It's in the details

We're in the middle of working on the irrigation system - we're converting from a traditional system to a drip system, installing a timer and setting up zones - but it's so danged hot outside, that we can't really work during the heat of the day.  So I decided to fix up a fun little project.  Dale had bought me these plant markers when we were out at a plant store a couple of months ago:

They have a zinc-plated face, which you should be able to write on with a pencil or marker.  But Dale said they'd look so much nicer in copper.  One of the perks of being an art teacher is that I just so happen to have sheet copper and copper tape at home, as well as a set of metal stamps so instead of writing the names, I can stamp them permanently.

The first thing I needed to do was to remove the zinc plated metal -- I just unfolded the metal and took it off, then measured the unfolded piece.  I added a little length so I had plenty to work with, then marked and cut my tooling copper.  I then went down the plant list and stamped the botanical names with my metal stamps, which I bought a long time ago at Harbor Freight.  I got them on sale for 2.99, and I've used them for a ton of things --

I added the year at the bottom.  Thinking of the future when I may replace plants or add new ones! 

After I stamped the name and date, I rolled the metal flat again. I marked the sides with a light crease.

Then folded it over the metal frame.  To make it more secure, I used copper tape along the back.

 I took a dot of black acrylic paint, and rubbed it into the embossed letters.  This will make them stand out and make them more readable.

After I rubbed the paint in, I used a paper towel to wipe off the excess:

I considered spraying the finished tag with a clear spray, but decided I wanted to let them age and build a nice patina.

We have about 35 different plants in the landscape, so I've got a few more to go.  I have 20 of them done, but I need to order some more plant markers! 

Well, I hope to finish the drip system tomorrow.  We also added solar lights (which have come a long way in the past few years!), I'll have a rundown of those in the next post.

Succulent fountain

I ran across some great images on Pinterest when I was looking for ideas for the hell strip - I want to use succulents there because I don't want to run the irrigation system under the sidewalk, so I need something that can take the long periods between hand-watering.  I saw these ideas:

(all of these can be found on my "ideas for the yard" board on Pinterest)

So instead of working on the hell strip, I got sidetracked into looking for a free fountain on Craigslist (because I'm a CL Free stalker.  Seriously, I could have done my whole yard purely on CL free).

I missed several - these go fast, but early one morning I was using my CL app while still lying in bed, and I ran across this ad:

(I removed the personal info).  Looks great! I glanced quickly at the size without really thinking about it, I could see it was large -- but when we actually got out there (Yes! scored it by being the first caller!), OMFG it was huge.  Yes, 5 feet across.  Thank goodness we bought a truck.  And, thank goodness the guy who was giving this away was the size of a football player, so he could help Dale load this into the truck (although I be  his heart sunk a little when he saw me, a white haired old lady at his door, before Dale got out of the truck). We wrangled it into the truck and got it home - getting it out was an exercise in problem solving, but then we got it all placed and I painted it with the same brown paint as I used on the bricks, planted the top half for the front yard and:

 it looks pretty sweet!  I want a lot of trailing plants, so I have a few varieties that will drape over the side.  Brown is not my favorite color to say the least, but I thought this would work best in the front.  Although a really lovely orange or red might have been pretty cool --

And in the backyard is the rest of the behemoth:

I haven't done anything other than paint it yet.  I placed it where we took out a large agave for the front yard, we got it all leveled, and I am going to think about what to put here.  it's not going anywhere.  I do have one more agave bovicornuta that might look great in the center, with a lot of other succulents around it.  We want to give it some thought before we plant it, however, because once it's full, it's placed for good.  We are contemplating the backyard landscaping plan, because we are going to be putting a pool back there in the next year (I know I said that last year, but I really mean it this year :) !) I think it might look really nice with a lot of lush groundover back here, but we have to put in an irrigation system and clear out some trees/roots, so no big rush.

Speaking of irrigation systems, that's the next plan on the agenda. I got my supplies all ready, we got a new automatic timer (another almost free item - the city of Long Beach has a rebate that covered 80 of the 89 dollars it cost).  Oh, and I got my OK for the lawn to garden rebate - our check for $3000 should be coming in a month! 

