Category: Garden

Out of the many, many things that need to be done on house and garden we decided that we would try to put part of the garden to grass. Main reason for this is that we don’t want to have to weed it a third time and we were also planning a Disaster Mansion party for Aimee’s birthday in June (anyone reading this is invited †) so we thought it might be nice to get the garden looking a bit better. Alas the grass won’t be ready by then, but at least it won’t be some huge mass of weeds.

We plan to do the lawn in two parts, the first will be the flatish area at the back and the second will be the sloping side area.

It’s not the best time to sow a lawn, but we’ll have to make do, also we don’t have any running water in the house so watering it will be either an act of God (i.e. it rains lightly every day) or we’ll see if one of our adjacent neighbours will lend us a hose and water. I’m hoping a neighbour can help us out as we have already forked out $90 on grass seed and fertilizer and it would be a shame if it came to nothing.

I had laid lawns from scratch at my parents house years ago so it took me a while to remember what to do. The rough steps that we will take are:

• Weed the entire area to be grassed.
• Dig over the area by hand.
• Till the area.
• Rake over the area to start to get an idea of grading.
• Decide on the levels and set up some level lines.
• Make a leveling jig and get to work leveling.
• Penguin walk over all the leveled soil, rake lightly to remove foot prints.
• Sow seed and rake lightly again.
• Water regularly.

Each of the above steps is also accompanied by, removing old roots and stones as you go along and we have lots of stones and roots.

A few weeks ago we placed one of our old roof tarps over a patch of garden to kill the weeds. This is a great way to kill the weeds if you have the time and three to four weeks later the tarp was removed and everything was dead. We dug that patch last weekend which took us pretty much both Saturday and Sunday, albeit having a latish start on both days.

We didn’t have time to tarp the rest of the garden so we used our Dragon weed torch which is basically a small propane flame thrower. It seemed to do the trick and I did keep my eye out for poison ivy, which incidentally seems to have been pretty much eradicated from our garden :-).

Next was the tilling and a tiller is such a great piece of garden equipment and within a few minutes, hand dug soil becomes beautiful loose soil. My Dad had a Mantis tiller which was a real trooper, light weight, easy to handle and start so we picked up one on Craigslist last year for a little under half price.

This past weekend was Memorial day (three day weekend) and by the end of Sunday we had weeded, dug and tilled all that we had planned. By the way the pile of bricks to the left are old Hutton bricks which are from our old chimney stack. We’re saving them for something, perhaps a fire pit.

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I have to say that the work was pretty hard, lots of bending etc. and by Sunday we were feeling pretty beat. Picking up stones was my least favourite. Luckily, in addition to swimming I had started Crossfit at Aimee’s gym, Kingston Athletics and that really kicks your butt!

Monday came and it was time to start grading it. First off we sat for a while and looked to see what were the natural gradients of the garden, which was sloping towards the garage as well as towards the house. We faffed about trying to rake but it was hard to read level of the land, which I think was due to the surface being roughish soil and half was in shade. In the end I remembered what my dad used to do:

• Setup some level lines (taught strings between hammered in posts).
• Install a couple of guide rail planks (placed 10′ apart) which lay just underneath the string and are parallel to the string and themselves.
• Drag a plank over/between the two guide planks to pull away the excess soil, giving you a pretty decent level (think of it as scraping the froth off a beer).

We started with 10′ guide planks, but it was frustrating work, the planks were really too short and the wooden stakes to hold them up kept breaking from all the hammering in. In the end we maybe did 3 sections before giving up and going to buy better supplies.

Our new guide rails will be 24′ long and possibly longer. Ideally our guide rails would span the whole width of the lawn so in two to three passes we could get that section beautifully leveled. I also bought twenty 24″ metal stakes to hold the guide planks in place. I really wanted to buy these square stakes which were US made, but shipping was over $100. Instead I ordered some round ones from the local box store, which I think are also US made.

Our plan eventually for the garden is all about having beautiful lines and gradients, something like Opus 40 but 75% lawns/flower beds and 25% stone walls and paths and maybe a hint of Lombard Street (San Francisco). We are in the early stages of the design but we hope this will be a masterpiece. Currently we are collecting ideas.

The video is a bit long. I did put a clock in the back so you could judge time passing, but it was too far away for the camera to read, next time, I’ll place it nearer.

By the way we didn’t dig up anything interesting and the only things of interest was one small plastic t-rex and elephant, two glass marbles and one old brass hose nozzle which may be useful.

We’ll continue with the lawn next weekend. Shame we didn’t manage to get the grass seed down last weekend as the weather has been pretty damp this week.

Last week was a bit of a stressful roller coaster, but luckily things are now settling down and the house is reasonably safe.

The daffodils we planted last year with friends Colin, Tim and Lauren are now out and more are sprouting. Later this year we will plant even more and add some clumps of tulips to the mix as well.

By the way, after a long absence, the ground hog is back, I saw him last week disappear into a new hole he/she made.

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I didn’t think it could get worse but I think it has, but we should get used to future disappointments and keep a stiff upper lip, right Winston?

