Walkway Garden - Go!

Ever since installing our walkway arch last fall, I've been waiting for the ground to thaw (and the feet of snow we got in Kansas City to melt) so I could begin the front walkway garden I'd been dreaming of. I just so happened to be off work on Friday, and it just so happened to be sunny and beautiful, so I got to work.

Like many projects, the first step was the least fun, involving digging out all the sod that C has worked so hard on (don't worry, I had his blessing) and filling in the trench with mulch. It was total grunt work, so I was grateful to have a beautiful spring day (and a serious case of spring fever) to motivate me to get it over with.

  

We planned the shape of the beds to duplicate the shape of our walkway - which we have named "The Wine Bottle." The beds also maintain the strong symmetry of our home. The new lines add some nice drama to our sloping front yard, with the dark mulch accentuating the nice green grass.

C even said it looked like a baseball field. Whether he was just being sweet because I was so tired, or really meant it, it's pretty much the ultimate compliment from a former baseball pitcher.

I managed to wait two whole days, admiring my mulch, before I couldn't stand it anymore and picked up a few plants to get the garden started. It was Easter Sunday and my favorite local nursery was closed, so we did a quick Home Depot run and got a few staples to start adding shape to the walkway.

Enter four small sedge varieties, two blue fescue balls and two ranunculus, and things were starting to take shape. I laid them out carefully, alternating the sedge so that they won't crowd the walkway from both sides.

Everything is perennial except for the ranunculus, which is an annual in our area. I don't often put annuals in the ground, but these tiny plants with huge round blooms were just too cute to resist, and it's a bit too early for some of the other perennials I'm planning on adding.

I think as I add more plants I'll keep adding more sedge and fescue - I love the texture they provide, and they are nice tough plants to stand up to the intense sun of our west-facing front yard. 

So, here's the yard before the arch and flowerbeds:

And here it is now.

It's just a start, but a very satisfying one to me. As the weather continues to warm, I'll keep filling in the walkway at the top of the steps, get some climbers planted by the arch, and - most dramatically - plant the wide triangle portions of the beds that go down the hill.

Over the next few weeks, as the weather continues to warm, I'll add some topiary shrubs near the bottom of the hill:



Surrounded by more grasses, as well as some low-growing, tough flowers and ornamental cabbage.

 

And perhaps most importantly, some climbing english roses and clematis to grow up over the arch - adding beautiful blooms and fragrance to welcome visitors into the yard.  

I can't wait to get the rest of the space filled in and growing, but for now my few little grasses and flowers will have to hold me over. As well as some viola I packed into the window boxes on our front porch - I just couldn't resist!

Happy Bench

The weekend before Thanksgiving, Chris and I were driving home and saw this sad little bench on the curb. Upon inspection we saw that, while the wood slats were beyond shot, the size and shape of it was very charming, and the wrought iron of the bench was very nice and in great shape. So we brought it home and planted it in the garden. 

The wood appeared to be maple, but someone had painted it dark red a while ago. The red paint was peeling and the wood was rotting. I liked the idea of painting it - our garden is surrounded by beautiful cedar and if this bench was going to live there, it needed some color to get the attention it deserved.   

The first step, though, was replacing the wood slats - all of the ones on the seat were rotting, and one of the pieces of the back as well. So CJ and I headed to Habitat ReStore - a materials source that has been very good to us - and we found a 1"x6"x16' piece of pine that would work great. It was a nice clean piece of wood - no knots - and would be just right. It was truly 16' long though so we borrow their saw and broke it down in the parking lot so it would make the drive home. 

Once we were home my handy hubby cut them down to size

and installed them.

I tested the new and improved bench out, and it was nice and sturdy. 

At this point it was getting pretty late in the day, and it just so happened to be an absolutely beautiful day, so we decided to quite our work for the day and put that old rotting wood to work. 

 

We didn't burn quite all the old lumber though. Wrigley claimed this slat for himself and insisted on fetching it as we relaxed by our fire. 

 

 

So this morning, here's what our little bench looked like:

I looked through our stores of exterior paint and found we had about 3/4 of a quart of Glitzy Gold left from painting the back grate of our house. This cheery yellow seemed just the right thing for our new seat. 

So we painted.

And a few short hours later this little bench looked like new. The yellow brings out the green in the metal, and shows brightly in front of the trellis and fence.

The last painter got red paint onto some of the hardware, and for now we're leaving it. It could be fun - an homage to its former life. Or if it bothers us I will drop some matte black paint into the recessed holes to fake the screws' original color. 

There are also a few spots where dabs of paint bled through tape onto the metal. I have a feeling it will flake off pretty quickly, but if it does not a little steel wool will correctly it quickly.

In all, I'm thrilled with the upgrade. We probably won't sit on this guy a ton - maybe occasionally here and there when we're enjoying the garden. But it will be the perfect inviting spot when we want to. The rest of the time it will likely be a set down place for garden tools and vegetables while I'm working.

