More gravel. More grasses. More sleeping.

I've been an insomniac my whole life. Last fall everything got way worse and I basically stopped sleeping. Things are a lot better now, thanks to a light box, melatonin, and what they refer to as "sleep hygiene." At night I cut out blue light which means for the last two hours of my day I live in a world without the internet or TV. I have to read books or work on projects that don't require the Internet. This means I mostly read books because every project leads back to the Internet.

I was reading Beth Chatto's Gravel Garden the other night and I wanted to look up some plants she described . . . but I couldn't. I just had to jot down a note to research it later. It's probably for the best, since I'd just end up on Plant Lust, then I'd fall down the rabbit hole of Google Images and various garden blogs. How did people garden before the Internet? And how much more productive could I be without an iPad?

In our own gravel garden things are chugging along. We've figured out where we want the deck and now we just have to figure out how to build it. The original plan was to wait on the deck until next summer but as I had rock being delivered, Greg said, "Maybe we should just do it this summer," hence my mad scrambling and panic a few weeks back. All of the sudden that vague rectangle on the paper plan needed to be finalized.

We've marked out the spot for the new deck with yellow spikes that I WILL trip over at some point. We're still deciding whether we want to build the deck before or after the wedding in June.

The parabola-shaped rock wall was changed to an even curve. Greg thinks this is a downgrade but my brain likes it better.

I need to retool some of the planting because I totally planted on a grid and I didn't overlap my plants enough, so I have big blobs of the same plants that don't meld nicely into the other blobs. Anyway.

What did I plant?

The centerpiece of this bed is Arctostaphylos 'St. Helena.' I went to Xera and pumped Paul and Greg for their opinions on the very best manzanitas. I originally wanted A. viscida 'Sweet Adinah' but they warned me that it's prone to randomly losing branches and it's incredibly picky about soil, location, and drainage. St. Helena has those big beautiful leaves and will handle being in a northern aspect (though it's still getting 6-8 hours of sun a day) better than others. I also like how blue the leaves are.

Arctostaphylos manzanita 'St. Helena'

I wanted this bed to be low water and I wanted a lot of grasses. We've got a whole bunch of Schizachyrium 'The Blues', Pennisetum spatheolatum, Anemanthele lessoniana, and Festuca roemeri.

Schizachyrium scoparium 'The Blues' in the garden of Greg Shepherd

Pennisetum spatheolatum send up hundreds of little exclamation points

Anemanthele lessoniana in my side yard

Festuca roemeri Photo source: The Evergreen State College

I have a bunch of Achnatherum calamagrostis on order, which will also get squeezed in here.

I also shoehorned in smaller shrubs like Baptisia 'Purple Smoke' and Hypericum 'Albury Purple.' I also rescued a crapload of Salvia 'May Night' from the front garden so something in this bed wouldn't be tiny. Can you tell I love purple?

I also bought one of those stupid Digiplexis annuals on a whim, which I now regret. I do not like that pink.

Baptisia 'Purple Smoke'

In other parts of the garden, I tore out the flowering currant (Ribes sanguineum) that used to live in between the two clumps of bamboo. I hated the color of the blooms and it's a pretty boring shrub. I vacillated for years about ripping out this one. It's drought tolerant and low maintenance but it wasn't sparking joy, so out it went. I planted a new Ribes in the front garden and it blooms a nice hot pink that plays nicer with all of my orange flowers.

In its place I planted Tetrapanax papyifera 'Steroidal Giant' (which is hiding behind the clump of Acanthus spinosus), Miscanthus purpurescens, a cananna (Canna musafolia), and three Calamagrostis foliosa that I rescued from another part of the garden where they didn't get enough sun to color up like they should.

The back rain garden finally got edged too. It's always had a soil berm edging it, which just petered out into cedar chips.

We're not missing a stone, that's the overflow notch.

It looks pretty silly right now because I'm still futzing with the stone placement. Then all the cedar chips in the pathway will get scraped up and replaced with gravel. I still have so much work to do but I'm pleased with how everything is coming along.

We tested happy hour in the garden this weekend and it still worked! Whew.

Garden bloggers' bloom day April 2015

Happy bloom day! 

It's April, which means it's camassia month! Huzzah!

Camassia leichtlinii 'Blue Danube'

Iris x pacifica 'Civic Pride'

Iris x pacifica 'The Eyes Have It'

Hooker's fairy bells (Disporum hookeri/Prosartes hookeri)

Geranium phaeum 'Darkest of All'

Epimedium grandiflora 'Red Queen'

Tulipa 'Flair' with a bird-planted Cotinus coggygria

Cistus obtusifolius

Salvia 'Flame'

Syringa patula 'Miss Kim'

Lewisia cotyledon

Lewisia cotyledon 'White Splendor'

Othonna cheirifolia

False Soloman's Seal (Maianthemum racemosum)

Coronilla v. spp. glauca 'Variegata'

The blooms of Darmera peltata emerge before the foliage does.

A very happy bloom day to you! As always, thank you to our host, Carol, at May Dreams Gardens.

Hardscaping is hard.

We haven't been very good lately at taking it easy on the weekends. Last weekend they were calling for rain but then on the Thursday before the forecast changed to sun and I was like, "I guess there's no reason not to tear out the lawn in the backyard."

This was back breaking and it sucked so hard that I'm glad we may never have to remove sod at this house again. This was before, with our weird boards showing where a low deck will go.

As before, we put our sod on craigslist and a bunch of weirdos showed up and took it home. Enjoy your crap lawn! You're insane. Also, my back hurts.Those rolls were HEAVY. But now I can say I've removed every inch of sod from this property.

