Category: Garden

Today we planted a Jane Magnolia. Both Aimee and I share magnolias in our childhood memories, Aimee from her parents old house in Long Island, and my Gran in Dinas Powys. Aimee dug a hole my dad would have been proud of and we added some decent amount of good soil and peat. We’ve named her “Big Nan” after my grandmother and she should grow to about 15′.

Maybe in a few decades, magnolia left will become magnolia right.

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Next tree to plant (if I can find one) will be an Acer griseum. We will plant some native trees as well and intend to plant a white oak and some hazel nut trees, and this is in addition to a white pine and larch that we planted last year.

By the way our daffodils have done pretty well this year and eventually we’ll plant them over all this lawn and include crocuses, snow drops, primroses and bluebells.

Why the Olympics ever stopped hosting ‘leaf raking’ as an event I’ll never know. In celebration of that event Aimee, complete with Olympics regulation leaf paddles and rake goes through the paces. To accompany her carefully choreographed movements Aimee chose a leaf raking classic, Yakety Sax by Boots Randolph.

Remember, this is a long and gruelling event which, on this occasion Aimee was fortunate to complete in under 5 hours, a personal best I believe.

Enjoy and maybe you’ll become a supporter of ‘leaf raking’…

Okay the rest of the house still needs major work but at least we can host a croquet tournament. As hosts it was the right thing that we came in bang in last place, but to be honest we were rubbish. It wasn’t the easiest of courses and involved some pretty tricky trenches and down hill slopes. Tempers did flare and mallets were swung but no stitches were required. Some notable tricks shots were taken by snooker ace Joe the Mangrum, but at the end of the day the skilled ball and mallet work of Derrick propelled him to champion, well done Derrick!!!

We finished the evening off with a nice bbq and fire. Looking back at some old photos of the garden it’s nice to see some improvements.

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First off, Happy Birthday to my brother Ian who is a constant source of support and cheeky comments, thank you Ian!!!

Earlier this year Maria and Pete kindly gifted us a lovely, little used, mower. At the time Pete suggested that we take it in for a tune up as it hadn’t been used for at least a year, maybe more. We had always planned on taking it in for a tune up, but due to C-19 we decided to see whether we could start it ourselves. I was really hoping we could start it ourselves, even if we had to pull the cord a hundred times, so we checked the oil, added some petrol – first pull, nothing, second pull engine sprung into life, couldn’t believe it, so thank you Craftsman and Briggs and Stratton I was really, really impressed and this wasn’t a one off, we shut the mower down a few times to adjust the height and it pretty much started up on the first pull every time.

Good news from our freshly sown side area, the new grass seed has finally started to grow and we have a week of wet weather ahead so that will be perfect. We also put to grass, the sloping area to the back left of our garden.

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Just as the C-19 was taking grips in the US we bought a lovely rocking chair (craigslist) from a nice chap, Josh, for a similarly nice price of $35. Josh was happy to hang on it for a while and this weekend we decided to pick it up. Aimee now has a decent chair to sit on as previously Aimee was using a kiddy sized rocking chair. The only downside to the chair is that a dog mistook it for a bone which you can see in the photos. It doesn’t effect the how it rocks and we can always replace the rails when we have time. I believe it’s oak and the style Amish. I have to say it’s very comfortable and it looks great 🙂 So if you’re ever in the area Josh come sit on your rocking chair and share a glass with us.

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Inside the house we are working on building a new front door for the ground floor. The current door is pretty beat up and doesn’t vertically align with the door above it. Later this year our friend Derrick who is doing the parging of the ground floor walls will take out the existing door, including side panels etc., and add a bit more masonry to center everything. At that stage we’ll need to ready with a new door, hence we are starting now.

