On Monday morning, Wifey contacted Miss Utility to have them come out and mark the locations of all utilities coming to the new house. We thought it'd be a good idea (and legal) to have them mark everything before I potentially did bad things with the roto-tiller. We also contacted the electric dog fence people (yes, there was one already in place from the previous owners) to mark the location of their lines.
While it was necessary to do, we've found that much of all that is problematic to getting the garden in place.
The picture above shows two runs of orange stripes, some red marks, and an arc of flags. The flags are the electric fence lines, orange are cable and phone lines, and the red are the power (barely seen in the grass by the Japanese maple in the middle).
The good news is that the power lines are buried 2' down so they won't be affected by the roto-tiller. At its deepest, it'll dig 1' down.
The bad news is that the cable and phone lines and electric fence are all only 6" deep at the deepest. They also run across the entire middle of the yard.
So the plan is to remove the electric fence line for certain. We could likely do it ourselves. We can certainly have the electric fence company come out and do it according to the guy who marked it. In the big scheme of things, though, it's less of a problem than the cable and phone lines.
Tomorrow, I'll call the phone company (who we don't use) and cable company (who we do) to see if I can get them to reroute the lines. They may not be willing to even if we're willing to pay for it to be done. If they're not willing to do that rerouting, I'll have to use the orange-marked lines as guides for where to put permanent paths in the garden. I hope I don't have to go that route, but it may be the only option.
This afternoon the family finished digging out the last juniper bush from the bed where our main garden will go. It put up a mighty fight and its roots ran deep, but with a lot of help from The Boy, its gone. Shortly, it'll be on its way to the dump to be chipped up.
We also removed the first of a number of juniper bushes from the bed in front of the garage.
With that bed being between 8' and 12' deep and the entire length of the garage, it's a pretty large space to fill. Wifey's idea -- and I think it's great -- is to put that space to use. Currently, we're planning to put three artichoke bushes spaced evenly in the bed, have an arbor for some kiwi, and herbs along the path way. I imagine more will come, but that's what we have for now.
Where will the garden go? Why, next to the driveway, of course!
Next to the driveway is a respectably-sized patch of grass. It's around 40' wide and 80' from the street to the maple tree (right side of picture behind the yucky swath of Juniper). There is a slight slope down toward the shed at the woods line. The plan is to set up a rectangular garden inside that area with that Japanese maple roughly in the middle. The area immediately around the Japanese maple will eventually have a more ornamental feel to it. I'm thinking an arbor on the north side, a park bench underneath, and some sort of flowering climbers on either side. Thus: there is shade and relaxation in the garden surrounded by the crops.
Prior to taking this picture, there had been a more sizeable bed where that Japanese maple is. We have since removed four misshapen Juniper bushes, a poorly maintained Hydrangea, two small sad rose bushes, a few large weeds, and a rotting ornamental birdhouse. In digging up that vegetation, we found a buried plastic border and a lot of landscape rocks also buried under grass and dropped Juniper needles. There is a single Juniper stump left in that area (see picture below). I've been gradually chipping away at digging it out.
The plan for this fall is to roto-till an area approximately 25' wide by about 35' long. That would start roughly even with the upslope (south-facing) side of the Japanese maple area and head down roughly even with the southern face of the maple tree. I will then install fence posts at appropriate distances apart and build fencing (design still in debate with Wifey who insists that "it must be pretty!") and a gate. Adjacent to the property line (west side), we will also have another rectangle broken down into a few segments to allow for permanent plantings of asparagus, onions, and strawberries as well as three small segments for the kids to have their own gardens.
I also need to have a few extra inches of organically-amended topsoil trucked in to get us started. If that central bed with the Japanese maple is an indication of the rest of the soil, the property has around 3" of topsoil with clay underneath. I'd like there to be at least 5" of topsoil when I get started. More is better.
By the time I'm done building this garden next Spring, the idea is to have the garden roughly 25'x65' (not including the permanent plantings and kids' gardens). It'll be interesting to see what we actually end up with. I'll be shocked if something doesn't get in the way of that. I just don't have that kind of luck to have everything go completely seamlessly.
I'll sketch everything out at some point and post on here, but work has been busy and the home life has been moving at light speed since the family moved in (a month ago tomorrow).
As for fall plantings, I'm hoping to put in Egyptian Walking Onions and Garlic so we can harvest that next year. Anything else is gravy.
Its been a year and a half since I last posted and what a busy time its been.
In early April 2015 my family and I came to a crossroads. In a single day, our townhouse neighbors decided to erect a very large, ugly and cheap (plastic) shed in their backyard, we lost the pussy willow that provided us much enjoyment, and I had a really bizarre encounter with a neighbor from across the street.
To paraphrase an old baseball idiom: three strikes, we were out.
Immediately, we put all our efforts into fixing up our home for sale. In mid-June, we put the house up for sale. A week later we had a contract and at the end of July, the house was sold.
This began the longest year of our lives.
The short version is that it took us a year to find a home that was a "reasonable" price, that provided flexibility for family growth, that wasn't a complete disaster, that had some acreage, that was in a county with reasonably low taxes and a relatively agrarian approach to life, that was a driveable distance from my job, and was in a county with good schools. There were a number of homes we came across that met a few of those requirements, but only a few that met all. We missed out on two that we were interested in with one of those being one we really loved.
Three hundred sixty two days from the sale of our townhouse, we closed on the purchase of our new home. On July 28, 2016 we became homeowners again.
Since then we've done a ton of painting, done some updating, moved the family from Ohio where my inlaws graciously hosted Wifey and now three (!!!) kids, and have been working to make the new house feel like a home. And we've been discovering ways the previous homeowners neglected taking care of the house. But that's for another day.
And I'm finally chipping away at the garden I've always* wanted to have. It doesn't exist yet, but it's close.
* Blogger's note: In this context, "always" is defined as "since 2009."
