New baby bushes

[cimorene]

For long-time readers following along at home, you will likely remember our year-long struggle with the open septic tanks in the yard and the conclusion a couple weeks ago when the plumbers (and the digger) finally fixed it! Unfortunately, in the process, as well as digging up a bunch of grass and the gravel of our driveway, they had to dig up

• The horizontal cement square at the base of the cement steps to our door connecting them to the cement steps a couple yards in front of them that led up the retaining-wall hill to the higher level of the yard. Why did they build these two steps with a little square of cement between them? Nobody knows. But because it was connected to both sets of steps, and it had to be dug up, the bottom step of each set of steps is now all crumbled and broken with rebar sticking out and the step down to the ground is now too great. I guess we're gonna get some bricks???



RIP hideous but previously functional bottom steps :(


• A row of established bushes marking the edge of the yard on the right of the driveway as you turn in. The broken pipe went under it. So we lost all of them. They were kind of straggly and unhappy anyway and we have tried several times to cut them back and fertilize them, to no avail.



• A lot of the roots of the beautiful birch tree on the corner of the lot, planted by the wife of the builder of the house, so probably sometime around 1950. The city workers who dug up and repaved the street 1 year ago unfortunately cut right up to the base of the trunk at the corner, so it lost a bunch of roots then, and this new excavation went almost as close, but from about 120° off. Two different old people in the neighborhood stopped on their walks to tell us "Hey, that tree's gonna die." Which seems plausible based on how much of its roots it must've lost, but it will be really sad and we are at least SLIGHTLY hoping that maybe it won't? Wax wants to wait and see how it feels next spring before we consider calling an arborist. I looked at the city website, but there is no number for the people in charge of trees (it is on city land since they own the margin next to the road) or any contact information about trees, so I suppose there isn't a municipal "Is This Tree a Danger" number.
  
  
  You can see the tree on the edge there and all the bare earth where the excavation was...

So we bought some clover seed to put where the grass used to be (hoping the headstart will help it outcompete the grass - we hate grass) (it won't grow until next spring though) and where the cement square was. We can't hope to repair the steps until spring thaw because it's too cold to be sure of being able to cure concrete already. And we also bought some baby bushes to replace our lost bushes.

One of the bushes is the extremely common native shrub dasiphora fruticosa, or shrubby cinquefoil (Swedish: Ölandstok, Finnish: pensashanhikki), the Creme Brulee cultivar, which is white. The yellow-flowered one is what you see everywhere, so this will be a little different. In the center are two spiraea betulifolias, birchleaf spireas (björkspirea, koivuangervo), a variety whose leaves turn red early in summer after it finishes blooming. And the last one next to the driveway is forsythia x intermedia Courtalyn, or border forsythia Courtalyn (forsythia, I guess? in Swedish, and komeaonnenpensas in Finnish), which will have yellow flowers. However, now we have to get one or more stakes to put around them to protect them from the snowplows. The old bushes were big enough to warn the plows off, but these guys probably not so much. And they're near the corner of the lot and the street corner at a T intersection which is a big danger zone for snow plows because of the way the street widens a bit at the corners there.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Happy gardening and best wishes to the birch.

[cimorene]

We're not serious gardeners like you, but it is very nice to plant bulbs and bushes! We bought a lot more bulbs as well, but we haven't finished planting them yet!

[princessofgeeks]

I am laughing really hard at the idea of me being a serious gardener!!!!!

I am soooo not.

[cimorene]

Oh, haha! I have the impression that you maybe spend more time on it, or more... organized? time? than Wax does. But she is a serious Plant Hobbyist who like watches tons of videos and learns about the varieties, but her favorites are epiphytes, tropical climbers that grow in moss and bark and have to have special indoor lights and stuff, so her interest in the garden is always more sporadic. Also maybe you're just more regular about doing stuff outdoors and uh. Less ADHD... lol.

[princessofgeeks]

I really don't spend all that much time on it! I bought this house three years ago and have enjoyed watching the various plants appear, and I have moved a few of them around -- there were some iris in the side yard that I think had migrated from the neighbors' and I moved them to the front. There is a vegetable garden that I had keep weeded, and two of the three years here I've planted a couple of tomatoes with mediocre results. The most time consuming thing I did was clear all the fallen leaves out of the back yard and plant grass seed on the bare spots, because that takes daily watering until the grass grows, but that was right after I moved here in 2022.

I love seeing the green lawn; that is my favorite part. Just having a yard.

I do have some houseplants but I am very haphazard about those. I don't love them like Wax does and in fact am thinking of getting rid of two of the messiest ones. I do have a Boston fern that is past its prime but it was something I bought for myself when I first moved out on my own in 2019 after my marriage, so I'm a bit sentimental about it.

Right now I am very annoyed with the houseplants because I have had an outbreak of gnats.

Oh, the really big job with the yard didn't involve gardening. I got sick of the koi pond and filled it in and that was very hard. My ex and my friend B helped me. Also I have had to move a lot of rocks around that were used to line abandoned flower beds in inconvenient places but that was more for the lawn than for plants.

[cimorene]

Oh, I remember that pond!

Yeah, I see what you mean, I guess I was remembering some lawn posts as well as the stuff about the vegetable garden. And of course a vegetable bed typically takes more weeding - or it can at least. We didn't even plant zucchinis this year, which we usually do - and that was a good move because I don't think we could've managed the weeding this year. It took us until September to prune back the crazy overgrown raspberry and blackberry bushes, which, we love berrries, but they have thorns and you have to be able to walk around and up to them to actually pick the berries.