Garden Plan

I figured I should at least try to remember all the various things we planted since I’m sure some may not make an appearance next year.  I went through and inventoried all of the various plant tags and tried to indicate where we planted them.  My memory is a little fuzzy on a couple of them, but hopefully I captured most everything.

There are still quite a few plants that we planted but aren’t pictured.  Those are:

• Japanese Blueberry Tree (Shogun series)
• Nugget hops
• Hydrangea Endless summer (Bailmer)
• Rhus typina Tiger eyes sumac (Bailtiger)
• Shasta daisy
• Calla Lilly
• Cinese Lantern Physalis
• Phoenix Red penstemon
• Salvia greggii

Hopefully everything makes it through this winter!  I’ll try to capture the same image again next year.

-H

Ta-Done!

Well…we’re done!! It’s been a couple of weeks since the last post, but it’s because we took some time to actually enjoy all of our hard work 🙂

After the rainstorm & flooded basement debacle, we spent the next couple of days finishing up the deck skirting and planting. Then called it finished for the year. This means that we didn’t finish everything we thought we would (cable rail for the deck, concrete patio, etc…) but we got most everything done:

• Demolish existing deck and garage
• Re-build deck and add new stairs and railing (have a wood rail in place but wanted to do a cable rail – this may have to wait until next year)
• Build new fence and gate
• Break out concrete, add drainage (just in case), build retaining wall, fill with dirt and plant garden and raised beds
• Add irrigation and lighting
• Repair and stain concrete patio (this will have to be next year)

To remind you, this is where we started:

And 6 weeks later, we had this:  

It was a long, hot summer, but we have such a great space to enjoy the (hopefully) few weeks of nice weather this year!

So backyard is done…for now 🙂

-H

Two steps forward, one step back

We arrived home Friday afternoon during the first major rainstorm this summer to 4″ of water in the basement. It was pouring in through the electrical conduit pipe that we had cut off during the garage demo. It was run out there to provide electrical for the garage. It ended up getting buried basically under the retaining wall and when water built up after the rain, it started running through the conduit – directly into the basement! 

 

that little thing in the back is the garden-end of the conduit…under the retaining wall!

 
It was so frustrating to have done all this a hard work and have to deal with this issue. Luckily we figured out right away what the source was and got to work trying to stop it. Poor Alex was out there in the pouring rain digging and trying to rig something up to stop the water flow.

 

The poor guy also got shocked by the electrical extension cord we were using out there as well! 

We were able to use the shop-vac to drain the water so it would stop pouring in and brainstormed over dinner with my dad.  We still didn’t have any great ideas when we went to bed cold, exhausted and discouraged on Friday night.

Saturday morning my dad came back with some plugs and roofing sealant – so we plugged up both sides of the conduit and covered the exterior end with concrete. 

Fingers crossed our solution prevents this from happening again! 

-h

We have a dirt patch!

We made some pretty good progress this week!

Once we took out the garage and removed the concrete, we realized that we have some pretty serious clay soil that could cause drainage issues in the future. So, to be proactive, we decided to lay the foundation for a french drain system.  We didn’t actually connect it to any drain lines, but can in the future if we need to.  We had 4 cu. yards of drain rock delivered and went through the backbreaking work of spreading it around to create downward sloping areas for the perforated tubing to run out of the garden.

Progress one evening after work

We laid this out in the shape of a backwards “E.” Once the slope was created (1/8-1/4″ of vertical drop for every 1′ of linear distance,) we covered the perforated tube with more drain rock.

2/3 of the way there

Then, we covered all of the tubing / gravel with a layer of landscape fabric, so by Friday morning it looked like this:

Then we had 10 cu. yards of topsoil blend delivered. I selected the blend that contains a mixture of peat moss, topsoil and something else because the woman from Pacific Topsoil said that it would help with potential drainage issues.

Alex and Jamie are kings of the dirt

1 hour of hard-core shoveling later, it looked like this:

  
It looks like a great blank-slate for our future garden!  Phew – that was a ton of work, but I think it will add so much livability to this space.  Next steps – fence, finishing the deck and doing the concrete.

-H

Not so rainwise

After we had demolished the garage and concrete slab underneath it, I happened to come across an article in the Seattle Times that mentioned that the city of Seattle participates in the federally-funded Rainwise program.  If your house is in a location that qualifies, you can be eligible for the program to pay up to 100% of the cost of installing a rain garden and/or cistern up to ~$4,500.

Well, my address is eligible, and I was already going to be putting in a garden area, so I thought this could be perfect!  Well… not so fast…  As with any government-funded program, there are a lot of restrictions and hoops to jump through.

The first is that you have to offset a minimum of 400 sq ft of roof area.  I looked at my roof and thought “perfect!” since the area for the most easily accessible downspout to the backyard is 500+ sq ft

AND, this project is actually removing 350+ sq ft of roof by taking out the garage

But… unfortunately the program measures this from a birds-eye perspective and ONLY includes the roof of the house, not any roof structure that may be removed as part of the project.  That area is <400 sq ft 😦

It seems a little counter-intuitive to me, and pretty unfortunate since this would be a perfect area!

The other qualification is that the soil has to “perk” to determine what level of rebate / subsidy you will be eligible for.  Basically this means that water has to be absorbed into the ground at a certain rate.  In order to check for this, you have to dig a hole 2ft deep and 10″ wide and then fill it with water and watch it drain several times over a period of ~7 hours.  We dug the hole but haven’t done the test yet since its not looking likely that we would even qualify based on the roof calculations.

I have been talking with a very knowledgeable rainwise contractor, NW Bloom, about this and am hoping that there may be a little room for flexibility on the roofline qualification. I’m not holding my breath though, and I’ll certainly keep you posted!

Update: Unfortunately I won’t qualify for the rainwise program – there is no wiggle room in the square footage calculations (no surprise there).  I also started the perk test by filling the hole with 12″ of water for the first fill/drain cycle.  Its supposed to drain and then less than 2 hours later you fill it again and start to time how long it takes to drain.  Well… I filled it on a Friday and then 1 WEEK later, it had only drained about 4″ of water!

-H