Garden Projects #13

Reminds me of the tropical drinks!

Less than 6 years old.I traded it for lamps for the new house a year after we moved in.
GF makes beauties.
wha, they look like kairnes but hollow clay pieces.

both are pretty!!!

Very nice lamps! You know some creative folks, JoAnn......

Hey Celeste, if it's still cold enough up there you can do these for V-Day
http://pinterest.com/pin/351912440687845/

I like it

NICE!!

not the greatest picture - i built two of these trellis to replace the ones i built out of hickory saplings a few years ago that have rotted. used an old design from birds and blooms that called for cedar, copper piping and copper wire for scrolls. When i say old design the cost was estimated at $60 a trellis to build. The copper wire alone was .98/ft and it called for 115' ft per trellis - could buy a real nice one for that.

so i used pressure treated 2x2's (hard to find straight ones!), copper piping, and bagged the scrolls as nothing i could find was sturdy enough to keep the scroll shape. ordered the cobalt blue tops instead of making ones from wood. The trellis are 8' tall and will be buried at least a foot into the ground so they do not get blown over.

second one came out much better than the first which was no surprise - not a big deal as the clematis back there are pretty aggressive and will cover them soon enough.

Any natural wood structures I have made only last a couple of years.I made a White Birch table base and used it to cage dahlias for a couple of years.It just rotted.
Your project looks so sturdy. Nice bird houses too.

Very nice Bill!!

I like the cap too!

thanks - not a very good pic from the deck you can barely see the copper piping.

looks great Bill .. Randy would take an hour trying to find straight 2 x 2's... I just have to walk away and go look at something else

L O L

you have no idea.. if I know we are going to go buy 2 x 4's or anything he is building with.. he climbs up on the HD shelves.. has to look at every single board.. now I know.. just walk away.. LOL

Is that his only obsession? Besides you?

i ended up at lowes as hd only had crooked ones - even with the ones truest to straight i had to pull the tops together and screw them tight and then square off the top so the cap is square

They just dont do lumber like they used to.

For sure! Love that trellis, the cobalt blue top is awesome.

Bill - why don't you buy larger 2x stock and strip them and use a plane and router?

i did consider that Frank but i was not sure how the trellis would come out - to drill the holes for the piping you rough cut a piece with @80 degree angle and just hold it while dilling a 5/8 hole at the same angle 1"deep using the scrap piece as a guide - flip the wood and drill another hole same way - when you drill that second hole the drill jumps a bunch and hoping the holes are all the same depth is a crap shot - so i went with the cheaper alternative - next time i would rip down some 2x4's and not use the suggested piping lengths like i did on the first one - on the second one i measured each pipe length individually and it came up perfect.

There is also a piece of wood between the sides that all three pipes go through - making sure that drill hole was straight was very important - i did end up needing more wood after messing that up a couple times

JoAnn.. no thank goodness packing things are another!!.. LOL

I cant help but side with Randy on some things.I tend to toss away stuff but packing materials seem to have so many other practical uses.

materials... and he is an obsessed packing fiend .. must make many things fit in a tiny space.. (decorations for example) he will make it all fit in it's place ... and remember exactly where that thing is

Of course !!!!

I do see your point Bill. I make mine out of all wood. Copper is just too expensive for me. And I get tired of breaking into foreclosed houses just to rip off the piping! :)

:)

the piping was only $10 for 8' and only needed one per trellis so not bad.

was able to get out and trim several jm's today - with the pile of branches it looked like i took a tree down.

Odd how those little suckers mount up.

I haven't pruned any....I do have a broken branch on Cindy....

most of the trimming was to clean out dissectums of lower branching, some were major branches getting covered by branches above - always try to create some interesting twists and turns when trimming a dissectum

was planning to do some major work on a seiryu but backed off and just cleaned up a bunch of small sucker branches and will evaluation it before chopping off a couple big ones - hard to go back once they are off! - have the same decision on the large shirazz, removed a couple small branches that i had been trying to train that just did not look right, three big branches that start low that might come off later this year.

I lost half my 3 year old Siryuse,think I mentioned it earlier.Heavy snow just ripped a limb off.
#1 the scar.The limb that ripped off was equal in size to whats left of the tree.
Do you think it will shape nice in years to come?Bill.
#2 Always my favorite Spring Delight,made it thru another winter.it was planted in '08

nice shape on the spring delight.

the seiryu should bounce back - i would stake it and pull it to the left so the main trunk is as straight as it can be - better would be to dig around the root ball and re-plant so it is straight. possibly clean up the wound with a saw if possible so it is smooth. and watch to see if begins healing, it should as it is a nice size tree.

I had a jm of similar size that lost a major limb like yours and it is fine now and you can not even notice it lost a major branch from its shape. like you i was devastated when it happened - the root ball had grown so much that i had to do a combination of digging and then tilting the root ball, bringing in more dirt, and staking and forcing the tree straight. it has been a couple years and plan to remove the stake this spring.

The siryue is staked but it looks like some tweeking is necessary from the photo.

Winter is hard on our poor trees!

Went to Smith College today to see their annual bulb show in their greenhouses. It was the perfect dip into spring. Saw some nice orchids too and a wonderful collection of ferns. I took many shots of them to look up, but I think most of the ferns that I loved where most likely not hardy even in zone 7. Nice day. Patti

Smith is an easy drive for me....would like to go next year....

Talk about organized as they have their dates posted through 2017.

You still have time to go until the 17th March this year.

Thanks so much, Patti! I wrote down the info......next week may be a possible go for me!

Smith has a peony event too, though I've never been. DD1 told me she wouldn't go to college there just so I could visit the flowers.