Garden Happenings

I have lots happening in the garden, both of my own doing and of nature's. Bulbs and other perennials have popped up all over the place and I've discovered the identity of a couple additional inherited plants as a result. And my husband and I have been hard at work getting the front yard into shape. I've also planted a handful of plants, with more on the way.

Let's start with the inherited plants. Daffodils came up a couple weeks ago, and now I have tulips amongst my blueberry bushes.

 

I'm not sure I approve of the locations of either of these bulbs, so they are probably going to be transplanted after they finish flowering, but I have enjoyed the unexpected spring display. The roses that I pruned back harshly are coming back nicely. And there are a bunch of grape hyacinth that sprouted at the base of this one.

I still don't know that I like the rose in that location, but I tried quite hard to dig it up and put it elsewhere and it refuses. Even if I wanted to just get rid of it, I'm not sure how I would get it out of the ground. So it might have won.

I couple additional inherited plants include a forsythia bush that I tried to kill last fall, not knowing what it was, but knowing that it was a giant unruly bush. I didn't kill it, and may keep it now that I know what it is (a couple uncut branches flowered this year). Luckily, cutting a giant unruly bush to the ground is exactly what I ought to have done to rejuvenate it.

There is also the trees, the dogwood (which I feared had been killed by ivy, but put out a very nice flower display this spring), the spruce, and the large unknown tree that could possibly be a white willow.

I planted around 50 strawberry plants, and they seem to be doing well. I was worried about them. They came like this:

With 25 plants in that plastic bag. And it snowed a couple days after I planted them. And the soil dried out more than I had realized at one point. I was sure they were all doomed. But except for a couple plants that a squirrel pulled up out of the planter, they all seem to be doing great.

I've also planted rosemary, rhubarb and tea. 

All small right now, but they'll fill out with time. The rhubarb especially. It seems to put out a new leaf every couple of days. The rosemary and tea are slower growing, so will take longer to fill out. I've planted a bunch of lettuce, oregano, and nasturtium seeds in my front planters. Hopefully some of them will sprout. The birds seem to be very interested in that planter, so may be pecking all my seeds/seedlings out of the ground. I need to get some bird netting.

Both the blueberry and kiwi plants that I planted last fall seem to be doing well this spring, which is great. I was really worried about the kiwi plants, which came as pathetic little sticks. Now they are putting out leaves and growing:

My lettuces overwintered just fine in my back garden bed and now are growing well and providing tender greens for salads. I'm hoping to build (or have my handy husband build) a cold frame this fall so that maybe next year we can have home grown lettuce all winter long.

And finally, we poured the arms of the cement paths in the front garden. They look great. I hadn't anticipated out much better they would make the whole thing look. We had gravel paths laid already, but the cement cobblestones give it a much more formal look. We still have to do the middle. That will be next week's task, after my legs forgive me.

Path in progress: 

Plants!

So, my birthday present from my husband was as many plants as I wanted to buy, primarily to fill my front garden beds. So, I put in orders to EdibleLandscaping.com, Richters Herbs, and Indiana Berry last week. Some of them are not ready to ship yet, but most of the plants will be here soon. Here is what I have ordered (or already had, from a seed purchase last fall):

Plants:

• 50 Strawberry Plants (25 Quinault- Everbearing, 25 Sparkle- Junebearing)
• 1 Thornless Blackberry Plant (Apache)
• 5 Rosemary Plants (Arp)
• 2 Tea Camellia Plants
• 2 Rhubarb Plants (Victoria)
• 1 Basil Plant (Pesto Perpetuo)
• 2 Bay Laurel Plants
• 1 Lavender Plant (Provence)
• 1 French Tarragon Plant
• 1 Oregano Plant (Hopley's Purple)
• 1 Gardenia

Seeds:

