Salmon and Souvlaki

I decided that other entry was too long so I’m putting the request in a separate entry.  If you haven’t already, go read the entry underneath this with all the pictures and then come back.

So here’s what I need.

Tina is pretty insistent that we do something about this side bed.  In fact, when I came home on Friday she told me that she had been contemplating starting to pull out the cement blocks.  And clearly those need to come out.  But I don’t want to start anything until I have some sort of design for how we want this to look.  And I don’t want to rush into it.  I’m extremely grateful to Tina for all her help and I know she’ll help me implement the plan but I feel like I (with Nik’s advice/approval of course) need to come up with the actual plan.

A.  I definitely want to make the bed wider, although not so wide that it’s not easily weeded/maintained.  The square foot gardening guy says about 2 feet is ideal, any comments?  We don’t really care how much lawn we lose so it could be wider if you thought it would look good/be OK to maintain.

B.  I think I want some sort of curving design rather than just a long straight look.  Feasible?  Look good?  Or other ideas to break up that really long boring line that I have right now?

C.  I need something to make the edge of the bed.  The front bed currently has some nice rocks and I’m tempted to continue that theme.  Do you think this would be too hard to do?

D. I also need a way to make space between the edge of the bed and the lawn so we can actually mow the whole lawn and don’t have to cut the edge by hand.  Again, the front bed has a border of bricks that seems to work OK.  Any better ideas?

E.  Any good design books to recommend?  I feel like I’m shooting in the dark on this one.  I do know that I’d like to have some big herb plants, like lavender and rosemary to be anchors in the bed.  I also have a three coneflower (echinacea) plants and a few other things that I can divide and put it.  The bed gets a pretty good amount of sun.

F.  I’d rather not have vines but it would be nice to have some taller flowers at the back of the bed to give us some separation from the neighbors (who we do like very much!).  Any ideas?

I think that’s it.  I need to ask Nik to make me a scale drawing of the side yard so we can sketch out some design plans and see what it might look like.  This is probably the last major job we have left and I’d like to redesign it so we don’t have to do any more major bed design/building again.  I’m not worried so much about the plants as just the bones of it.

Thanks for letting me dump my thoughts about this out.  Maybe I’ll just start working on it now that I’ve written about it!  And any words of advice anyone has would be appreciated!

Hi everyone.  I know I’ve been fairly absent from the blogging world.  It just seems like there’s so much to do and not enough time to do it in. Plus, I have this perfectionist streak in me that doesn’t want to post something unless it has a really witty title, perfect text, and a nicely edited picture.  Well, I think I need to let that go because I have lots of pictures and things I want to share with you all.  So in an attempt to just get the blogging roll going again, here’s my first request.

I need some advice on our side garden.  It goes almost the whole length of our property and is currently overgrown and so narrow that it’s hardly a bed at all.  I took these pictures over a month ago so I’m just going to put them on here so you get a sense of what the bed is like.  Then I’m going to tell you what I’m thinking and ask for your advice!

Here’s the view from the front of the street to give you the over all idea of it.  It’s the bed to the left – which starts under the dogwood tree.  (Note our gorgeous driveway while you’re at it!)

Here’s that bed with the dogwood up close.  This is the bed where I did the most work in this summer, planted a few plants, etc.  so it’s not perfect but I was very happy with it this summer and I like it.  It’s moving on back (on the left), along the fence that is the problem.

This is the other side of the front bed showing the transition to the side:

Here’s the corner, filled with azaleas that I had to prune way back this summer (tons of dead wood).  They’re starting to grow back nicely.  Notice the cement blocks – they go the whole way along the side of the bed and I do. not. like. them.

This is the long view of the troublesome bed (our garage is at the end of it).

Here’s an up close view of one section that I’ve mostly cleared out.  Up until late in the summer, pretty much the whole first half of the bed was full of those tall, orange day lilies that I don’t like.  At all.  You can see some flowers in this picture.  Tina got a bunch of perennials from a friend and so I just shoved them in here for now until next year when I decide where the’re actually going to go.  Please note how narrow the bed is.  It’s actually much narrower than it seems because the cement blocks go in under the dirt for a few inches.  So in many places, there is maybe 6 inches of usable dirt to plant into.

More of those dang lilies (which have crazy bulbs for roots I might add).  They’ve probably been growing in that bed for at least 20 years.  I’ve since gotten rid of a lot more of them.  Also notice that the grass grows right up to the cement blocks, making it impossible to mow the side of the lawn.

Here’s the second half of the bed.  It has two big sections of Rose of Sharon and a bunch of periwinkle vine and grasses  and weeds growing under and around it.  We’ve also trimmed the Rose of Sharon way back since then so it’s much shorter and not falling over (this was right after a thunder storm).

Here’s an up close of the vines/weeds/grasses:

Here’s the end of the bed (mostly filled with weeds because I’ve been purposely ignoring it)

Here’s the Rose of Sharon bush in front of the garage:

And here’s the view from the garage looking back down the yard to the front of the house.