gardening
Every warm sunny day of summer I think to myself, “please never end, ever.” And then it starts to feel like fall, I’m so glad. September in Portland, is the best month, in fact, we got married in September on a clear 80-degree-day three years ago. It’s usually warm, dahlias are blooming, apples and peaches are plentiful and the garden is usually overflowing with veggies to harvest.
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Composting at home is a great way to prepare your own soil and manage organic matter from your yard. It is a chore, so if you decide to do it, know that it’s not something you can just pile up and hope will come out perfect. The first step, of course, is having a good place to store your compost. There are tons of solutions out there that you can buy. And some of them I’d definitely recommend, especially if you’re composting food waste, I’ll list my favorites at the end. Most of these are too small to accommodate the organic matter our yard produces and we have a small yard. We have hundreds of rotten apples and pears, leaves and end of year veggie garden material, and this year we have tons and tons of grass. We’re remove a significant portion of our grass and replacing it with wood chips and mulch, and it’s too heavy to put in the city compost collection. This week, we were graced with a load of wood chips from my husband’s company (he’s an arborist and one of the crews had taken down some incense cedars), so we ended up, unexpectedly, with about 10 cubic yards of wood chips. Eek! So, Kyle started the work of removing grass much earlier than we expected and now we need a place to put the old grass and get it to decompose so it doesn’t grow somewhere else!
Read MoreWe have put some serious work into our deck and a bit of time into our yard, so when we sat down on the deck for a cocktail to relax and looked around what first caught our eye’s was the ugly fence along our driveway adjacent to our other neighbor’s house. We could see into her yard, the past owner of our house had left a bunch of garbage and there were two large former fence post footers with bent iron poles sticking out. It wasn’t just ugly it was also a hazard for our kiddo.
The plan was to get rid of all the garbage that had been stored there, pull out the cement/brick and old footers and then build a trellis and plant something that climbs to create a screen from/for our neighbors and have a planting bed. Our driveway has been challenging to make look not ugly, so this was one step closer to beautifying it.
I didn’t take a proper before picture of the space, but here’s the best one I’ve got. Just imagine it like this, but uglier.
Read MoreHere’s a list of the most common climbing plants and where and when to plant them.
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Before planting, I want to give my reminder that if there’s something wrong with your trees, then contact an arborist. Don’t hire a landscaper to check on your trees or prune them. Landscapers are wonderful, but they don’t have the knowledge, skills or licenses to care for trees. Emily Henderson shared her experience of paying her gardener to prune her trees a few years ago (spoiler: he nearly killer her trees) and ruined their back yard. Tree care isn’t cheap, so plan on getting each tree pruned every 5 - 7 years.
One thing you can do to care for your trees and to give them the best chance at a long life is to plant them properly. The best time for you to plant might be the summer, but the best time for trees is in early spring or fall (really any time during dormancy). Following that schedule is best, but I know that’s not always realistic, so do what you can.
Read MoreThe last few weeks have been spent getting our garden together for spring. Much of the work is cleanup and maintenance, which is exhausting, but always ends up being incredibly satisfying. We also indulged a bit and bought some plants for a few bare spots in the yard and it’s made a world of difference.
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It’s about this time every year, after I’ve passed my ugly rose bushes 10 or 12 times, that I Google how to prune them. I’m always second guessing my knowledge, maybe it’s because I live in Portland, and the Rose Test Garden sets a high bar. Your signal that it’s time to prune roses in spring is when you see all the bright yellow forsythia popping up around town. There’s probably a way to tell by your zone too, but that takes research and planning and I don’t do that. Half my roses have already pushed leaves and buds out, but I’m pruning them down anyway, because YOLO.
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Gardening is and should be very simple, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy. I have had gardens so many climate zones I can barely keep track. I have had many failed gardens and many plants that failed me (I’m blaming the plants). I’ve learned a lot, so here’s what I’d do if I were starting a brand new garden this year…
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