New York Renovator

We’ve had tons of snow days this year. When I was a kid, we ran wild outdoors and in the neighborhood. Times have certainly changed; parents, including this one, are more hesitant to let their children meander aimlessly down the streets. Communities have built structured activities and activity groups for kids. Problem is, finding these groups.

Enter ActivityTree.com! This is a really neat resource. ActivityTree.com is a website loaded with information on kid’s lessons, classes and camps. You can search your area using the handy search engine feature, to look for thousands of activities in your location. I was surprised to see so many activities in my area– I had no idea! The results show all sorts of goodies: activity group information and descriptions, contact information, website links where available, maps and directions and more.

ActivityTree.com also helps parents locate information on kids scholarships for various activities and summer camps. And if you run an organization, you can register your group with ActivityTree.com to get your event or activity listed.

The whole thing is great. It’s free to use, and you just may make some new friends, too. Check out the Get Kids Active! Facebook Campaign on Facebook, too.

I have been as negligent of my gardens this year as I have been about blogging about them. Thank God, plants require very little care and attention. Unfortunately, the weeds also thrive on negligence. :-p But it looks like my vegetables are holding their own. The snow peas are on the brink of harvesting (I just love them raw); we also have cucumbers, which are not doing so well (never do, really); loads of kale, lettuce, spinach which is overwhelming in its production; the red cabbage is coming (yay!), yellow squash is starting to produce fruit… I love vegetable gardening! Talk about diet supplements that work!! There is nothing like fresh, clean food that you have grown yourself.

Here is my chorus of onions in the late afternoon sun:

The zucchini has a few babies!

The cantaloupe is doing poorly, due to a cold spell in April, a very dry May, and a totally soggy June. The apple tree is producing little– I only spotted THREE apples so far– but the grapes and berries are doing well.

The native, wild stuff seems to be doing very well in Upstate this year. Plants that I usually have to pamper, such as tomatoes, melons, and cukes, are doing very poorly. It does not fare well for our emphasis on the raw food diet, but I am grateful for the stuff that we are getting.

June is really a crucial month for us, and it was very disappointing this year. We got SEVEN inches of rain in June. Way, way too much. Everything is soggy, and the pests breed in the wet weather. So even my flower gardens are rather limpid this year.

Still, it is good to see my fruit plants producing, such as the berries and grapes. They get better every year.

I hope you’re not sick and tired of garden photos. Because I’m surely not tired of taking them! I could gaze at them for hours. So I feel compelled to inflict you, as well, muahahaha!

This is the time when everything finally bursts into color. Because I use only perennials and late-flowering shrubs in my garden, my garden is green usually until early July. Then, late-July and August, the whole yard goes colorful. It’s so lovely.

My Althea, also know as Rose of Sharon, are blooming, too. They have survived being chewed to death by the deer.

We’ve added to both side of our Secret Garden this year. We removed a tangle of weeds and overgrown plants under the Maple tree, and finfished it off this past week.

In case you’re wondering, this is what it looked like before:

Here’s my purple Butterfly Bush. I love the color. When the kids ask why it’s called a Butterfly Bush, I tell them, “Because that’s where butterflies come from.”

We got a visitor in our garage, too. Don’t know what he was doing in there, must have taken a wrong turn. We got him out.

I love this time of year!

I’ve had these Nikko Blue Hydrangea plants for YEARS. They bloomed the first two years, and after that, NOTHING. I cannot figure it out.

One Plant Guy told me to cut them down in autumn, and new blooms would appear in the spring. Nothing. Another Plant Guy told me to leave the shrubs alone (no trimming) and in time, they’d bloom. Nothing. GAH!

The plants are well-fed, they are obviously not starving. They have plenty of green growth. I’m out of ideas. Can anyone help?

My gardens always come into beautiful bloom about this time of year. Here are my pride and joy– the gorgeous Stargazer Lily. The scent is knock-off-your-socks heavenly.

The Asian lilies are beautiful, too.

Here is my beloved Secret Garden on full bloom, finally!

Mandeville plant with Black-Eyed Susans.

My first year with grapes are doing well.

Unfortunately, the bugs are loving our grapes as much as we are. I have been beating back the Japanese beetles (HATE those things, wish they’d stayed in Japan), and now Irecently found out there’s a bug that loves grapes so much, it’s called the GRAPEVINE Beetle! Gah!!

I got a measly pepper from my plant. Peppers just don’t do well here. This is my second pepper from three plants over three years. OK, I quit now. I’ll stick to the turnips and potatoes!

And I’m thrilled to see my young apple tree loaded with small fruits! The bugs, of course, are getting there before us. :S

And we’re still working on expanding our Secret Garden. More on that later! It will look so beautiful!!!

This yard, where half of it is gravel beneath turf, and the other half is completely waterlogged, is very difficult to cultivate. When we bought the place, it was horribly overgrown. It has been a decade of hacking, digging, sweating, screaming, and crying to plant ANYTHING here. The good thing is that we are old pros now. We know what to expect and are armed with strong iron tools to fight back. Today’s project was no different. I’ve been wanting to do this for 12 years! Today was the day!