Then Greg and I sat here in our mudpit and drank a gin and tonic and bemoaned that our work was just beginning.

And then we moved two yards of gravel to the backyard . . .

. . . so that this guy could deliver two tons of rock to me.

And then Sunday morning I started working on a rock wall.

And then I had a crisis of confidence and nearly broke down because I couldn't tell if it was ugly or not. It looked great on paper! I'm still unsure of how to size the deck appropriately. So I pulled out some boards from the garage so I could make a poorly rendered mockup in Photoshop of what the deck might look like. Picture a beautifully stained 4 inch platform deck. And all of the old Home Depot retaining wall stones are going.

I need to redo the right side of the rock wall and bring it out a bit; I don't like the angle of the curve the way it is right now. The fake deck is currently 10x14 feet. I've looked high and low for some sort of guide for deck sizes (how much room do people need around a dining table? more than three feet?) but every guide is for a mega-deck in a yard where people hate gardening. I vacillate between thinking it's way too big and fearing it will be too small. Our deck just needs to hold a table that sits four people and our cute little bamboo couch.

We have two stupid things and one serious thing dictating the size and location of the deck. The serious thing is the drip line of the cedar, which we need to dig outside of, so it can't shift left any more, unless we cantilever the deck over the footings. The two stupid things are what-ifs that we never do:

1. Really large dinner parties. Though we host barbecues, we've never had a large dinner party in the summer (I hate cooking when it's hot) and a long table could be moved to the open gravel area IF that ever happened. 
2. Movie viewings. We don't own a screen but we borrowed a friend's screen ONCE four years ago and hosted a movie night. Greg wants me to leave this wall clear so we can hang the screen we may never borrow again:

The view from the deck

I'm sort of inclined to move the rock wall out even further, movie screen be damned (the front plants will be short, anyway). My main goal with this project is to get as much planting space as humanly possible while getting a slightly raised area for wining and dining (that may get a pergola or cover at some point). 

I'm already happy because we won't have a dormant lawn, come July. It made the backyard look so desiccated and sad all summer. All of the new plantings for the rock wall area will be drought-tolerant because I hate watering.

If anyone has opinions or advice, I'm all ears. Bigger deck? Smaller? Cantilevered? Get rid of it all and put in sod? I just don't know anymore.

Toiling in the basement. Again.

Back when we had our earthquake retrofit, they had to cut into the drywall in our basement. That happened almost two years ago and yet I haven't wanted to patch this area because I hate drywall repair.

At some point in 2014 Greg screwed the old pieces back into place and I threw one compulsory layer of joint compound on top. It sat like that for a very long time, and every time we watched a movie down there I'd say, "I should really do something about that," and then I would ignore it. Because patching is the pits.

Because we did a shitty job getting the drywall pieces back in place, I had to do one billion layers of joint compound, with all the sanding that comes between coats. Of all the projects in the house, I really wish I had hired the drywall mudding and cornering out. I hate it and I'm not good at it. I've spent months of my life working on the walls in this room and they still look like shit.

Anyway! It became very clear that the entire room was in need of repainting and since I am trying to be a little less of a dictator around the house, I relented to Greg's one constant request: to paint the basement dark.

As I've covered before, Greg hasn't always felt like this was OUR house. I bought it, I picked out all the decor, and I just let him live here. We have this frequent push-pull where he complains, "You never let me choose anything in the house!" and then I run through the house pointing out all the things we've purchased together, and then he says, "I want to paint the basement black," and I screech "NO!" and then he's proven his point. And you know what? He doesn't really want a black basement but we're both stubborn enough to go through with painting it that way, just to spite each other.

If this isn't clear, I'm so excited to marry Greg. I'm crazy about him and I can't wait to be his wife.

When it became clear that the whole basement needed to be repainted, I suggested painting it navy blue. We tried a number of different colors that looked great in other people's rooms but didn't work for us. We finally settled on Blue Note by Benjamin Moore. If I wasn't already marrying Greg I would marry this color. It's so delicious and it's perfect for a room where we watch movies. It's so much darker than I'd ever choose normally, so Greg gets a gold star for this one.

But first I had to deal with the windows, which had never been painted or trimmed out.

And we needed to deal with Hall and Oates/Beavis and Butthead over the fireplace (free artwork left by the previous owners).

I haven't replaced the window hardware because I'm afraid it will disintegrate into rusty pieces and I'll never find a replacement.

I think, for never having done this before, I did a pretty good job. We then spent a Saturday installing baseboard and window trim.

And Hall and Oates got replaced with a new cover. I want to repaint it black because I feel like it needs to be darker. We're toying with the idea of building a teak mantel over the fireplace, which will fix that whole missing brick issue.

And we hung a sweet bamboo curtain to obscure the storage area and provide some texture. Now we'd like to stash a bar in there.

We spent another Saturday hauling the old couch up the stairs, and boy, was that fun! The pleather was peeling and splitting or we would've just kept it down there. Instead we bought the comfiest (though not the most attractive) couch we could find at Ikea: the Kivik. This room is for watching movies, so function trumped form.

I also mounted and hung the tiki masks we bought in Hawaii. I glued lights inside so their mouths light up.

We still need sconces over the TV, a skirt board along the staircase, new stair carpeting, a new area rug, a perfect mid-century modern credenza under the tiki masks, window treatments . . . there's still so much to do. I also kind of want to drywall over the wood paneling in the stairwell even though I really don't want to mud any more drywall seams. And it would be a total bitch to drywall around the stair risers. And yet . . .

Maybe I'll just wait for a super nice weekend to do that.

To recap, when I moved in:

After the first go-around with redoing the room:

And now:

We're getting there.