The plan for the door is to make a plywood/foam cored slab door and then add stiles, rails and trim so it looks like a traditional paneled door. We’ll have two panels on the bottom and two windowed panels on the top. Our friend John Paul who is building a house on the site of an old bluestone quarry has the equipment and the trees to mill his own lumber (mostly oak I think), so we’re going to get some oak from John Paul for this. It will be freshly cut, so we’ll have to leave it for a few weeks whilst it dries.

It’s nice making your own door as you can make it as wide as you like, we’re going for a nice 40″ wide door so it’s easy to carry stuff through. Also building a door from scratch is a lot easier than restoring an existing door which we did last year. Lastly we bought this nice old brass letter slot for $20 (including p&p) on ebay which looks great, just hope it’s a decent size.

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Continuing from the last post, we’ve eventually finished the side lawn. Putting this to grass was a pretty big job and included spending a few weekends last year shifting countless barrows of soil to remove some rather large humps, bumps and dips.

You’ll see Derrick (our local expert in all things relating to old houses) in some shots. Derrick will be adding a lime mortar parge to the exterior ground floor walls in the following weeks or months. You’ll also see Don the Johnson, who is well, Don the Johnson. Don just bought himself a Frogeye Sprite which is sooo cute, I wished I had turned the camera around so you could see it.

In case you’re wondering what we’re picking up, it’s pebbles and there were tons of them. We didn’t get them all out but we removed a decent quantity. Also the shuffling penguin walk up and down, is to help compact the soil and the dark brown stuff we threw on is peat moss to help condition the soil.

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Finally our daffodils are coming out and at the last count six were in bloom. We didn’t want to disturb the daffodils but when the leaves die back, we’ll dig up the bulbs, grade and seed the area and replant the bulbs. Thanks for helping us plant them Colin!

Weather has now turned rainy which will be perfect for the grass seed.

We’re waiting until the weather warms up a bit so we can continue work inside the house, specifically concrete repairs to the ground floor (concrete needs to cure in temperatures above 50°F/10°C), so in the meantime we decided to do some garden work especially as the weather was lovely, albeit a little chilly.

We had hoped to put the side area to grass last year but we ran out of time. Our plan now is to seed it next weekend and hopefully get a nice healthy lawn in time for summer frolics. On Saturday we faffed about trying to get a decent level with a couple of planks and a string and then towards of the day I realised that we had a load of leveling guides/planks that we used for the top lawn, doh!!! Two of the six planks were missing so we replaced those, getting some peat for the soil at the same time.

Sunday started slowly, due in part to some birthday inbibes, that said we still managed 7 1/2 hours down the house. It took a while to get the guides together and after that there was a lot of shoveling, raking, stone picking up and tilling with our great little Mantis.

The front ten foot of the ground is where we planted our daffodils so we’ll wait until they’ve flowered and the leaves have died back before we turn that to lawn.

By the way the buckets are for all the stones and pebbles we find.

Not sure if I ever mentioned our garage, but it’s slowly collapsing. All three walls have cracks, some of them about 4″ wide. It’s definitely got a lot worse since we got the house so we thought we should rescue our little sailing boat in case it got destroyed, the only trouble was that the driveway was covered in concrete and rocks which needed to be removed first.

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The skip arrived on Friday and we started on Saturday, it wasn’t a warm day but the weather was perfect as we both soon worked up a sweat. I also jack hammered away a patch of concrete as the start of the drive as this is roughly where the sewer pipe will go and we will need to dig a trench for that sometime soon.

You’ll see that we found three sets of initials on the concrete, no idea who they are though, one looks like “CPT”, another “RT” and the last “DS 97”

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This was a hardcore only skip, so we could only add concrete, stone or bricks, hence why we had to sieve out the leaves and soil from some of the smaller stones. Having a hardcore only skip, keeps the cost down as they can sometimes reuse the rubble for fill.

We pretty much got the boat out as the light was fading on Sunday and then we went to Keegan Ales for a well deserved couple of pints. Next week we’ll put a tarp over the boat to protect it from the elements.