At a total cost of $4.80 (for the pine from Habitat ReStore), I'd say this was a great upgrade.

Coming Soon

Happy Friday!

I just pulled the trigger on something I've been wanting to purchase for our house, literally for years. This beauty should be arriving on our porch sometime next week!

This simple metal arch will go over the front walkway into our house, with some simple landscaping clinbing it and reaching down the hill. Here's a very bad photoshop rendering of my plans:

The arch will go at the top of the steps, and the browned out lawn is where I will pull out the grass (sorry CJ) and landscape. The area goes over a slight hill (maybe about 3' from top to bottom) so it will make all the new plants very visible from the sidewalk and street. Here are some of the plants I have in mind.

Morning glory vine growing up the sides of the arch through the summer. It's an annual so it will die out in the winter, leaving only the pretty arch for you to see. The large blue flowers will look great with our house that will (hopefully) be all blue soon.

At the bottom of the hill, at the widest spot in the new landscaping area, I want to do a large prairie grass on each side of the walkway,

surrounded by white salvia and orange lantana (butterfly bush). I love the textures of these three together, and they'll make a good dramatic entry into our yard from the street. 

And finally, I'll plant a variety of low-growing perennials (about one foot tall) along the rest of the steps and walkway to fill the sides in.

 
This will add a lot of new color and interest to the yard, and I can't wait to get started. Come on UPS guy!!!

Look Closer

After posting yesterday, Chris found a few extra shots from Saturday that show the "after" a bit better. You can see the plants better in this one - some hen and chicks, sedum and a pincushion cactus that I bought, as well as some sedum, moss rose and ice plant that I transferred from a flower bed in the yard. My hope is that once the plants fill in next year, the brackets and quite a bit of the planters themselves will be completely hidden.

And here's the whole view - we're still using the trash cans and grill at the end of the wall (proven in this photo by the corn on the grill!), and the planters frame it at the end pretty nicely. 

Succulent Siding

I warned you Friday that Chris and I had some big weekend goals, and after a busy weekend, I'd say we accomplished one out of the two, and we're pretty happy with it. I wrote months ago about wanting to build some gutter planters on our garage, and we finally got around to getting this done.

The project was a bit more involved than I thought it would be (aren't they all?), so it ended up taking pretty much all day Saturday. It was a beautiful day though, and we spent the majority of it working in the shade of our big walnut tree out back, so no complaints here!

After drawing up plans and measurements last week, I purchased four 10' aluminum gutters, 24 hangers, eight end pieces, a rivet gun and rivets and some black spray paint. We cut the gutters down to size with a hack saw (taking turns and wearing ear plugs - it sounded terrible!)

Then we drilled drainage holes, painted them black and attached the end pieces with a rivet gun. Once that was finished, we took them to the backyard and set them up in the grass to make sure one last time that we liked our design. We did, so it was time to start hanging them up. 

Here's the wall before planters: 

We left the shepherd's hook up for now - it used to hold a bird feeder which I since moved into a flower bed near the fence. I think I'll probably move it to the back of the garage one of these days (maybe near my new garden tool hanger) and put a nice big wind chime on it.

Anyway, here's the garage with planter #1:

and a second:

then #3:

and the last one:

All up! This actually took some doing, as we knew these planters would be fairly heavy once they're full. We attached a heavy duty bracket at each stud that each planter crossed - 22 brackets all together!

After that, it was time to fill them up! I filled the bottom fourth of each planter with pea gravel to facilitate drainage, then filled the rest with one part sand and two parts soil, all mixed together.

 Finally, the fun part came. I purchased a few plants to get me started this year - all perennial succulents. I specifically looked for plants that can deal with hot, dry summers and survive through cold winters (mostly rated for zone three of four through zone nine), since they're in a metal planter rather than the ground so are likely to feel both heat and cold a bit more. In addition, succulents need much less water than most other plants, which means I won't be drenching the side of our garage every day to keep them alive. 

It's hard not to go crazy and fill the the planters full right now, but I'm pacing myself to see how these guys do this winter. I'll probably add a few more plants here and there throughout the fall, but I want to make sure these varieties will come back well after the winter before I completely fill them. My hope is that they'll all be thriving and spreading next spring, at which point I will add more until the garage looks like a big, green living wall!

As for the weekend project we didn't get to, we're still plugging along with our house painting project. So far we're about halfway done - through with the back (east side) and finished except for some trim work with the north side, which we hoped to work on this weekend but ran out of time. This week and next weekend we want to get the north side completely finished. Then CJ will start sanding the south side, while I work on painting the porch ceiling and trim. Our hope is by winter to have only the upper story of the front of the house left to do - which we will wrap up next spring. This story to be continued . . . . .