Apropos of Nothing v.16

I'll take pics soon as I get some food and a Vicodin in me. heh.

Huh. I seem to be kind of foodless. LOL oops.

Here's a pic- the light isn't right to get a good shot of the whole thing right now, but you can still see it. I need to take one from a different angle to show it better once the sun moves.

Awesome and amazing that you did that by yourself.

Aw, thanks. I reckon anybody coulda done it, though. ;)

Very nice. Definitely a lot of work to cart those stones around!

Where'd you get Adonis?

Wow, that is going to look gorgeous!

Thanks! :) Gwen, I got the statue at Goodwill years ago. We call him Dave. (and that was long before I ever heard of this site)

I got a better photo- I should have just waited a few minutes. Sheesh.

Pony
Nice! What is the plan for flowers in that new bed? Keep the pictures coming.

Pony, thats a MASSIVE job. I had no idea you were doing something that large. Okay, you are crazy. It looks so good but that is so not what a person with a bad back should be doing. At all. Looking at it is making my back hurt, I wouldn't even try that. What are you going to plant in there? Or can you even think that far ahead.

I think its a good thing you were too far away to see those big curbs, you would have loved them. Actually the shape of your bed is very nice, was that freehand or was that a plan? Very artistic. My spelling is so bad, once I was complimenting someone and spelled, very autistic. She answered, ummm, thanks a lot!!!

Been watering and watering, the heat and the wind, everything is dried up. My grass used to be so nice and green....oh, well.

Thank you! I have a few small dahlias and tithonia that still need to be planted, but other than that, I have no idea what's going to go in there. Next week, I'm taking a load of Tagro compost down to Joy in Kalama- she is going to give me some plants. I don't know what, but they can go in the new beds. :)

As far as planned/freehand- I just started stacking and stopped when it looked right to me. hehe.

Pony, that's going to look awesome. Throw some nasturtium or squash seeds in there and let them trail over the side while it's filling out.

Pony, that is really great. Looking forward to hearing your plans for the inside now.

I have nasturtium seeds that I forgot to plant this spring- but isn't it too late to start them?

I have to decide what do do with the leftover concrete, too- there's enough to make another smallish bed somewhere in the yard... but where to put it... hmmm. I eventually want to have the whole yard be all raised beds like that with gravel paths winding between them, so placement is important.

They may be a little late, but I think they'll bloom . . . my neighbor has started them midsummer.

Pony!! So cool!!!!

Good to know- thanks, Kathy! I was regretting not getting them started. They're the only thing missing from my list of flowers that my Mom used to grow. Instead of doing a memorial garden for her, I decided to just grow all of her favorites throughout my garden. :)

Holly- thanks! I am really happy with how they turned out. :)

Marvellous job Pony! Well, really well done - and yikes about your back. but really great start to the bigger picture - looking forward to the paths and multiple beds - and do do do grow dierama, one of my favourites! (They really appreciate their feet staying damp, their heads warm, so directly under the tree may not be the right place).

Laurie, glad to hear you mention dierama. I got my seeds for dierama igneum from a woman in England,I love that one, minature with rosy red flowers. She had 27 varieties, of course I want them all. I have some planted under a tree where they just get a very small bit of filtered light, they bloom fine, but about 2 weeks later than the ones in the sun. I have a large rock and have several varieties planted next to it, its very pretty. It is surprising how well they tolerate wind, they look so delicate.

I also learned about one of my favorite trees from the magazine "The English Garden". Its the eucryphia, I have several now and even though they are from Chile and Tasmainia, I learned about them from the English. I have never met an English person who does not have a beatiful garden, must be something inherted or perhaps England is just a beautiful country. When I first got the magazines, I was totally confused by the term Ha Ha. They kept talking about it and finally my uncle was able to tell me what it was. And there is Pony with a ha ha.

Let me join the chorus with yet another atta-girl. I would have expired a quarter way through that project! Now the fun part begins - planting. Please do keep the photos coming, it's great to experience these things from start to finish.

Thanks, everybody. :)

I would love to go get the soil to fill the beds today, but I'm feeling pretty well broken. We'll see how I feel as the day progresses, maybe impatience will triumph over good sense. ;)

How lovely to be growing so many dieramas - Rebbecann. Photos please. And how nice that we have been able to amaze and inspire your gardening - but I am wondering what your uncle's definition of a HaHa is - either I've really missed a great photo of one of Pony's garden features, and goodness installing a HaHa is really backbreaking, or if we are talking about the new beds she has just put in - we may have to correct the definition a bit. I'll be interested to hear.

I had to look up HaHa, never knew it was anything but laughter. Haha! I definitely don't have any HaHas in my garden- just little rock pile walls.

That just made my day!!! Let's see your new HAHA Pony!!! Great looking rock bed, Pony. You are so ambitious. If you can make it out here, I have peppers, petunias, eyeball, and heaven knows what else in the GH that I have not planted out. Come plant shopping!

LOL! Lynn, let me see what I wind up with when I go visit Joy and take her compost to her next week- she's saying she wants to load me up. hehe. I already have a few things that need planting out, too. I don't want to wind up with another pot ghetto. ;)

What the heck is eyeball?!?!?

