Notice two things — the dusty haze and the gleaming, astroturf-free porch.  Hooray for the astroturf being gone forever!

While they were all doing that, Frank and I were able to focus on the front yard.  You may remember that we’re going for a front yard that has no grass but instead has edible plants (all of the herbs we relocated from the back yard) and flowers.  We posted about it here and here.  It was looking a bit scraggly and we needed some fall/winter color.  So we focused on that while everyone else worked on the steps.  It was great to be able to have both going on simultaneously.  It would otherwise have taken us 3 full days to accomplish the same amount, and when the astroturf was still there, improving the yard didn’t make enough of a difference just like when the front yard was scraggly, removing the astroturf wouldn’t have been as big of an improvement.  However, getting both done at once was wonderful!

Here’s the end result.  We’ve got mums that will keep coming back for fall color, pansies that will provide color all winter long, and lots more bulbs up front for springtime color.

Yesterday we bought a weeping cherry tree on a whim.  We got it half off, so it’s much more mature than what we expected to buy for the front yard.  They were a bit incredulous that we’d be able to get this 300 pound tree (with root ball) home in the Matrix, but it was just fine.  When we got here, a bunch of neighbors came out and helped Frank carry it up the steps and into place.  Even though it was already dark, the weather was gorgeous so he stayed outside and got it planted right away.  We can’t wait to see it blossom in the spring!

We were happy to see that the weeping cherry had not been stolen when we woke up this morning.  It’s pretty heavy, so we should be ok.  But it’s always good when things aren’t stolen.  Unfortunately we can’t say the same for our second rue plant.  Our neighbor cautioned us that rue is very popular (for some reason) and that every time she planted it, it was stolen.  We weren’t that attached to it — it was just something that we relocated from the back yard.  But sure enough, a couple of months after she warned us, one of our rue plants was dug up in the middle of the night.  Well, last night it happened again with the second one.  I think it’s kind of humorous that with all of the plants we consider more valuable (all of the established herbs), this silly little rue is what thieves go for.  But Frank, of course, is livid that someone would come and dig anything out of our yard.  The good thing is that we don’t have any rue left for the taking.  I guess we won’t be buying any more…

Hi, Frank here – I just want to give a word of thanks to our neighbors for helping us get the tree out of the car and up into the yard.  Special thanks go to Mr. McLaughlin, who is not afraid of moving a 300 lb tree around.  The people in the nursery had us pretty scared about killing ourselves, the tree and our car.  But within minutes of our pulling up if front of our house, Mr. McLaughlin was there with a hand truck and his brother.  We pulled the tree our of the car and onto the hand truck, and five of us hoisted the tree and cart into position in the yard.  If it weren’t for Mr. McLaughlin, I fear the tree would still be sticking out the back of the car.

Other things we planted directly into the garden, like corn and sunflowers and lettuce and spinach and peas.  We didn’t get any peas to speak of, but we think maybe this was because of that one hot week we got in early spring.  We don’t know why we don’t have lettuce and we’ve never had any luck with spinach.  Our corn seems to be behind schedule, as do the sunflowers.  And nothing is taking off in leaps and bounds like we expected.  For some perspective, I looked back for pictures from our first (amazing) garden and am feeling a little more encouraged.  Things were bigger in June than they are currently in our garden, but still smaller than I remembered.

For quick reference, here’s a comparison shot of our garden from June 11, 2007.

This gives me hope that it’s still not too late for us to rescue our garden this year.  Remember, this is how our garden looked on July 11, 2007, just one month later. 

The good news is that our front yard blueberry bush is starting to produce!  We ate 6 delicious blueberries from it yesterday.  We bought another 2 bushes this year that appear to be slightly later bloomers than the one we planted last year, so we should have a pretty steady stream of blueberries for a while.  Mmmm!

Boy Cat heard me upstairs taking pictures and he came running up and got in a bunch of my shots.  He is such a camera hog!

Here’s a side view of the yard with the chives and the thyme in flower (taken on 5/10/09).

The chives are still in full-flower, but the thyme flowers have come and gone.  Also, the sage got some pretty purple flowers that are mostly gone now.  It looks like our lavender will start to flower any day now — it didn’t flower at all last year, so we’re looking forward to the lavender blossoms this year.  Our blueberries (the tall, thin bush in front of the porch) also flowered early this spring.  It looks like we’re going to get quite a crop of blueberries from it very soon!

Here’s the view from the street.

Next up — photos of our garden on top of the garage roof and also the progress on the back deck footings.

So, the day after Frank and Mike finished the concrete work, Frank and I relocated all of the plants that had been uprooted in preparation for the back deck project from the backyard to the front.

This included tons of chives that were about to flower, 2 big thyme plants that have made it through 2 winters, 2 lavender plants, 2 oregano plants, 1 rosemary, 2 sage, and some cilantro, parsley, and green onions.

We spent all day digging up the grass in a 3′ wide stretch and then replanting the herbs.

At the end of the day, we were one step closer to eliminating the grass and having a productive front yard.  Next step…making a mulch pathway to get rid of the remaining grass on the upper part.

Here are our first crocuses of the season:

And this is Brady’s garden.  We got a bunch of bulbs at Morgan’s baby shower and we were actually in the middle of planting them outside in a little garden for him when we got the call that she was in labor.  I can’t wait to see what the bulbs turn out to be!  In the meantime, some hardy pansies are looking vibrant now that they’re no longer covered by snow.

The key highlight of this year’s plan is to put most of the vegetable garden up on top of the garage roof.  We hope to transform an otherwise bleak and useless space into something beautiful and useful. 

