Front Yard Update: Welcome to Crazy Town

May 20, 2016

Back to the Garden, front yard series, Gardening

...take over the whole slope, pour myself a cocktail and call it quits on the landscaping. It wouldn’t be the worse solution in the world. Surprise #2 is how hard it is to get grass to grow. Native grasses remain a mystery to me. I lost many of the grasses I planted this winter and others are growing slowly. I bought new grass to replace the lost ones, and it’s doing okay, but is a little lost in the crowd on the slope. I’m hoping that it will start...

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2014: The Year in Review

Mr. Homegrown

December 29, 2014

Thoughtstylings

5 Comments

...thought that before. Right now, why Kelly is away, I’m working on a secret landscaping project. Let’s see if she notices . . . February Advantages and Disadvantages of Raised Bed Vegetable Gardening After a successful straw bale garden in the summer of 2013, I finally got around to building new raised beds to replace some that we had taken out. Our lead and zinc contaminated soil necessitates this, but I wish I didn’t have to use raised beds for r...

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Backyard in Progress

Mr. Homegrown

June 17, 2019

Garden Design, Gardening

3 Comments

...is morning I thought I’d update progress on the garden. A crew from Haynes Landscaping worked hard over the past week to clean up our backyard and install the hardscaping for a rain garden fed by the downspout from the back end of our house. The rain garden will fill out a problematic area we’ve struggled with over the years. When we moved into this house in 1998 the spot was occupied by a dead tree. A few years ago we used the area to mine clay f...

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Garden Update Part II: The Good the Bad and a Lot of Ugly

Mr. Homegrown

March 4, 2019

Gardening

11 Comments

...eds and clutter here. Ugh, more junk. Here’s the nice new patio the Haynes landscaping folks built. The adobe oven is under a blue tarp. Blue tarps are the architectural equivalent of a comb over. The oven needs a little roof which, to extend the metaphor would be the architectural equivalent of a decent wig, if such a thing exists. And, man, do we need some outdoor furniture. Thankfully I came up with an idea for some outdoor furniture that I’ll...

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Our new front yard, part 4: a digression on the new paradigm

Mrs. Homegrown

November 19, 2015

Back to the Garden, front yard series, Garden Design, Gardening, Miscellaneous

5 Comments

...develop a new relationship with plants, and as a result, a new approach to landscaping. This is the path of the post-wild. New paths often run rough. Meanwhile, the lawn n’ shrub is a path worn into smoothness. In fact, it is a rut. So yes, learning to view the yard as a community takes some mind stretching and extra work. We are changing the lens by which we view our relationship to the natural world. (Dare I say we are becoming wise?) This is wo...

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