This happen a while back and maybe something I didn’t want to post right away. If you can remember the portrait that our builder Thomas found, see Our last great find.

Aimee was taking  our photograph with us either side of the portrait when the wall behind collapsed. Luckily it just dropped and didn’t topple. It felt like an earthquake was happening, strange noises like rain drops hitting glass and a shower of dust from the roof. Aimee and I were a bit shocked and I think Thomas was a little too. Luckily the ceiling above had been shored up, otherwise it could have been a lot worse.

There were numerous reason it collapsed:

• There are no footings on this house, just foundation walls.
• This was mud room and the previous owners had removed all the soil so exposing the bottom the foundation walls and as the soil is very sandy, it tended to fall away, leaving the foundation walls unsupported in places.
• Our groundhog had made a few tunnels under the walls.
• Thomas and Matt had removed further soil to enable then to underpin these walls.

This gallery doesn’t really do a good job at showing all the above but hopefully it gives you a taste. Note that the bottom of the wall is where the wall ends, no footing underneath just sitting on soil and you can see that the earth is very, very sandy, in fact it’s almost sand. At one point the wall was unsupported for about 6′ with no support at all at one end. The first shot show the chimney stack.

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These are the photos of the collapsed wall, luckily it didn’t topple.

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This is an old post which I forgot to post so my apologies. Anyway we were out in the back garden when we noticed that someone had dumped a good few barrow loads of earth at the back of our garden. I thought it was odd as why would they bother to cart it all the way back there.

We were pondering this when we noticed a hole towards the back of the mound, it was our groundhog extending it’s underground lair. It’s pretty impressive how much earth and stone the groundhog can move and I don’t know how many meters underground it had to slowly push or drag the soil to the surface.

Moving to current day we haven’t seen the groundhog for a while, so it’s likely that the deforestation of our garden has led to the extinction of above mentioned groundhog. RIP [spfx: sniff].

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By the way the title of this post was ranked 39th best joke (courtesy Darren Walsh) at the 2015 Edinburgh fringe. How many of you got it? I’m not sure I would have.

I now feel spring is finally here, I see small green shoots on a couple of trees and in the last few weeks daffodils, tulips and crocuses have started to flower. Spring happens a lot later here than in the UK where you can expect daffodils and the such to flower in January/February.

This year we are hoping for a splash of color in the garden and starting in November we planted 150 daffodil bulbs and more recently we planted:

• 120 Irises
• 9 Rudbeckias
• 9 Lilies
• 36 Gladioluses
• 3 Dicentrases
• 4 Dahlias
• 3 Peonys

The daffodils are doing pretty well and they will start to flower this week. Next year we’ll plant more spring flowers such as crocuses, primroses, tulips, Lily of the valley and snow drops.

Our main contractors for this project is Motzer Construction and the team is predominately Thomas and Matt. Plumbing will be by Roland Green

This is Thomas and Aimee as Matt had to pick up his kids. 

Three out of ten but shows improvement…

Sick of all the weeds we decided to try and put the garden to grass before winter comes. We’ll probably end up digging some of this up for walls, paths, flower beds etc. but all that will probably be years off. This is what we’ve been working on mostly for the past few weeks.

The process started off by getting rid of all the weeds and vines which was a combination of digging, weed killer and flame thrower (think big bunsen burner).

We don’t know how we will want the garden but we thought that having nice flowing contours would be a good start and the first step to doing that is to roughly grade the garden which involves using the soils from humps to fill the dips.

It’s hard work as we have many tons of soil to move which involves shovels and a wheelbarrow. I’d say we are maybe half way there and this is just to the rough grading stage, the fine grading will be another pretty big task. By the end of this I estimate that we will have moved about twenty tons of soil.

So that I could look at our progress when we took a break, I took off the side railing of our rear deck. The whole thing is going anyway and it’s nice to be able to sit back and take stock of the work.

If you look at the string you can see a curve in it and this is the hump we are removing. These photos were taken after maybe three weekends of shoveling and wheelbarrowing and yes it really doesn’t look that different. To cheer us up I added two pictures of what the garden looked like when we bought it.

Last night we met someone who owns a tool hire business in Kingston and we will probably get some heavy duty machinery to finish off the rough grading. This is the earth moving machine we are looking at and we may be able to hire it for a weekend for a few hundred dollars. I bet we can do a lot in one weekend with one of these.

It will be handy to try out something like this as we have to dig out and replace our 130 year cast iron water waste pipe at some point.

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In preparation for the builders we moved all the blue stone slabs from both sides of the house and took them to the back of the plot. The very, very small ones I could lift but the largest were monsters. The biggest one we moved was roughly 48″ x 18″ x 6″ and as bluestone weights 162.5 lbs. a cubic foot that stone could have been around 485lbs.

We moved them on a sack truck and I added a third wheel and had the truck lying horizontally to spread the weight. It still flattened the pneumatic tires so we had to pump them up nice and hard. It wasn’t fun moving them and a few choice words were uttered during the process. We won’t be moving those for a while.

We still have the biggest to move (last photo) which we’ll do after the O+ festival.

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