We would pull the garage down, however our architect advised us against and to leave it until we were ready to rebuild it, reason being, it’s on the property line and if we demolished it now and went to rebuild it in five years time, then we might not get planning permission for it.

In response to one of our earlier lawn related posts, friends of Aimee, Maria and Pete, kindly gave us their old mower and when I say old, it’s only three years old and for most of that time it’s been in storage. Maria and Pete have a steep lawn and as this is a push mower they upgraded to a self propelled model. The mower is in great condition and should serve us very well. We’ll probably get it serviced later this month so it will be ready to go this spring. Thank you again Maria and Pete and we look forward to taking you out for beers and burgers at The Anchor or Buns sometime soon. Incidentally for anyone reading this in the Bay Area, Pete designed and built the sound studio labs at Expression college in Emeryville in the late 90’s.

So this weekend we were blessed (or cursed) with warm weather, temperatures hit 65°F (18°C). It was a bizarre shift from full clothing to shorts and t-shirts but it was blessing for working in the garden. Tomorrow temperatures will drop below freezing. Marie told us that this was the warmest day in the area since 1975.

We’d also like to thank Don the Johnson for lending us two cordless chainsaws. I was bit dubious as to how they worked, but I eat my words, they were great, so thank you Don. We only used the smaller model as it was easier to handle up in the trees, also I tried the Dewalt for about 15 seconds and the chain didn’t seem to run well on the blade, nor did it cut well, so possibly a new blade or tune up is needed, which we will look into in return for your generous loan. In the end I think we did a decent job at cutting the trees in a manner which still left the tree looking wonderful.

By the I’m wearing a harness so I can securely rope myself to the tree/ladder. I also secured the ladder to the tree which was fortunate as tree limbs often fall unexpectedly. A lot of the limbs we cut off had a lot of vines holding them up so there were a few occasions when some of the heavy limbs swung back and smacked me on the shoulder or glanced off my head, luckily I was wearing a full face visor. It would be nice to get some advice on how to do this in a safer manner so I’ll ask my arborist friend Win. I think for now, we have pretty cut off the majority of branches and anything else can be left to the experts.

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I know, all we seem to do is play in the garden and climb trees when we should be working on the house. Well it was just too nice a day to stay in doors, a toasty -5°C/23°F (luckily no wind chill) and the sun was shining. We’re pruning the trees to thin the canopy, remove dead wood and remove some of the branches which overhang the lawn. We are being careful in what we remove as we don’t want to spoil the visual aspect of the trees and after we have finished you probably won’t notice that they have been cut at all. I won’t seal the cuts as it seems that trees can look after themselves.

Currently I’m just taking off some of the main branches, leaving 3 – 4 foot stumps on the tree which I’ll trim flush with the main trunk at a later date. The reason I’m leaving long stumps is that when a branch breaks, it can cause tear out, which you can see was what happened in the video below and I don’t want that to happen to the main tree. As for the stumps, I’ll cut them off in shorter lengths, 1 – 2 foot so I can control the wood as it starts to fall. When I was cutting this branch (and it was pretty big) you could hear it going and I didn’t want to be up there when it went. I’m lucky I did go down as that could have been messy as it hit the ladder on it’s descent and the branch went quick.

Still using the trusting Bahco bow saw, but starting to feel that I could do with a powered chainsaw, not sure if I’d buy an electric corded or a gas/petrol one. I’m not looking for a super powerful behemoth of a chainsaw, rather something small and lightweight. We used to have a corded Black and Decker one in the UK which worked great for anything less than about 9″ in diameter. By the way I think this is the first time I have ever used the word behemoth in any written form and if you’re interested it’s origins are:

Behemoth comes from the Hebrew word b’hemah meaning beast.

I also found out that I’ve been pronouncing it incorrectly, shame on me. By the way we did buy a larger Bahco bow saw, however we’ve lost it so if either of us have left it at your house, can we have it back please?

Lastly the stones at the base of the tree aren’t grave stones but they could be, but that’s another story …