I'm kind of in love with this moment in time. My Mahonia x media 'Arthur Menzies' is still blooming.
Sweet box just started to bloom. Sarcococca ruscifolia.
My Oregon stonecrop is making the prettiest rosettes and mingling so nicely with Sedum angelina.
My Daphne odora 'Aureomarginata' is about to smell really great.
My hellebores are still going nuts.
And my first crocus bloomed! Crocus chrysanthus 'Romance'.
The sun is shining and Cara Cara oranges are still available in stores . . . I'm giddy. Happy bloom day, everyone! Be sure to check out the full show at May Dreams Gardens.
Dan Hinkley held a packed seminar "Foliage First: Exquisite Hardy Plants with Great Folial Interest" at the Yard Garden and Patio show. This was my first time hearing him speak and I found him totally charming. He started the talk with a joke about flowers where the punch line was, "You have to bend over to enjoy it."
He had a couple of tips, like using lots of self-sown annuals to break up your plantings (they tend to sow themselves where they look good) and using photo editing software to pull the color out of your garden photos. With the color removed you can assess your texture to see what you're missing. Loree explored this idea a while back and the photos are gorgeous. You can see that I have way too much fine foliage. I need big leaves to break everything up.
The talk was mainly plant porn with jokes thrown in. These were my favorites.
Gunnera. It can really only be grown in the U.S. in Northern California and the Pacific NW. Dan said it makes gardeners elsewhere insanely jealous and gardening is all about making other people feel bad about things they can't grow.
This weekend I hit the Yard Garden and Patio show and got the shot in the arm I needed to get me really excited about spring. I only made it to two seminars, sadly, but they both were great. I headed over to the Right Plant, Right Place seminar (Dan Heims, Terra Nova Nurseries). I was feeling sort of "pfft" about it, but the main hall was getting crowded, I was getting tired, and I can sit happily for hours and listen to people talk about plants. It was a treat when they announced that Dan got stuck in Boston in the snowstorm and Maurice Horn of Joy Creek Nursery would be talking about using gravel in the garden.
He described the process of designing a no-water hell strip for five of his neighbors, which was a huge success. Eventually he was asked to design some large hell strips around Reed College. They would receive no supplemental water and they were comprised of the heavy clay soil that's so prevalent here. He talked about two different things: soil prep and great xeric plants.
Xeric plants thrive on very little water but their crowns tend to rot out in our very wet winters. In order to prevent this, they use gravel as mulch, which wicks moisture away from the crown of the plant. They also amend the soil with two inches of quarter ten crushed basalt and two inches of compost. The type of gravel is important. You want crushed basalt, not round gravel, because it travels down into the clay and breaks it up better. Quarter ten gravel has also been washed, which means you won't get fine particulate floating to the top of your beds and forming a concrete crust.
He's also been experimenting with applying gravel to areas of standing water and top-dressing them with compost. This breaks up the water tension and allows the water to percolate down. They have a great article on their blog about how to improve your lawn using 3/4" of gravel and a top dressing of grass seed.
The old lawn grows up through the gravel and the new seed germinates on top. You end up with an even lawn (you use the gravel to level uneven spots) that requires less water, less feeding, and stays green longer.
Back in the hellstrip, once you've got your soil prepped with gravel and compost, you can put in plants that require no water in the summer. Some of his suggestions:
This talk got me so excited to replant my hell strip and try the gravel method on our lawn where the bobcat compacted everything. My hope is to avoid watering in the front yard more than once a week in the summer, so I'll definitely be planting a lot of these. I'm sure Dan's planned talk would've been great but I'm happy that Maurice subbed in. It was just the information I needed.
In the backyard I have a mature Western red cedar that has thwarted all my under-planting attempts. I've tried a number of natives, few of which have thrived. Of course, I never bothered to plant things that could survive with almost no water. One lonely hosta looks great until August, at which point it dramatically keels over. The sword ferns are happy but everything else malingers. It's my fault.