Looks great so far Pony! I would just toss a bunch of seeds in there..What is there to loose!

Gwen, it's a plant that essentialgardener mentioned in the 'plan your garden thread' as a fun plant for kids.

http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/58049/

Wow, very cool!

Dang. I had to go gas up my truck and do some grocery shopping, and I feel like I ran a marathon. So tired. Looks like I won't be doing any work out there today. I'm actually leaning towards taking a nap... naps are good... zzzzzz...

How did I miss the "plan your garden" thread? I am in dire need of some kind of planning as my current method is certainly haphazard.

I have several Dierama pulcherimum which are just beginning to flower. Laurie turned me on to these and I found them at the nursery across the street. i went looking for other kinds and bought bulbs of P. reynoldsii, P. mossii, and P. alba. last Spring. They were so tiny, I decided to pot them up to grow them out a little before planting. I sadly didn't bring them inside before that early freeze and lost them all. :>(

The dierama is a plant that's been on my list for a long time. I didn't realize there were so many varieties.

Holly - it's the plan your vegetable garden thread - the one where we listed the types of vegetables we were going to grow. I think you saw it. No worries.

I, too, bought a Dierama after hearing Laurie talk about it. Mine died last winter . . . I think :-(

But I haven't weeded much this year, so maybe if I'm lucky it's buried somewhere in the buttercups and grass . . .

Last winter lots of dierama rotted, it was not the cold, it was the wet. In places where I have good drainage they were fine, no drainage, mushy mess. Dierama in pots were all gone, too much moisture. But they can take more cold than you think they would. I got a new one from a speciality nursery in Fort Bragg, its called Cosmos and supposed to be near black. I am excited about this one, in a year or two, mine should bloom.

I thought a ha ha was a raised bed, sometimes a raised area and a gully or depression to keep critters out, like for cattle when you did not want to put up a fence, you would make a stone wall, fairly low and have a gully on the other side so you did not see an unsightly fence. But I am ignorant and this was what I assumed from looking at pictures. Laurie, please do tell, what the heck is a ha ha???? Is this not what Pony has? I would love to call it Pony's ha ha, but perhaps I cannot.

ROFL! "Pony's ha ha" sounds like something for an adult forum. *snicker* *snort*

I think a proper 'HaHa" is a fence in the middle of a trench, so it isn't actually visible above ground from either direction. That's what I got when I Googled it, anyway.

My quadriceps are so sore today from hunkering up and down with those heavy cement chunks. Oy. I just used Bio-Freeze on them, forgetting that it makes my kitty Myrrh go crazy- now she's stalking me and wanting to lick my legs. Freaky cat.

Glad to hear it's your quads that are sore - assume you were lifting properly. Still, take a break and relax. Feast your eyes on your hard work and plan out the next step.

Yeah, Deb- I try really hard to lift from the legs whenever possible. Doesn't always work out, but I try. ;)

I wound up crashing for three hours this afternoon. Guess I was a little tired. Sheesh. I don't think I would have woken up when I did if someone hadn't knocked on our door.

Afternoon naps are delicious, especially when well deserved (aren't they always?)

Wiki has it right that it is basically a retaining wall with a ditch in front - the addition of the fence is modern. It was a means of keeping livestock and deer and maruaders out of the decorative part of the park (a large garden around a posh house) - to build one you have to be on sloping land (which most important houses are since it gave them considerable defensive advantage) - a large area of the soil is dug away on the field side, with a timber or stone wall put up to stop the dug face from eroding back into a slope, then a grass cover is allowed to regrow over the top of the wall. These are massive projects, with the haha's often (especially when defensive or for protecting against deer) well above head height, and ditches a good meter deep and meter wide, below the field height - the ditch stops anything getting a good run and footing to clear the wall. The whole thing is invisible from the house, and creates the effect of the park melding seamlessly with the landscape - its only when you start to approach the edge that you realize the precipitous drop the other side - sadly most have fencing along the top now so people and pets don't go plummetting. Health and safety.

A lot of the haha's have been lost, largely because of the breaking up of land around the old houses, but ther are still a few spectacular one around - Pashley manor, here in East Sussex has one of the best I know of - great vista without a hint of the haha from the garden side. It really is a surprise when you come across it thinking you are going to walk out amongst the sheep only to find there is this wonderful inverse barrier holding you back. I suspect that the majority of the remaining ones are 18th C, built during the great gardening boom of the Georgians, but there are probably still some that have earlier defensive origins, where the Tudors combined gardening and enclosure together.

They are surprisingly effective, and a darn sight better looking than being surrounded by tall deer fencing. I really enjoy them when I find them.

I was familiar with the concept of hahas from reading Jane Austen, but I couldn't picture what they would look like. Thanks, Laurie!

Okay now I understand. I also did hear it was called a haha because once in awhile a drunk or otherwise would fall, usually in the dark and go ahhh ha. So does Pony qualify for half, say just a ha? I like the term so well. I had a little doggy we called ha ha, his name was Brutus and he was a 5 lb mean machine. This was before I had heard the term, he just smiled a lot.

Good morning everyone.

Has anyone heard from Katye or Rachierabbit lately?