We're on TV!

We were pleased to host Leigh Spann of Channel 8 for a yard tour last week. The segment will air Wednesday, May 26 twice between 5-7 a.m. and maybe again during the 5:30 p.m. slot (for those who aren't early birds).

Leigh and her cameraman were at our house for about an hour, interviewing me, Rick and our landscape designer, Lisa Strange. We love showing off our beautiful Bay-Friendly Backyard and hope that the publicity will inspire others to "Do Something Different" with their landscape. 

In other yard makeover news, we actually finished our front yard landscape last weekend, after two very long days of work in the heat. Still, compared with the backyard, which took about 10 weekends of labor, the front yard was like a downhill sled ride! Start to finish, including edging the borders and pathways, creating an auxiliary parking area of shell, cleaning up and trimming our existing hedge, and planting and mulching some 50 new plants, we were done in just two weekends! Now if we can just get some rain....

Stay tuned for photos and a video tour of the front yard. In the meantime, we are taking a much-needed break and going on vacation for a week starting this Friday. Whew -- we need to go fishing!

Introducing our new Bay-Friendly Backyard!

Drum roll please... Yes, we are done with the backyard, after nearly three months of hard work. Was it worth it? Oh yeah! Look at the photos and tell us what you think.

In trying to adequately describe the new backyard, two words come to mind: interesting and peaceful. The diversity of plants, with their varied textures, scents and colors, makes our yard so much more interesting. We enjoy just looking at everything. And the shady walkways surrounded by these gorgeous plants give us such a feeling of peace. Rick and I have been sitting in the yard every night and just admiring it. I told him last night that this is the first time in my home ownership memory that I have ever been able to look at my landscape and not see it as just a list of chores waiting to be done -- you know, weeding, edging and mowing. This yard enhances our quality of life, instead of interfering with it.

In Florida, one billion gallons of water is used every day just to water St. Augustine grass. It was that eye-opening statistic that started us on this landscape makeover back in February. I am so proud that we decided to buck the norm and Do Something Different! We can now say we are truly practicing what we preach, in our own little way and in our own little world.

 Our urban wild critters seem to enjoy the transformed yard too. We have seen our resident black racer on a regular basis, and the backyard birds are coming in a steady stream to our feeder and birdbath. The supply of "customers" to our butterfly garden is increasing every day, and last weekend we spotted our first swallowtails.  

Of course, we still have the front yard to make over, and Lisa has given us another beautiful landscape plan for that. But for just a few days, I think Rick and I have earned the chance to sit back, drink a cool beverage, and admire the results of our labors.

 

Dare We Say It? We're Almost Done!

We have completed all the planting in the backyard -- more than 120 individual plants.  I singlehandedly planted 34 shrubs and groundcovers in one day a week ago and am very glad I got that task completed before the humidity descended on us last weekend. It seems like our gorgeous Spring has fast-forwarded straight to August!

We put in a very productive weekend despite the heat. I planted the last of the new plants, and finished mulching the beds with pine bark, while Rick completed installation of the edging. The FINAL task, occurring this week, is bringing in washed shell for our pathways. Then we will truly be done with the backyard, and ready to move to the front.

Many of the plants have been in their new homes for more than a month now, and they seem to be settling in and expanding. The lovely bulbine plants are spreading already and blooming constantly, attracting a steady supply of bees to the delicate orange and yellow blossoms. And the little shade-loving iris that I transplanted from the backyard to the side of the house are also producing gorgeous flowers -- white blossoms with blue centers. I have been having a great time getting up close and personal with them with my macro lens on my camera.

We already have butterfly customers in the butterfly garden, and this morning I counted three monarch caterpillars munching away on the plants. Spotted our first Gulf fritillary too.

Saturday morning, we enjoyed watching a sleek black racer and a beautiful glass lizard checking out our plant beds. We've uncovered several glass lizards hiding in the leaf litter during our yard makeover. These fascinating animals are legless like snakes, but have a lizardlike head and really are considered lizards. They are called "glass" lizards because their tails break off if grabbed by a predator, so they can escape. The tail will eventually regrow.

