Garden Projects # 15

Great photos, Jo....love the lily combos!

No not a bull, but a cut little Bugdozer like this one. You could tow it off to anywhere to excavate rocks for your endless projects. Patti

http://www.my-mini-excavator.com/Gallery.htm

I love my wheel barrel:)

Wha You do magic with it. I can see a kids book titled, Bill Moves a Mountain With His Magic Wheel Barrel.

Just had more rain blow through. Messing up my day. I wanted to take some shots of the garden and plant a few new Heuchera liners. DH seeded some carrots this morning just before the first downpour so they probably got washed into the kale or tomato area. So it goes. We are picking green beans for dinner tonight and Chef son is eying the pea shoots for something. I never have cooked them. Something new. Lettuce is the best ever! Planted a new one that we once saw in Italy, that is splotched green and maroon. I think it is Lactuca sativa 'Freckles'. We found a six pack of it at a farm in Vt, but with no tag.

http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/31603/ Patti

I have peas that are ready....that's it.....my lettuce & bok choy never matured......the garden is just too wet......

Bill a fairy garden for you!!!
http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/fp.php?pid=9566661

That's cool! Cept methinks, wha would use real stones instead of hypertufa.

OK Now I'm entering DG through a different browser, Mozilla Firefox, so DH can keep all the history features alive and I don't have all the ads. It doesn't save any settings, though. I'll try that for awhile.

I always use Firefox exclusively.

Patti if you scroll down when on the home page you will see the search journal tool there. It is very weird, you can't search in the journal! But it does bring you to your journal.

I use Firefox....what happened to my Bookmarks????

My search of my journal is working. It took me awhile to see it. Patti

For those who are still hunting for it, look on the right of the Home screen and at the bottom of this list is the Journal Search Box

Glad you're back in busness, Patti!

I really don't like how they made buttons I use a lot way down on the side :(

yes I would use real rocks

I knew you would!!

Glad you have your journal, Patti. I'm still waiting for someone to help here....probably have to wait until I purchase a new computer!

I agree with you Meredith about the button location, but at least some of those features are back. I couldn't find the new location for the dmail for the longest time. I guess that new banner is so boring that I failed to look at it to see the d-mail site. What I see the most is that they wanted to make the twitter, face and pinterest site access more prominent which will be useful to all the 30 and under gardens which will be after all us old gardeners are dead and gone.

Really sorry for the likes of Robindog who still are scrolling away or looking at a jumbled screen. Poor you.

Now I must go and find out how to do something to make sure my years of journaling are safe. Or should I work on an ark. Just had another downpour. Patti

Arks are the thing here ......picked up another inch at least........Yes, I'm wondering how many of the gardeners are young? My 38 year old son is a gardener, but he's a landscape architect, so the interest is there, but he's too busy to chat on a garden site.....

Patti, if you ever find an alternative way to journal please let me know, I am so worried they will decide to do away with our journals. It isn't looking too promising with the way they have practically hidden the buttons to get to them. I agree the new banner is so boring!! I miss the hummingbird on the Crocosmia so much!
Robin sorry to hear you are having such a hard time!!

This message was edited Jul 1, 2013 2:26 PM

I went and looked at several of the "competition" sites. Now more of them look similar.

Okay I just realized they added the same bar they used to have across the top. Thank goodness, that will make me much happier at least!

Ok that is weird, it only shows when you are in the forums.. Not when you click on Home! Huh

Thanks, Meredith....Weather people saying rain will stop by Thursday.......

It will NEVER stop...

We got so much rain today that in less than one hour it filled our pool from halfway up the tile to almost over flowing!

Severe storms again for this afternoon....I'm picking peas today no matter what!

We had our second crew looking at the property for the water feature. Even if we don't use them they had some good suggestions. They warned us that our patio would flood in event of a power outage if we build a 2' deep pond behind the proposed retaining wall, suggested a small pond between two waterfalls (so our dog can get in there), but keep everything pretty shallow. Although I thought with a liner we could have a long shallow edge area, they said that would not be sufficient. They still sound expensive.

Get a 3rd opinion, Rosemary.....it's a big investment.

Think I paid about 5K ten years ago. But I did all plant design and installation.

Thanks, all. I think (groan) it may be necessary to get a third and fourth estimate too, considering what two different people are saying about the job. With the wall and patio, I wish I could match Victors price :) these days. I'm sure the nursery wants to make some business selling plants, and I'm sure they misnamed some of my plants to discover my level of sophistication or not. I said I would not plant it this year to delay some costs. They stayed and talked longer, and sounded a bit more flexible about where they could bring the heavy machinery after I said "Bruce" sent me. I suspect this will be the higher end estimate.