Last year we more-or-less followed the Square Foot Gardening method, which we find is ideal for an urban garden where space is at a premium.  Actually, according to Mel Bartholomew, SFG’s inventor, it is ideal for any garden because it not only uses far less space than a conventional garden, it uses far fewer resources and requires less maintenance.  This year we plan to follow the SFG method as closely as possible. 

The roof of the garage is about 450 square feet.  In that area we will build eight planter boxes covering a total of about 160 sq ft.  We plan to have four more boxes in the main yard for another 64 sq ft.  This gives a total of about 220 sq ft.  Hopefully we are not making a common rookie-gardener mistake and biting off more than we can chew.  But most of this additional space, closer to the house, will have flowers, not vegetables.  Flowers don’t require nearly as much work as vegetables do.

The boxes will be filled with a mixture of peat moss, vermiculite and compost.  There is no actual soil, so the boxes will stay relatively light weight and won’t collapse the garage roof.  Yes, vermiculite and peat moss are non-renewable resources, but the theory is that you use far less of it than you would with a traditional garden and because you reuse this same mix year after year, just adding new compost each time you plant.

Our first step was to draw out our plan on graph paper and plot the location of each plant.  Then we made a calendar of when we should be taking each step.  The SFG book tells you how many plants to put in each square foot: 16 carrots per square, 4 corn, 1 basil, 2 sunflowers, etc.

• This weekend we will be building a seed starting rack with shelves and lights for starting our seeds inside.  A few weeks ago we purchased a whole slew of heirloom seeds from Seed Savers Exchange.
• Each week from now until early April we will be starting different seeds indoors, starting with broccoli and kale this weekend.
• April 10 is the estimated date of the last frost in DC.  We’ll actually start planting some of the hardier plants outside before then.
• Prior to that, by the end of March, we will have to have shored up the garage roof (it has a few rafters that need to be replaced), built some steps from the main yard to the roof (only about 3 feet high), and built at least some of our planter boxes.
• Some of the first plants to go outside will need to be protected by cold frames that will keep them from getting killed by the cold weather.  This is basically just some plastic sheeting on a frame that protects them from the wind and cold air overnight.
• Starting in late March we’ll start planting seeds directly outside, and when the weather starts to warm up by the end of April, we should start to get our first harvests of lettuce and other greens.
• By May and June everything should be growing like gangbusters, and we’ll have our first tomatoes in June.  The corn will be taller than us (or Kristen, anyway) and we’ll have more squash and cucumbers than we can handle.

Of course reality will intrude on our plans soon enough.  Last year we had a very wet spring, which nearly killed all of our tomato plants.  They never really recovered in time to give us more than a few tomatoes each.  Then, atypical even for DC, we had a week of 100 degree days in June, which caused all of our cool-loving lettuce, broccoli and greens to bolt before giving any produce.  The little that remained was mostly eaten by harlequin beetles and slugs.

I’m sure we’ll have many of those same challenges again this year, but at least we won’t be handicapping ourselves by starting everything too late and not planning properly.  Hopefully we won’t get too lost in weeding and squashing bugs and we’ll have time to update the blog with photos and descriptions of our progress.

The first batch has lost some of its luster now.  In March we took pictures of our crocuses and tulips and looked forward to posting them on the web to let our northern friends know that spring was on its way.  (And yes, perhaps to show off how early spring comes to DC.)  The crocuses, tulips and daffodils are long gone now.  But they were beautiful while they lasted.  For some reason our tulips came up before our daffodils.  But our daffodils were so pretty that they were worth the wait.  A big thank you, again, to Frank’s mom for planting these bulbs last fall.  We looked forward to their emergence all winter!

The next batch of lost pictures is from Suzanne’s 30th birthday cocktail party.  We made a lightning-fast trip to NY for the event…arriving around 8 PM on Saturday and leaving around noon on Sunday.  But it was well worth the trip.  Check out the pictures of Suzanne’s boots.  They were her extravagant birthday present to herself…and one of them got stuck on her leg!  After about an hour, a skilled friend managed to loosen the zipper enough that Suzanne was able to unzip the boot the rest of the way.  We have no pictures of the process (it wasn’t so funny at the time), but everything turned out ok in the end.  And we didn’t have to cut the boot off. 

The final batch of lost pictures is from a big weekend of visitors.  Marisa came to town from Thailand, which drew a crowd.  Bonnie & Tom came up from South Carolina, Shannon came down from NYC, and Wendy came up from Virginia.  And Mary happened to be in town from Boston that weekend, so it was a great party.  We had a nice birthday brunch for Bonnie and Tom’s birthdays and then went out to the Brickskeller that night.

Enjoy!

This shows the progress of our garden, which we’ve been thinking about, planning for, and working on for the past 4 months. We started working the soil on a warmish day in February. We also started our seeds inside in February. Then it stayed cold, so the seedlings couldn’t be moved outside. By the time they could, many of them had died off and others were just emerging. We supplemented our own seeds with seedlings from the farmer’s market, re-tilled the soil and mixed in our own home-grown compost, built planter boxes, strung trellises made of netting, planted seedlings and more seeds, and installed a drip irrigation system. Now that the rains have stopped and the sun is out, we expect the garden to start taking off!

Enjoy the photos.

If you want some arugula, let us know…we’ve had enough for this year.

Yesterday we took the day off work and spent the whole day jackhammering. We figured a weekday would be better than making so much noise for a third weekend in a row. I’d say we’ve got about 75% out now (not including the path, which will be taken out at a later date). Of course, we have to finish this weekend, but at least it won’t take us both Saturday and Sunday to get the job done.

What did we do with all that concrete? We dumped it down into the back of the garage. We are planning to shorten the garage to its original size since the new addition is not going to last much longer and we’d rather have the yard than an enormous garage. So, we’ve got our own fill to use — perfect because it doesn’t go to a landfill and we don’t have to pay to fill in the enormous hole.