• Basil ("Sweet", "Large-Leafed Italian", Dark Opal, Siam Queen Thai, Aristotle)
• Catnip
• Chives
• Marigold (Red Gem, "Durango Mix")
• Nasturtium (Dwarf)
• Alpine Strawberry
• Cilantro
• Spinach (Hybrid Tyee, Bloomsdale Long Standing)
• Peas (Sugar Ann, Lincoln)
• Lettuce (Grand Rapids, Royal Oakleaf, Buttercrunch, "Blend")
• Tomato (Beefsteak, Abraham Lincoln, Brandywine)
• Butternut Squash (Waltham)
• Watermelon (Sugar Baby)
• Pole Bean (Blue Lake)
• Cucumber (Straight Eight)
• Oregano
• Carrot ("Rainbow Blend")
• Corn ("Hybrid Northern Xtra-Sweet Bicolor")
• Johnny Jump-Ups

When the weather is consistently warm, I will order some tomato plants or buy them from a local nursery. I have never had much luck with tomatoes from seed. I wanted to try some this year, but I'll also grow some hybrids that I love from plants to make sure we have an excellent tomato harvest. Home grown tomatoes are the produce from gardening that I have missed most.

Goodbye Lawn

When we started digging up the lawn in November, I knew it was going to be a big task. It was a longer-running task for a couple reasons: the weather got cold, I was busy, and there were roots. Or maybe I should say ROOTS, because these were no ordinary roots. These roots were impressive, thick and long and running all over under the lawn. They were like a sea serpent, lurking under what looked like smooth, unaggressive ground. A multiheaded sea serpent, in fact. Every time I dealt with one monstrous root, my shovel would bump against a new one and the fight would begin again. The monster metaphor seemed especially apt when I started hacking away at a particularly large root with an axe.

Some pictures are in order:

 A long root from under the grass

Monster unearthed

Monster defeated

Despite it being a lot of work, I am very glad I dug out the bed by hand. I had considered the popular method of lasagna gardening, where you just cover a bed with cardboard and organic material and hope that the bed will be useable once everything decomposes. I decided against it because I had bermuda grass that I feared could outlive the lasagna gardening method. I don't know if it would have, but those roots would have given me grief for years if I hadn't gotten them out. I also considered renting a rototiller. That would have been a waste of money. I would have had to return it in defeat after hitting root after root that it couldn't get through.

In addition to the grass, I transplanted the small shrubs in the front bed and dug up that bed. In addition to more gigantic roots, I found other surprises hiding in the front bed. These included 6 lengths of old, rusty rebar, 5 stumps, and some bricks and bits of concrete. The stumps, I believe, were from some long-gone bushes that were chopped to the ground then buried by dirt and/or mulch. I found this picture of our house from 2004 that shows big hedges in the front yard. Those didn't exist when we moved in. I believe those are the origin of the stumps I found.

Now a before/after:

Okay, hard to tell the difference. But now I have a nice little garden bed. Hooray. It's not very pretty now, but I've ordered a bunch of plants and we're going to put some nice little paths through it and it is going to be lovely. I'm very excited. After 8 years of living in apartments/dorms/other rentals I finally get a garden again. 

It's Springtime!

It's Springtime, as my toddler happily announced (repeatedly) as we came home from the playground on Saturday. In addition to more playground time, springtime seems to mean her mommy and daddy exhaust themselves working in the yard. Some of the things we worked on this weekend:

• I trimmed the ivy along the driveway

Before/During                                   After    

• Chipped all the clippings from the rosebush I trimmed a week or two ago (pictures of rosebush, not chipped bits, which are less interesting) 

                     Before                                                              After 

   

• And mostly finished digging up the front yard (the subject of my next post).

My husband built his cement mixer and with its hindrance made a nice little cement patio in front of his wood-fired oven:

In the meantime, we had some guys come in and put up a skim coat of drywall mud on our guest bedroom. Now it's all ready to sand and paint. It's going to look very nice. They did a great job with the drywall. Our regular handyman, Fat Guy With A Hammer, brought them in when he decided the job was too big for him.

My Sister's Old House

My sister just bought an old house out in California. So now I have someone to commiserate with over stubborn wallpaper. Her house is younger than ours, built in 1966 (versus 1921 for ours), but that's pretty old for California. And since our effective year built is 1953, we are likely to encounter many similar problems.

