate the trim color. This is the painter's favorite.

Pewter Green, Saucy Gold door, Ivoire trim

Scene 2:

Turkish Coffee, Raging Sea door, Creamy trim

Turkish Coffee, Raging Sea door, Creamy trim

Scene 3:

Roycroft Pewter, Offbeat door, Summer White trim

Roycroft Pewter, Offbeat door, Summer White trim

Scene 4:

Peppercorn, Amber Wave door, Napery trim

Peppercorn, Amber Wave door, Napery trim

This last one definitely reads kind of purple. It's very pretty (I think it's my favorite) but I worry we'll be "that purple house." And of course, all the this is conjecture because everyone's monitor will render the colors differently. But tell me what you think anyway. Or if you know where I live come by and look underneath the kitchen window. But not IN it! I hate it when you do that, it's so creepy.

I'm hoping the sun will come out soon so we can see how it looks under something other than clouds. And we have the samples here so I'll paint bigger swatches once Greg and I actually talk to each other (we're like ships in the night this week) and see if he hates all of them. It's possible.

Things lost, things found

I was cleaning up the vegetable beds last fall, a messy process full of soggy rotting tomatoes and fruit flies. At some point in the day I realized that my garden claw was nowhere to be found. I checked the roof (I've left it there before), to no avail.

 

I don't even know.

 

I suspect it is currently being composted by the city of Portland, having made its way into the green yard debris bin.

I recently misplaced my favorite ring that I bought at Chichen Itza. The ring fits me loosely in the morning and snugly by the end of the day, which means it's never quite comfortable on my hand. I told Greg that I couldn't find it anywhere and that I was "pretty sure I did something weird with it." 

As I was readying to weed this weekend I slipped my hands into my gardening gloves and made a fist to loosen the mud dried on them, which caused pain to flare across my middle finger. I pulled out my hand and there was my ring, which had slipped right onto my finger without me noticing.

 

 

I ran into the house, laughing and laughing, so I could tell Greg. This was the same morning I freaked out because I saw a common robin for the first time (he was unmoved in both cases). Say what you will, everything is more magical when you go through life not really paying attention.

And then later that day I misplaced my weed popper. So it goes.

Our Portlandia episode is airing!

 

We were starting to worry that the episode of Portlandia they filmed at our house ended up on the cutting room floor. Set your Tivos for episode 7: "Motorcycle." It looks like it's airing here on February 17th. Check your local listings.

Leap year

There's an old adage that in the first year your plants sleep, the second they creep, and the third year they leap. For some of the plants I first established at the house, this should be their leap year. Our weather has been lovely this week--cold but clear, which means perfect for weeding.

I have never been so happy to weed! It was so nice to be in the yard again, muttering to myself and saying hello to the plants that are starting to poke out of the ground. We have lots of bulbs now starting to show, and the flowering currants and elderberry bushes are budding.

The winter-blooming daphne is *this close* to erupting in blooms and the stonecrop is forming rosettes--hooray!

I spent all day removing popweed (Cardamine hirsuta, street name: Jumping Jesus) and Herb Robert (Geranium Robertianum, street name: Stinky Bob). I also put down Sluggo, the only insecticide I'll use. I had a moment of panic where I wondered if I was weeding all the forget-me-not that I sowed last fall. That's the problem with wild flowers--how do you know what's a good seedling and what's an invasive weed?


Remember when my aging next door neighbor thought I wanted her Doug Fir removed? She called a surveyor and had him mark her property lines, so I couldn't "take over her yard" like she claims I'd like to do. I carefully pruned only the roses on my side of the surveyor's white post. After I pruned them hard last year and didn't kill them, I became emboldened and pruned them even harder this time. I might actually remember to fertilize them this year but I'm not holding my breath.

I also did silly things like crumpling leaves that had accumulated under the shrubs by hand. Last fall I put uncomposted leaves on the beds, which is generally not advisable. In the wild, leaf mulch breaks down quickly because animals walk on it. In our urban and suburban yards, it just sits there and attracts slugs. But: if you put out a bird feeder nature does what it would do in the wild. To wit:

What used to be three inches of leaves now looks like this

So next fall I'm going to put out fresh leaves and a million bird feeders and I will sit back and know that I'm feeding the wildlife AND my plants.My transformation into That Crazy Bird Lady will be complete. I can't wait.

Also, remember my bird bath that I spent $5 on and drove all the way to a trailer park in Cornelius, which took two and a half hours during rush hour, and then I had to patch it with Liquid Nails so it would not leak? It holds water! So my cheap scavenging on craigslist, while dangerous and unattractive, totally works.

