|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
Gardening
|
| I wasn't
very interested in plants until college. I took a few
botany courses as part of my interdisciplinary major - including things
like plant taxonomy and plant-animal interactions - and that really
opened my eyes to the diversity of plants and the many interesting
aspects
of their ecology. I also had the opportunity to spend a summer working
on the horticulture crew at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo between
my junior and senior years (after working a
couple
summers as an animal keeper) and I really learned a lot during
those three months about how to select, plant, and grow herbaceous and
woody plants. Although I kept
a few plants in my room in college, my collection increased
dramatically
when I got my own apartment in Chicago - pretty much the same thing
happened with my collection of animals. When we moved to Cleveland Heights and actually had a yard, a whole new world of possibilities was presented. The prior owners hadn't done much with landscaping, which gave us lots of opportunities to be creative. We had some ideas of what we wanted, and slowly began transforming our yard by adding flower beds, trimming trees, and planting annuals and perennials. We're done with most of our major projects, and are not just "tweaking" things. I've learned a lot in the process, often by trial and error. Hopefully my Master Gardener training will help cut down on the error side of the equation in the future; it certainly has been (and will continue to be) an extraordinary learning experience. We mostly grow herbaceous ornamentals and shrubs in our yard, though we also do a bit of herb and vegetable gardening. We also try to make our yard wildlife friendly through the things we plant and by providing a variety of habitats. You can check out a list of this things we're currently growing here. |
|
Landscaping
Although Lisa and I are do-it-yourselfers, we didn't want to tackle some of the major landscaping components we envisioned for our yard. We therefore hired Impulitti Landscaping to help design our back yard and to do some of the more significant construction; this primarily included tearing up the back yard, building a brick patio, installing a series of privacy panels, and moving many of the small hemlock trees along our east border. Here's what it looked like while they were working: |
  |
|
Planting
We've done all the planting in our yard ourselves. Our garden is far from finished (I'm not sure a garden really ever is "finished") but our yard little resembles the one that was here when we moved in. Below are a few "before and after" photos of our yard from various angles. The "before" pics were taken when we bought the house back in the fall of 2003. The "after" pics were taken in June of 2008. |
  The
northeast corner of our property. We took out the basketball hoop, a
maple tree, and that iron post (which is now in the front yard and has a clematis growing up it).
|
  The east side and southeast corner of our yard. The small hemlock trees were moved to different spots, as was the stone bench (just out of view to the right in the more recent photo). The big, bifurcating tree in the center is a magnolia. |
  The south edge of our yard. The sun room is visible in the left photo, but it is blocked by our porch in the right photo. |
  The back side of our house. The family room addition in the left photo was added to our 1927 house back in the early 1990s. We added the covered porch shortly after we got to Cleveland in 2003. A brick walkway (not visible behind the big flower bed) connects the driveway to the brick patio and the porch. |
|
In June of 2008 we installed a couple rain barrels on the side of our house next to the garage. In case you're not familiar with them, rain barrels are essentially just big barrels (ours are 55 gallons each) that collect rain water from gutter downspouts and store it for later use. There are many practical and environmental reasons to use rain barrels, the primary one being that they decrease the amount of rainwater (and associated chemical runoff) that enters city sewer systems. We mostly use our rain barrels to fill drip buckets (i.e., buckets that slowly drip water, such as might be used to water newly planted trees), and to water our potted plants and vegetable garden. Given the large surface area of our roof, it doesn't take much rain to fill the barrels, and 110 gallons of water go a long way in the garden. Instead of purchasing our rain barrels, we built them at a class sponsored by the Cleveland Botanical Garden. (The Nature Center at Shaker Lakes also offers rain barrel classes.) The registration fee for the class covered the cost of all the materials except the diverter box, which we purchased from Gardener's Supply Company. The Cleveland Plain Dealer interviewed the instructor of our course shortly after we took the class, and published an article providing all the details on rain barrel construction and the costs associated with it; I copied the text of the article and have uploaded a PDF of it here. You can save a lot of money if you already have the necessary tools or can borrow them from a friend, but even then you may not end up saving much money on your water bill by using rain barrels; in northeast Ohio at least, water is relatively cheap. The main reasons for using rain barrels are convenience and benefits to the environment. One important thing to keep in mind about rain barrels is that they are passive mechanisms for storing water. To get water from the rain barrel to wherever you want it, you either need to pump it or let it flow downhill. For most folks, the latter is simpler and cheaper. You can help yourself a lot by planning to elevate your rain barrels rather than let them sit on the ground. This not only helps the water flow by increasing pressure, it makes it easier to fill buckets and things like that. Keep in mind that a gallon water weighs just over 8 lbs., so your barrel will weigh between 400 and 500 lbs. when full. If you're going to elevate it, you need a something strong. Cinder blocks are a cheap and easy option, but they don't look so great. If your barrels are hidden, this might not be a bid deal. Since we were going to be looking at ours every time we drove up the driveway, we decided to build some simple yet strong platforms. Each one pictured below is made from one 8' 4x4, two 8' 2x4s, and one 8' 5/4x6 piece of decking. I cut each of these into four two-foot pieces (or, more accurately, Home Depot did), screwed them together using good quality 3" decking screws (pre-drilling the holes), and then painted them to match the house (and the barrels). They are plenty strong and position the barrel spigots at a convenient height. |
   |
|
This
page was last updated on July 1, 2008.
|