There’s a small asphalt walkway in the front of the house. It led to the neighbor’s parking lot (the two properties were once one large lot). We put up a nice fence between the two properties, mostly to keep out the scads of snowmobilers that roared across our yard in the winter. But the asphalt walkway remained, it just led to nowhere! Today, I had one of the kids bust it up and cart the pieces away. Hurray!

Then, we removed the tangled mass of weeds and groundcover. I’m planning on extending my Secret Garden area to this area around the tree.

Before and after:

The pipes are from our sump pumps. We have two pumps running day and night– there’s a LOT of water underground here. If we do not keep pumps going, our basement floods badly. The town has balked at helping us build a basin at the street side, so all we can do is pipe the water up from the basement sump well and into the nearest discharge basin (in the neighbor’s yard). Part of building a massive garden bed is to conceal the pipes under plants. I also want to make it so that we do not have to mow and weed-whap around the pipes all the time, an onerous job. I have plans on plunking down some choice monster-sized hostas here, because it’s so wet and shady. I’ll plant taller, water-loving shrubs in this area, too.

One such plant I have found PERFECT is Purple Loosestrife. It’s hated by many, because it is so invasive. But this plant and I are going to get along very, very well. It SLURPS up water like there’s no end. The plant is hated because it roots otself in waterways, like creeks and streams, and clogs them. For my water-weary yard, this plant is a God-send. I have two plants thriving right now. It’s taken them two years to really get established. I’m looking forward to placing it in my watery areas.

And it looks gorgeous next to my purple Butterfly Bush, doesn’t it?

So the saga continues…. next time we have another sunny day, we’ll develop this area more. I cant wait to get plants into this area!

We FINALLY got a break in the clouds and rain, enabling us to continue building our Secret Garden walkway. So far, we’ve done this in three stages. This year, we busted sod and removed a good-sized portion of the lawn, adding to this garden. And this allowed us to continue our concrete walkway. It’s looking SO beautiful! I love walking over to this area in the cool of the evening, it’s just a lovely spot. The shrubs will eventually grow up and over the arbor and the walkway, giving the entire side yard a “mysterious” and enchanting atmosphere. When this section is finally done, I think I’m going to mail out birth announcements or something, and throw a party!!!

Here are some photos.

We use the Quikrete concrete mould, and plain old Concrete mix. It works so well!

This was all last week. The concrete has now dried to nice white color, matching the rest of the walk. We will eventually build this walkway (and the garden) to fill up this entire area of the lawn, leading up to our garage area at the back of the house.

Because I have perennial gardens, everything is still green. My gardens really don’t come into blooming fruition until mid- to late-July. It doesn’t help that I have a lot of blue and purple plants, too: Butterfly Bush, Blue Hydrangea, Veronica, Blue Rose of Sharon, Russian Sage, Purple Coneflower, etc etc, which tend to be late-bloomers. I have some lilies, however, and they add some really nice color in June/early July before the blues start to bloom. I just love lilies.

The Stella d’Oro lily is everywhere right now.

My Stargazer lilies are still buds. Oh wait until you see those! And they smell INCREDIBLE! They are my favorite lily. I can’t wait for them.

And here’s an old Scotch Rose. It was a diseased, fungus-laden bush here when I bought the house. I’d hacked it down to three inches high, expecting to remove it. But it stubbornly refused to die. Actually, I think my hacking invigorated it. So it grows, and blooms.

And here you see the peas and turnips growing right along. Along the weeds, that is. :S

It’s been such a crazy spring and summer– soaking wet and COLD! I had to start my garden in JUNE, for pete’s sake, because we had frost and it was too rainy to plant. Even now, it’s very cold for July. Going to drop down to 50 tonight!

My baby grapes! Aren’t they lovely!

We have about a dozen clusters. So far, the deer and the birds have left this alone this growing season, but I’m still very wary. I have to get some mosquito netting to throw over the vine.

I just can’t wait!

One of the great things about having a perennials-only garden is that you get free plants after a few years. ALLLLL my perennials are bursting at the seams, so we have been enlarging our garden beds to accommodate them. And like the saying goes: “Many hands make light work.” The biggest difficulty is obtaining affordable mulch. The cost of mulch has really gone up, and I have been very tempted to outright buy a wood chipper to make my own! The prices per bag are ridiculous! And the bulk mulch from the nearby farms isn’t much lower.

Anyway, we are expanding our Secret Garden, presently, really trying to beef up the neighborhood PR New York. This area of the yard is the most visible as you drive down the street, and it has a lousy view for us (the garish parking lots and the car collision shops down the road). It’s been in desperate need of beautification.

Busting the sod:

We chop it up into small squares, and transport the sod to a shabby part of the property, an area we are trying to improve. It’s an old parking lot we’re trying to cover. It’s in very poor shape. There’s a very large parking lot next door, and years ago it was connected to ours (the neighbor’s and our properties were once one large lot). All the rainwater spills down into this ugly area, creating a very large pool of murky water. It’s in some serious need of public relations New York big time!

I’m laying sod here along my property line to cause more rapid decay of the asphalt and to absorb some of the water that collects here.

If I can keep the kids from playing in the water and stop them from creating “rivers” in the mud, this may look nice after the grass grows in!

In the next post or two, I’ll have some photos of our plants.