There are sad neglected boxwoods in the corner that I leave only because they're evergreen and they live despite getting no water. I really want something large to fill the space in the foreground but I've yet to find a medium shrub that can handle dry shade (but sometimes hot summer sun!) and fierce root competition. My next attempt will be gro-low sumac (Rhus aromatica), which won't get quite as tall as I want, but should be able to survive here.
I consulted with a guy at Joy Creek about ground covers because my wild ginger just never took off here. He suggested hellebores and epimediums, so I'll try that, damn it. I moved my hellebores here and thus far they are doing great.
I searched high and low for an epimedium I liked and found one called 'Black Sea.' It's supposed to turn almost black, which I thought would look great interplanted with Hakonechloa macra.
The only problem is that this epimedium turns black in winter, when everything else is dormant. You can't even see it, it melds with the mulch so well. During the warmer months it turns a very unremarkable shade of medium green. And I planted hakonechloa eight feet away. It's like I'm not even thinking, some days.
So I'm not quitting my day job. What other dry shade (but sometimes hot summer sun!) workhorses am I missing?
A couple of weeks ago Greg and I went down to Restoration Hardware to see the farmhouse table we've been eyeing in person. My secret hope was that I'd be like, "Meh. I liked it better online."
They didn't have any farmhouse tables in the store, so my plan backfired a bit. We ended up talking to one of the sales reps for a long time and looking at wood samples. Toward the end she asked us if we'd ever considered the Boulangerie table. It's about $1500 less than the farmhouse table and the extra leaf stores away in the center of the table. It still has that rustic farmhouse feel. Restoration charges you a lot of money to give you a mass-produced product that looks like you built it yourself.
Turns out I don't care. We liked it and we really liked how much cheaper it was. And you know what? IT CAME ALREADY ASSEMBLED. This is the first new piece of furniture I've bought in over 15 years that didn't come from Ikea. Everything else I own was bought off of craigslist, thrift shops, or vintage stores. Even the couch from my reveal was from craigslist.
It arrived the morning of our earthquake party, right on time. Whoever RH contracts with to do their delivery is great. When we expand the table it stretches to 120 inches, very comfortably fitting 12 people.
I freaking love it.
Of course our chairs were all falling apart. I found a woman on craigslist selling an Indonesian table and seven teak chairs (that didn't match the table) for $250. I asked her if she'd be willing to split the table from the chairs, since they weren't a set. She graciously agreed to sell me the chairs for $25 apiece. And guys, we fit all seven of them in my two-door Honda Civic. It took thirty minutes of the craziest live Tetris game ever, but we did it.
These chairs are not our forever chairs. They need to be recovered (I almost attempted to do that prior to the party before I remembered candle light hides all sins) and one of them is totally busted, which I didn't realize until I got it home and into the light. The two yellow end chairs are on loan from my friend Ryan, who took pity on my chair situation when I moved into my house. Someday I really want wishbone chairs. They have a much lower profile so you'd see more of the table and less of the chair backs, like you do now. And that's a sexy chair.
But man, you can't beat the price of the ones we have right now. It's very difficult to find more than four matching chairs on craigslist, let alone 6 or 8. I think we'll be able to recoup our money should we ever get different chairs and need to sell these.
Now we need to do some creative rearranging of the other furniture in the room. We don't know what to do about Greg's armchair.
It's too big to fit in the basement or bedrooms and we have no place for it in the living room. It's sort of out of place in the dining room but we don't want to get rid of it. It's very comfortable even if it's not my style. And I have been such a decor autocrat that I want to incorporate as much of Greg's stuff as possible.
Last up, we need to get some place mats so we don't ruin our new table with food stains. I like looking at our table so I don't want to cover it with a tablecloth but I grew up in a house that didn't use place mats. As a result, they seem really fussy to me. I guess I'll just need to get over that.
This last Saturday was the 313th anniversary of the 1700 Cascadia earthquake. We had a blackout dinner party to commemorate and to encourage our friends to get ready for the next one. (I blatantly stole this theme from EmilyStyle, who hosts an annual party for the anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. It's a great theme.) We take dinner parties very seriously 'round here and I think we nailed this one.