Here is "before"

The biggest thing is digging the hole. If you can fit one liner, then it it not that bad. It's when you have to join more than one liner that it gets complicated. Much higher % of leaking. Advantage to shallow is in case you do get a leak.

Victor, dido your sentiment. We had to join ours in one place to get the length we wanted. We did it with surgical precision or at least my DH did and I passed him the tools. DH has done tons of work to repair boats with fiberglass, so he treated it like he would when using epoxy or fiberglass. Clean and neat with everything in place before you start so the bond is strong. We went shallow because we didn't want fish. Love fish, but we live very close to a marsh full of Heron and Osprey that love fish too. I didn't want to open a super club. Patti

you can easily get a liner big enough for the pond - it is the stream coming in that will require the gluing - if you keep the seem up hill not a big deal and if you use enough overlap there is no need to glue if the stream is on a good slope.

rosemary I can give you a good deal on the liner - plenty left over from mine. how big you want it........

Starting to feel like digging it myself...If so, will definitely talk turkey with you, Bill, about liner.

The first estimate for the walls is starting to look pretty good. Perhaps water feature after that, but I still wonder whether there ought to be an emergency drain under the wall and past the proposed patio, and we can't do that later. Second wall guy warmed up to my perforated PVC pipe drain idea because we don't want the patio section to collect runoff from the hill above, and there is already a natural watershed. Whew! this is hard because it is right by the house and we don't want to create a basement waterfall :)

either way you should talk to me about the liner - most locally were 2x what I paid.

I'm curious if Zen Associates out of Woburn was one of the places you got an estimate from? My husband worked there for a season a few years back. They seem to be expensive but they do a lot of ponds, water features in the area and rooftop gardens in Boston.



This message was edited Jul 4, 2013 8:33 AM

We haven't talked to zen associates. Do you think we should, Meredith? We probably want a small operation, but not so small that they don't have a small excavating vehicle that they can use well. The crew that does 10 waterfalls a week only had big vehicles, but they boasted they can move really large boulders and slabs for steps. Our dog can dig a 20 lb rock.

I am definitely talking with Bill before we go ahead and spend a dime.

My inner self, the one that wants to be practical, says to either do the walls and patio or the water feature this year, but not both at once. As long as we leave enough room, and preserve a ramp for a vehicle, most seem to think they are separate projects. We did the math, and I don't see how we'd have a water overflow problem with a pond that gets 2 feet deep in the middle, as long as we don't make Niagra Falls like many of the industrial sites. The idea of two waterfalls with the pond in the middle and not the bottom like nature has stuck with us. Everyone also puts warnings about drowning just about everywhere, but who would turn a toddler loose in a bathtub either?

Rosemary, It would seem logical to me to do the patio first as it as the least amount of flexibility as it has to be flat and connected to an entrance from the house and have an exit to the garden and work with the existing foundation of the house. The waterfall and pond needs to meld with patio rather than the other way around. The patio has to be of a size to make in a useable living space while the water feature can be any size and as connected or as remote from the patio as you want. Also the configuration of the water feature has no limits while the patio is likely limited to an angular space unless you have a massive budget to do a sculpted patio with lots of curves. I think the terrain will speak to you about the water feature once you define and see how the patio works as a living space. You will know where you want to view the water feature from once you start to inhabit the new patio. Seeing the water feature from a sitting position is quite different from a standing one so if you do decide to do the fun part first, the pond, drag a chairs out to the future site of the patio and have a gander to see where you want to see falls and where you want the dog to be swimming. Our dog has plenty of space between the house and the pond area to shake. Not planned but worked out well unless you want to be soaked every time your dog takes a swim.

I know that the people from Country Gardens in Hyannis have been installing ponds for years and years all over Mass including Nantucket. We did our own, but bought all our supplies from them and they, at no cost, walked us through everything via phone, and over the internet. I would email them photos and video and they would get right back to me with suggestion. They are good folks, and maybe worth a call or just drive down to visit their on site pond at the nursery. Happy planning and have a good 4th. Patti

Thanks, Patti. I appreciate your good advice.

Course I wanted the water part to be fun, inexpensive and easy, but it is probably neither at first. Patio, steps and walls seems a still bigger and more expensive project. The patio guy who said they only put in curving patios worried me a bit because that must be a lot of cutting. I showed him a straight angle and said I could put in a curving triangular bed in one corner.