 



Rick and I are so pleased with the way the yard looks. In trying to find the best word to describe our new yard, I keep coming back to "interesting." Our landscape is so much more interesting with the incredible variety of plants we have now.  And it is truly becoming the peaceful oasis we hoped it would be, so peaceful that even the "Foreman," our cat Belle, has been napping on the job.

It's Starting to Shape Up

We now have two complete sections of our backyard planted, mulched and finished with border edging. We can really see how beautiful our completed landscape will be. Sunday's steady rains made our plants very happy. It also replenished our ran barrels, which were nearly empty.

We still need a few more coontie, and a bunch of giant liriope (which we are using as an inexpensive, easy-care groundcover) but all other backyard plants have been purchased. We still need to plant the 12 anise bushes that will border our wood fence, and we still need to install a few more muhly grasses. The roots continue to make planting very slow going, but now we have the end in sight -- at least for the backyard. Our front yard is much smaller and does not have so many tree roots so it should be a breeze compared to this!

I also have my butterfly garden planted alond the side of our back deck, and the milkweed just hosted the first monarch of the season! I'm still looking for purple coneflower and few other butterfly plants but the bed looks colorful and, hopefully, enticing to the "winged wonders."

By the way, Rick says that anytime a product is touted as "EZ to Install," it actually means just the opposite. Such is the case with this snap-together edging we bought. We need 150 feet of edging just for the backyard so we purchased this product because it didn't cost a fortune. The picture on the product wrapper shows a tiny little woman putting the edging together without even breaking a sweat. Hah! Rick had to dig a trench (through roots, of course) just to get the stuff installed at an even depth, then snap it together ( usually multiple times before he could keep it in place), then pound it into the ground with a rubber mallet. Nothing ever seems to be as easy as we hope, but it does look good and it will definitely keep our mulch from floating out of the beds into the walkways.

Speaking of mulch, we tried to get melaleuca mulch because we loved the idea of finding a positive use for a highly invasive plant, but the nearest supplier of any bulk quantities was in Ft. Myers, and the delivery charge was a bit excessive. I guess this is because there really isn't that much melaleuca in the Tampa Bay area -- though there is gobs of it further south, from Lee County into the Everglades. So we settled on medium-size pine bark mulch as a nice-looking, fairly durable and reasonably priced alternative. There is now a small "Mulch Mountain" in our front yard that we are gradually whittling away.

One member of our family, our cat Belle, is extremely interested in our yard makeover and feels that it is her duty to supervise our progress. Belle stays right with us as we work, hiding amid the muhly grass, and napping in the newly installed mulch. She seems completely fascinated by the yard transformation.

Can anyone spare some Advil?

I have a feeling that the next time my husband hears me say "Hey, I have a great idea," he's going to leave skid marks on the floor trying to run for cover.

We got the landscape plan for our backyard and went on a plant-buying spending spree last weekend. We purchased all three of the trees in the design (two East Palatka hollies and one weeping yaupon holly), along with three coonties, and about a dozen each of muhly grass, flax lily and bulbine, a hardy little clumping groundcover with dainty orange and yellow blossoms.

Matilda, our truck, was completely full. But, when we got home and laid out all the plants where they are supposed to go according to the design, it was somewhat disheartening. They barely made a dent in our now bare desert of a backyard!

On top of that, it is taking a lot longer to plant everything than we anticipated. Not only do we have to slice openings in the weed mat fabric that we laid over our entire backyard, we also have to cut through a never-ending supply of roots. It seems like we can't stick our shovels more than two inches in the ground without encountering a root that has to be bypassed or cut in order to plant. It took nearly one hour to plant each of the three trees. Some of the smaller, 1-gallon plants are taking 15 minutes or more apiece. We put in about 17 hours on the yard from Good Friday through Easter Sunday. At this rate, we'll be retired by the time we finish the entire yard!