The first rule of the night: candlelight only. You almost always lose electricity after a quake so you always want candles on hand.
I bought a 12 pack of wide-mouth mason jars and filled them with votives and scattered them around the house. Pro-tip: you need to keep the furnace lower than normal because you have warm bodies AND a bunch of open flames.
I love my friends because they absolutely commit to themes. We had people group into threes and fours and see what they had between them that would be useful in an emergency. Things like smart phones aren't as great when you have no cell service or electricity to charge them. The team that had a first aid kit, tools, and rope in their car, as well as large amounts of cash took that round.
I'm patting myself on the back because I'm finally figuring out how to make large meals without killing myself. We had brisket, rosemary potatoes, and the best kale salad. The brisket was prepped two days earlier in the crock pot, so I just popped it in the oven an hour before people arrived. Because we were using all candlelight I didn't worry about dusting. Who's going to notice? Appetizers were a cheese plate and frozen goodies from Trader Joe's. I even took a nap the afternoon of the party.
After dinner we played a bastardized version of Family Feud, with questions from the show ("Name an animal you hope never sits on you") as well as questions that we made up, like "Name a thing you should have in your emergency kit," and "Name something you should do immediately following an earthquake."
The winning team was rewarded with hard hats and the losers got Spam. Actually, everyone went home with a can of Spam. If that's not winning, I don't know what is. Then we had gingerbread cake and lemon cream ice cream. It was really fun.
But enough about party details. A lot of people living in the Pacific Northwest don't know that such a massive earthquake is due. The Cascadia subduction zone lies in the Pacific Ocean, where the Juan de Fuca plate is being subducted by the North American plate. This is an area that stretches from Vancouver Island down to Northern California. The two plates are butting up against each other, building up pressure until one plate forces the other beneath it. This is what's known as a megathrust earthquake. The recent devastation in Japan was from a megathrust earthquake. The 2004 Indonesian earthquake was a megathrust. These are massive earthquakes that cause shaking for 4-8 minutes. I was in the '89 Loma Prieta earthquake and it lasted an eternal 10 seconds. I can't imagine what 4-8 minutes of shaking is like.
Experts estimate that the zone triggers every 300-350 years. It has been 313 years, so we're due. There are some really terrifying articles about what to expect when it hits. The majority of our bridges are not expected to be left standing. Emergency crews will be overwhelmed and we'll largely be on our own. Cell reception will be non-existent.
My greatest fear is that the quake will hit while we're at work. Greg will be stranded downtown and I'll be stuck on the east side. It could take him weeks to get back to the east side of the river.
So what can we do? We can make sure that we have emergency supplies in our homes and cars. We can make sure we have a 72 hour supply of water, as well as a water purifier. We may be harvesting rainwater to drink. We can retrofit our houses so they stay on the foundation. Greg and I are getting bids for this now.
Most importantly, we need to know our neighbors. We may end up saving each other when the big one hits. This one is hard; Greg and I are shy and mostly wave at our neighbors.
Ayse at Casa Decrepit has a really great rundown of how they're preparing for a large quake. She mentions that your sewer or water lines may be severed, meaning you won't want to use your toilets. You'll need a shovel and an area in your backyard where you can dig a hole instead. I'd never thought about that.
Right now we're trying to figure out where to keep our emergency supplies. All of our water and camping supplies are in the basement, which is probably the worst place they could be. We may move our water supply to the garage, which would be easier (and less scary) to access, post-quake.
We have Spam, so at least we've got that going for us. Do you have an emergency kit? Are you preparing for the big one? Have I completely bummed you out?
Loree recently asked how my agaves were handling their first winter in the ground. They were planted back in May in the berm. I amended the soil with chicken grit and mulched them with gravel.
I'm happy to say that so far they are doing great. No black spots or rot as of yet.
Of course, we have many wet months still to come. My fingers are crossed!