One more look at my succulent fountain in the front yard:

 

Front yard planting

Wow, we make even more progress on one of our many projects!  And it has been a cool and breezy couple of days, perfect for planting and trimming our plants.  My foot is strong enough to walk on, so we got started going through the plants we've acquired over the past year to find the ones we want to put in our front yard.  As a reminder, this is where we were in May, after we sprayed the yard with Round-up:

 
We paid a couple of guys to use a sod cutter and haul away the dead grass.  It was worth the 300 bucks.  Then I rototilled the yard, twice.  Raked and raked and pulled roots, and sprayed any green sprigs that poked up with Round-up.  Then we laid the front walkway, after digging a pile of dirt out and then adding base, pavers and gravel.

 Then we picked up some boulders from craigslist (our favorite place to 'shop'), and raked and raked and raked some more.  And then finally, yesterday we planted!

Yesterday, we put in the big agaves and arranged the boulders to show them off, then today we picked up the groundcover and the dwarf bottlebrush that we needed to get.  We still need two dwarf kangaroo paws (we saw them EVERYWHERE a month ago - we've been to 4 stores and none to be found right now).  We also went this morning to pick up a load of free mulch through the LB sanitation dept.  We can have it delivered for free, but we like to look through and get the best kind.  So now it looks like this:

 We added in a few annuals (some alyssum, dianthus and lobelia) for color and because it needs some thing to fill in while the groundcover grows in.  It'll get crowded later, and we can remove things.  I am not afraid to move plants around all over the place.

all the agaves I got free on craigslist.  The big blue agave americana (looks weird in this shot) is a beauty, he's huge and in great shape.  The little artichoke agaves (agave parryi) are really lovely - I have about 8-9 of those here and there.  And off to the right is the agave bovicornuta (cow horn agave) that's Dale's favorite.  I think we still have a couple of bent leaves to trim on some of these, but we went over each one and cleaned them up, trimmed the dead or cracked leaves, and they look great.

Yea, he's got one flipper off to the side that can go.  Sorry about the blurry photo. We added some Mexican feather grass here, although we are really wary of that because it can be really invasive here, so we have to really keep up on that.   So this part looks great, but meanwhile, the rest of the front.....

yea, it's still a big pile of dirt and rocks.  And a heap of roots to throw away.  Not to mention the "hell strip" - which is a mass of weeds and overgrown candy apple (dorotheanthus bellidiformis), which grows like a maniac.  I think I planted like 5 little starts here, and it's OOC.

What a mess!  I think tomorrow I'm going to pull all this up, and put it in the center section (around the base of the tree) and rescue all the succulents that are buried there.  We aren't planning on doing anything with the parking strip here for a bit, but I can at least rake the dirt smooth and get this eyesore taken care of.  I do have a nice purple fountain grass and several other agaves buried in this mess.  But for now, it's just nice to have one section of the front that looks great when we drive up!

Slacker!

Well, I'm a slacker about posting anyway.  I have been doing things, just been very bad about recording them.  But after a long day of working on the yard, I am going to update my project status first.

First, the labyrinth.  It's mostly done, although after getting the path laid and the plants in, I have decided it would look awesome to have a nice hedge around it, so I'll be looking for a deal on some boxwoods in the near future.  But for now, this one can be considered 90% complete.

 So, the last time I posted about this, I'd just started by marking out the path.  Then I went through and tamped down the walk path.  Above you can see how the compacted dirt path looks with the soft, turned soil for the borders all fluffy and nice.

 Then we got a load of decomposed granite.  I wanted the path to stay unpaved, but it'll get weeds and it'll get muddy, so a load of DG as everyone out here calls it, was just what we needed.  I spread that out, then compacted that, too.  Unfortunately, now I can't walk on it barefoot, because the DG isn't soft.  Boo.  I might have to put some sand on top of that.  Anyway, we also planted and then mulched the plants, and then put some starter food on it.  This picture about was from about 3 weeks ago, by the end of summer, I think most of the plants will have grown and merged together to create a living border.  At least that's the plan.  And again, I think a nice little hedge around it would look really cool.  I was hoping to find a cool fountain for the middle, but I'm trying to do this really super cheap, so I am just lurking around craigslist free hoping to snap one up.  Missed one the other day, but I'm persistent!

Another thing Dale and I are doing this summer is trying to fit in some little mini-trips to places we've not yet visited.  So we took a spur of the moment trip to Las Vegas and Hoover Dam, because I had one free night from my hotels.com acct.  We upgraded, and stayed at the Bellagio.   And we ended up going on the HOTTEST week of the year!

Whew! and that wasn't even the hottest temperature we experienced, it got up another degree, but my picture of that is blurry.