So, to Ashley: I wish you fewer layers of wallpaper, working appliances, and many happy days in your new old house.

Inherited Plants

When I was a kid we always lived in new houses that had formerly been uninhabited area, so this is the first house I've lived in where I inherited plants. This is good in some ways. I have big, established trees and shrubs that I could never have if I was planting everything myself, but I also have things I do not want. Overgrown roses, invasive weeds, a hedge along the driveway that seems to be asking to be crashed into occasionally. And grass. An old, weedy lawn that hasn't really been tended to besides occasional mowing for a long time. Probably decades.

The worst thing inherited was the parts of the garden that were badly tended. I showed pictures before of the tree that was being suffocated by ivy. Hopefully I managed to save it. My dad thinks its a dogwood tree and I would love to have it survive. Dogwood trees in bloom are gorgeous.

Even some of the big, established trees are not entirely welcome. I have this gigantic crepe myrtle on the side of the house. I'm not really planning on getting rid of it, but it's somewhat tempting. It's such a messy tree. In the late spring/early summer it drops it's plentiful flower petals, in summer it drops bark, and in the fall it dumps huge drifts of leaves. We have a drain at the foot of the stairs down to the basement that is constantly being filled up by crepe myrtle debris and we already had to have our gutter cleaned out once. But it really is an impressive crepe myrtle. I've never seen one that big before. 

Other inherited plants include a bunch of azaleas, some rose bushes (mostly terribly overgrown, but I'll attempt to remedy that), a Japanese maple, a dogwood tree, an evergreen that I believe is a Norway Spruce (arborday.org has a nice tree identifier), and a white willow. My dad identified the dogwood tree and white willow when he was here. I also have a couple of shrubs that were clearly added to the landscape when the house was put on the market. I am not sure what all of these are, but need to identify them. I plan on moving them and need to know when the best time to transplant each of them is and whether or not they are shade tolerant. I also seem to have some bulbs popping up here and there. My guess is daffodils, but I guess I'll find out in a couple weeks when they bloom.

History of Our House

District of Columbia Recorder of Deeds
Our house was sold by Michael J. Colbert to Anthony J. Casale on November 29th, 1921. The ownership of the house was then transferred to Ralph W. Howard Jr. in the form of a trustee's deed on October 5th, 1930. It was then sold to Elizabeth E. Lanahan on January 16th, 1931. It was sold to the family we bought it from on December 2nd, 1988 and it was sold to us on May 8th, 2012.


DC Property Information Verification System
No permits have been issued for this property that have been recorded in the electronic building permit database. The "effective year built" is 1953. It seems that the house had a gut remodel. The walls are all drywall, which didn't exist when the house was originally built. Based on the EYB, 1953 is a good guess of when that remodel was done. The addition at the back of the house was likely done at this time as well.


Census 1940
In 1940 John and Elizabeth Lanahan lived in the house with their 3 adult children and daughter in law. John and his two sons were plumbers, his daughter worked as a salesgirl at a department store. 

Elizabeth and Helen Marie, the daughter-in-law, didn't work and had a 8th and 10th grade education respectively. John and the married son (John Jr.) had 2 years of college education, the other son (James) and daughter (Alice) finished high school. 

The Lanahan family had been living in their current house for the last 5 years, but Helen Marie was living in Greensboro, North Carolina. All of the Lanahans were born in DC or Virginia.

John worked 40 hours a week, but did not report his income, probably because he was self-employed (a common reason to not report income in the 1940 census). John Jr. made $1840 ($28000 in today's dollars) that year, James made $1000 ($15,000), and Alice made $850 ($13,000).

Census 1950 (Update 2022)

In 1950 Elizabeth Lanahan and her daughter Alice were still living in the house. Elizabeth was widowed and had apparently taken over her husband's plumbing business. Her occupation was listed as Proprietor of a Plumbing company. Alice was 35 years old, never married, and worked as a typist for a retail clothing company.