Because I grew up in a cave

I'm a little embarrassed; I'd never actually seen one of these in real life until this guy showed up in my yard.

Turdus migratorius

Robins are HUGE! And yet he got scared away from the birdbath by a teeny tiny bird (I'm terrible at identifying birds so whatever scared it away still gets IDed as a "cute brown bird."). Silly robin. I love having birdbaths; now I just need David Attenborough to show up and narrate.

Housepainting. Oh my god.

After almost a year of obsessively walking our neighborhood and discussing the merits of other people's paintjobs (that's what the song OPP was about, right?) we booked a house painter. We've been playing with the Sherwin Williams color visualizer, which is a pretty nifty tool. Our painter dropped off a book of color combinations and we plugged in a couple of our favorites, only to find that they looked terrible once we pulled them up on the visualizer. Accidental finding: it's really helpful to have your neighbor's house in your photo so you can see how your house will look next to theirs (the house on the right side of us is white).

Sherwin Williams Peppercorn with Saucy Gold on the door

Sherwin Williams Roycroft Pewter with Offbeat door

I'd love to paint the house a warm white and let the landscaping provide the color, but Greg won't go for it. He says it will get too dirty. This from a man who hates that I ask him to remove his shoes inside the house.

SW Porcelain with Deep Sea Dive door

We are both leaning toward blue at this point but blues are *so* tricky. Complicating things is the fact that our house doesn't have much trim, so we don't have a whole lot to diffuse or play off of a bold color. Our windows don't have a paintable inset, so we can't use two colors on them. And our roof is kind of orange. I love the orange but gray would be way easier to work with.

In fact, the more I look at this picture of my house the more I realize that my house just isn't that great to look at from the outside, bad paint job aside. I never really realized this because I'm in love with my house. I imagine this is what it feels like when a parent realizes that their child is not beautiful to other people.

You guys, my house has a good personality. *Sniff.*

We are tentatively booked for late February. As in this month, holy sh*t. The painter will paint three different swatches on our house for free, after that we have to pay extra. He said one client had him put up 16 different swatches . . . and then never paid him. As long as it's not raining, they can paint during the winter using a special paint. He claims it's more durable so it's a good deal for us. I assumed they only work in the summer so this is a nice surprise.

SW Downing Earth with Marigold door

SW Sage Green Light with Butternut door

SW Pewter Green with Bengal Grass door

Our friend Maura warned us that we would hate the first swatches we put up, no matter how much we liked them in the visualizer. This makes sense; it always happens with interior paint colors. So we're kind of resigned to paying more for more swatches. Part of me wants to ask the painter to "surprise us" with his favorite exterior color, like you'd do with a server in a restaurant, but I know our painter won't go for it.

Considerations:

• Hot pink tree in April - May.

The bloodgood maples are always this purpley color

• Lighter colors supposedly make your house look bigger but I'm confident in the size of my house. This isn't California, I don't need to compensate.
• Future landscaping which will not include a lawn but will include a rain garden with tall grasses. I want another cryptomeria, which has a deep russet color in winter.
• HGTV claims that reds, greens, and blues fade out faster than neutrals, leaving your house looking washed out.
• We already have two pink houses on our street, so don't anybody go suggesting it. 

SW Coming Up Roses with Grounded door

Has anybody painted their house? Any mistakes you made or words of wisdom? Go ahead, get opinionated.

Front yard plans

So. The side yard with its sad weird curves, its buried oil tank, and its random mohawk of roses.

I've spent so much energy in the backyard focusing on shrubs and the structure of the yard that I haven't gotten to have a lot of fun with perennials. I've decided that this is the area where I can get my rocks off and plant any perennials that I feel like and not worry about winter interest or anything. It's going to be the lab and I'm just going to plant what looks pretty in the catalog and if it looks terrible I'll just pull it up and plant something else. Anything softening that line of roses has to be an improvement.

Don't be jealous of my MS Paint skills.

That's not a dragon, that's an approximation of the perennials I will plant and the pathway we'll put next to the driveway. I'm going to plant things that butterflies and hummingbirds like and maybe put down gravel around the pavers, which butterflies use to replenish their salts. We already have a birdbath here and a hummingbird feeder, which is being thuggishly guarded by a male.  Hopefully this should draw all the pretty critters to the area viewable from my kitchen window.

These are the plants that I'm ogling right now. The palate is kind of a mess (orange! purple! red! blue!) but I'm just going to plant them and see what happens.

There are a lot of agastaches, poppies, and penstemons and a lot of plants I saw in Scott's yard. I want to work in some grasses so if anyone has a favorite to suggest (cough*scott*cough), I'm all ears. Or if you have a great flower to suggest, let me know!