Backyard in Progress

...is morning I thought I’d update progress on the garden. A crew from Haynes Landscaping worked hard over the past week to clean up our backyard and install the hardscaping for a rain garden fed by the downspout from the back end of our house. The rain garden will fill out a problematic area we’ve struggled with over the years. When we moved into this house in 1998 the spot was occupied by a dead tree. A few years ago we used the area to mine clay f...

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The Soil Beneath Our Feet

...en plot, or we may help in the school garden, or attend meetings about the landscaping of a local park or the future of a recreation area. In all these places, we can exercise soil stewardship. Soil is so important that I’m going to really drill down into this topic. In the next few posts I’ll be talking about 5 areas of personal action on behalf of the soil: Our consumer decisions Composting Mulching No-till gardening Committing to not using chem...

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News From Around the Root Simple Compound

...week a crew will descend on our backyard to begin phase one of a backyard landscaping reboot. First they will break out the word’s ugliest concrete patio and remove the infamous grape arbor, a.k.a. rat canopy. Then they will dig down to adjust the grading at the back of the house so that water flows away not towards the house. I struggle for words to fully describe the ugliness of this concrete patio. It’s a cracked abomination made of red tinted...

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2014: The Year in Review

...thought that before. Right now, why Kelly is away, I’m working on a secret landscaping project. Let’s see if she notices . . . February Advantages and Disadvantages of Raised Bed Vegetable Gardening After a successful straw bale garden in the summer of 2013, I finally got around to building new raised beds to replace some that we had taken out. Our lead and zinc contaminated soil necessitates this, but I wish I didn’t have to use raised beds for r...

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Favorite Plants- New Zealand Spinach

...or many years and find it a reliable plant. In The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping, Rosalind Creasy writes, “New Zealand spinach makes a marvelous temporary ground cover, is good in hanging baskets, and will cascade over the sides of planter boxes. Grow it on the patio so it will be close at hand to add to your morning scrambled eggs along with dill and cheese.” I have so much in my garden right now that I may do a big harvest and blanch, chop...

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