First, we went to Hoover Dam, and went on the tour.  We wanted to go on the deluxe longer tour, but it was booked and we would have had to have waited another 3 hours, so we just went on the shorter one through the power plant.  It was really interesting, and nice and cool inside.


I won't put all the pictures on here, but here's a cool shot:

A panorama of the Lake Mead side of the dam.  The water is down about 50 feet, which is really apparent when you visit, but not sure if you can tell in this picture.  Oh, and it was HOT!  We walked part way across the dam, but decided to drive across in our nice, air conditioned car.  We looked at all the outdoor exhibits briefly, then scurried back to the cool car. 

One of the things that I really liked was the terrazzo floor inside the power plant - they had inlaid designs that paid homage to the Native American history of the place.  This is a picture of a turbine, with a Native American influence:

 and an electrical outlet design , that looks somewhat like a rug:






We also got out and walked across the bypass bridge (the Mike O'Callahan-Pat Tillman bridge), which was crazy because we had to climb up eleventy billion stairs in the hot sun and then walk out across the burning hot sidewalk, but we did get this cool shot:

So that was worth it. 

We also saw this cool sculpture that pays homage to all the workers who completed this dam in only 5 years, 2 years ahead of schedule.  They worked 7 days a week, 24 hours a day and only got two days off a year.  But it was the Depression and they were glad to have a job.  And you know it had to be ridiculously hot like it was while we were out there, except they had no air conditioning to escape to!

This sculpture is huge, BTW, I don't have anything in it for scale, but it's really giant. 


We originally thought we'd also go to the Grand Canyon, but after realizing we were going during the biggest heat wave of the year, and there's really nothing at the Grand Canyon other than hiking, which would be completely idiotic in this heat, we decided we'd do that another time.  It's about 9 hours away. (Las Vegas is 3.5 hours from our house, and the Hoover Dam is 30 minutes from Las Vegas).  So that makes it a pretty easy trip.

Another big project we wanted to do this summer was sell (*sob*) my Karmann Ghia and buy a truck.  We've rented trucks so many times from Home Depot to do all kinds of things, and really, as cute as the Karmann Ghia was  (see! Look how cute:)

but it is not a very practical car for us right now.  And I've been taking the bus to work quite a bit, and driving it very minimally.  So it's been a bit of a luxury item, when what we could really use is a truck.  I listed it, had a bunch of people come and look at it, some really annoying people who want to low-ball bid, but finally sold it to a guy who was very happy to have a cute little car.  I think he's going to fix it up to make it more of a hot rod, but whatever! 

Then we had to go find a truck.  We looked at a bunch of really crappy ones, but got a really great deal on this 2002 Tundra.  It is in pristine condition, the guy we got it from really maintained it well, so hopefully it'll be a good deal.   And the best part is that we got the truck for $1200 less than we got for the Ghia, so we can buy a few extra things for it, and also pay for some of the yard projects.

We've already picked up a bunch of heavy stuff in it, so it's been earning its keep already.  And, like the Ghia, I will probably drive this only once or twice a week when school starts up again, as I plan on taking the bus often.  A full sized truck like this doesn't get great mileage, so it will be the vehicle we use the least.

OK, finally, what we got done today on our front yard.  In the past month, I've gotten the new walk path dug out, which was back breaking work but I've been doing it a bit at a time.  I somehow managed not to get any pictures of the dug out part, but a couple of days ago we got a free load of DG for the compacted sub-base, and this is what that looks like:

 This is during our process of spreading and compacting the decomposed granite.  EXHAUSTING, backbreaking work!  And after we got the DG compacted, we had our concrete pavers delivered.  We used 18 x 36s and 12 x 12s.  We alternated them so we had an irregular pattern.  There's a space in this first picture below, we have to re-route a sprinkler head tomorrow, and two of the large pavers arrived broken, so we have to return those and get a new one for this spot on Monday.  Tomorrow, we'll pick up another load of gravel (in our handy truck!) and fill the rest of the spaces between the pavers.  We originally thought we'd put groundcover here, but we really like the look of the little gravel, so we'll fill with gravel, and then gradually introduce the ground cover in between.

You can see the two cracked pavers above. 

We are pretty much exhausted, but we want to get this part done, it'll be a big boost for us to have part of this going!  We also can start planting the section between the path and the driveway, we have tons of plants ready to go!  We also have the drip system for that section, so that'll be the next part of our project.  And I'll try to get more pictures and posts on a regular basis!