Despite the discouragement, we have planted enough to see how beautiful our new landscape will eventually be. Even with only about 20% of the backyard plants installed, we can now visualize the finished design of meandering pathways surrounded by densely clustered groundcovers, flower-filled shrubs and our small native holly trees. We will get it done, and then we will enjoy a  nice long sit on our soon-to-be purchased garden bench near the bird feeders.

We are now Grass-Free!

We were reaching for the Advil after this past weekend, which included some serious earth-moving and plant relocation. But we are proud and happy to report that our yard is now GRASS-FREE!  In fact, it is pretty much void of all vegetation, having scraped the grass and weeds away with our new best friend, the MT52 Mini-Bobcat.

We rented the Bobcat on Saturday, and Rick did a masterful job of scraping away our grass and leveling out our yard to prevent water from pooling in our entryway. Masterful except for the little boo-boo of cutting our Verizon fiber optic cable, thereby killing our TV, Internet and telephone service. In all fairness, the cable was only buried about 4 inches deep. Still I couldn't resist the opportunity to remind my husband (a Risk and Safety Manager) of the admonition to "Call Before You Dig."

The very nice Verizon repair technician who repaired our cable Sunday afternoon said that those little accidents happen all the time, and we weren't even charged for the repair!

 Rick became quite proficient in using the mini-Bobcat, as you can see from the video clip I attached to this post, and it only took about half a day to completely scrape and level our yard. Several neighbors stopped by to observe. I think the men were jealous of Rick and his Bobcat.

Our yard is completely naked now (one neighbor described it as "Armageddon") but we are now almost ready to begin planting new plants in our backyard. I expect to have the design for our backyard landscape this week. All we have to do then is to roll out ground-covering weed mat, spray paint where our walkways will be and then begin buying and installing plants! We have 15 cubic yards of mulch being delivered on Wednesday and it will have to go in our front yard. The pile will be there for several weeks while we plant, so we feel very fortunate to live in a neighborhood where people will tolerate a temporary Mulch Mountain in someone's yard. I did manage to transplant lots of African iris from the front and back yards to either side of the house,and Mother Nature was kind enough to water them well on Sunday.

Speaking of water, our other major accomplishment this weekend was in finishing our rain barrels and completing our gutter installation. I spray painted the barrels and we had the gutter installer cut and angle the downspouts so they empty directly into our rain barrels. Sunday's downpours were a test drive and they worked beautifully. In fact, our rain barrels filled up and overflowed, just like they are supposed to do. I will use the barrels to supply water to my transplants this week and, soon, to our new landscape plants. It was a good weekend!

Now THIS is some serious Spring Cleaning!

My faithful 11-year-old Tacoma, Matilda, has been getting a workout! She has now carried three loads of old plants from our yard to Tampa's yard waste facility. The haul includes philodendrons, Boston ferns and one entire load of bromeliads. I loved the bromeliads, and they are great shade plants, but their ability to hold standing water also makes them major mosquito nurseries. For the last few years, Rick and I have found it nearly impossible to enjoy sitting on our deck because of the little blood-suckers, so we're hoping our new landscape will be much less "itchy." Solving our drainage issues with guttering, downspouts and rain barrels should help keep the skeeters at bay too.

Our landscape designer, Plant-Wise Landscapes (http://www.palmwisenursery.com/), is nearly done with our new plan. Can't wait to see it!!

We do know what one of our new plants will be -- a native fiddlewood tree. Since we had to remove the golden dewdrop that was planted too close to our shed, we asked Lisa to suggest another small tree we could plant to serve as a "scouting station" for the many birds that visit our backyard feeders. We noticed over the years that the first stop many of our backyard birds made was to the dewdrop. They'd perch there to check out the feeder and, if it looked safe, then fly to the feeder to eat. Often, they'd return to the dewdrop to eat their seeds. So, we needed another small tree for the birds, and Lisa suggested a fiddlewood. Plus this tree produces both berries and nectar, so the tree itself will be a food source for our urban wildlife.