Buried treasure: Kid's backyard time capsule

Elise has become kind of obsessed with treasures, treasure hunts, scavenger hunts, and generally hiding things. She is constantly inventing "games" related to finding treasures and hiding things like her hairbrush in the mornings before school. Fun times.

I've been wanting to create a time capsule with her for a while and thought now would probably be the perfect time. Treasure = time capsule. It's all the same to a four-year-old.

We collected trinkets from around the house: a rock, some figurines, a couple of 2013 coins. I had her draw a picture of our family (what, you didn't recognize us?), and we threw in one of her sunprints from a couple of months ago that was hanging around.

We also took a few photos with my Fuji Instax Mini camera, which was a birthday gift from my brother. I'm ashamed to say I really hadn't played around with it until now, but I suppose I was a little tied up in early March.

We put all the treasures inside a well washed small glass jar...

And then to prevent the metal lid from rusting, we slipped it inside a plastic Ziploc bag.

We dug a small hole in the backyard...

and buried our treasure!

I drew a simple map to lead us to the time capsule in the future. I hope it will be enough for us to find it. Or I guess I could take the Walter White approach and get a lottery ticket with the GPS coordinates. Either way.

Me: Do you think that we'll come find this treasure when you're 20 years old?

Elise: No, we'll come find it when I'm 18.

OK, then. 2027 it is.

At the last minute, I put one of our homemade stepping stones on top as a marker. I can't say it will stay here forever, but knowing me, it will be here at least a few years. And maybe then I can find a better way to mark the spot.

Backyard landscaping: Year two

My backyard landscaping isn't doing great. Last year, I started from bare dirt and planted a whole lot of things. Some purchased, some given to me. But the only thing that came back from winter was a whole lot of failure. Well, that's not totally true. The lamb's ear went from a few of these sad-looking transplants:

to this:

This is my kind of plant. No water, no attention, and spreads like crazy. Well done, lamb's ear, well done.

But other than that, everything I planted last year has been a disappointment.

Juniper: dead. (Likely my fault.)

Purple fountain grass: dead. (Turns out I didn't know our zone number last year. Lesson learned. Don't trust that a plant labeled "perennial" is truly a perennial unless it's also labeled with your zone number.)

Ferns: came back, but still pretty small.

Iris: came back, but again, puny. It's probably a slow grower.

Hostas: about half of them came back, but all still very small.

Bleh.

As a reminder, I have imposed a rule that everything I plant has to be drought tolerant and easy to care for. I am not interested in high maintenance plants. I've got a whole lot of bare dirt to cover, so let's start round two.

I decided I needed some height, so I bought a bush from a local nursery. (Yes, one bush. Wouldn't want to rush things.)

This one is called Little Henry sweetspire. Elise likes to hug it and say, "I love Little Henry!" It has these long white cone flowers, and when in full bloom, it looks like it's covered in caterpillars. A weird looking plant, but we like weird around here.

I added in some decorative rocks that were tucked away in the corner of our property. Some are geodes, some are granite, others are some type of lava rock, I think. All kind of craggly and oddly shaped.

While I was at the nursery, I also grabbed a couple of fillers/ground covers.

First, to plant at the base of some large trees, I found this shade perennial Lamium "White Nancy." (Yes, I brought "Henry" and "Nancy" home from the nursery.) The label says it grows in part shade or full shade. Drought tolerant, animal resistant. Fast spreading. Basically indestructible, right? We will see. It's doing OK for now.

Then, for a sunnier area, I got some catmint "Walker's Low." Also drought tolerant, animal resistant. "Weed choking." It's saying all of the right buzz words. It's supposed to get about 18-24" tall/wide. It's right next to the lamb's ear, so I hope they play well together.

I'm being hyper-vigilant about keeping everything well watered for a few weeks. I can't deal with any more failures!

Landscaping intervention, Part 2: Let's rock!

Onto part two of my landscaping intervention!

Um... you can see why it needed an intervention. My hostas are doing awesome, actually, but you would never notice because the weeds were stealing all the focus.

This is an area I don't see everyday, or even every week. I have to make a special effort to go see it. It's out of sight/out of mind and tends to become overgrown with weeds. Like, this overgrown or worse. (Take my word for it. Much worse.)

Mulch would help, certainly, but as I noted before, this area is large (4 x 36 feet) and would probably require something like 12 or 15 bags of mulch. For just this area. To me, that's a lot of wasted money, effort and time every year, especially for a space that we don't really get to enjoy. 

My overall landscaping goal is to make everything as low maintenance as possible and it doesn't get any more low maintenance than rock. Well, concrete, I guess, but who wants more concrete in their life? Rock it is.

First, I needed to clean things up. A couple of hours pulling weeds and it was looking better already.

I went with bagged rock from Lowe's. I'm not sure if this was the cheapest way to go; I didn't look into alternatives like a load of rock from a landscaping materials place. We don't have a place to dump a load of rock that wouldn't require hauling it around the entire house. It just didn't make sense in this situation. We ended up with 35 bags of rock at $3.58 each, so with tax, just around $125 total.

I added the curve of flagstones for some added visual interest, and to remedy one area where water spills over from the gutters during heavy downpours and erodes the soil. You can see how the dirt has splashed up onto the house in that area. (The gutters are clean and we have screens to keep out gutter clogging junk. It's just weird roof design and I'm not sure there's much we could do about it.)

So with a couple of stones placed just so, I worked them into a larger curving design so they wouldn't look like islands floating in a sea of gravel.

But I'll let you in on a little secret. The real reasons I used the flagstones at all were because a) we already owned them. They were all salvaged from underneath the broken concrete in our backyard.  I am all about using what you already have. And b) working them into the landscape cut down on the amount of rocks we had to buy. I can't begin to guess by how much, but certainly a significant percentage.

Dan and I started spreading the rock, but soon realized we needed some type of edging to keep the rocks from spilling into our neighbor's driveway. The project grows!

Plastic edging was about 75 percent of the price of concrete edging pavers. This area has a high probability of getting stepped on and given that it's so close to the neighbor's driveway, it even has the possibility of being driven on (accidentally, of course). I went with the long-term solution: concrete pavers.

These are not actually "edging" pavers. They are 6x9 inch stones meant to lay flat, but they were the right color and the right price and real edging pavers are similarly 5-6 inches in height. They were also from Lowe's for 81 cents each (just over a dollar per linear foot). I bought 48, so $42.55 with tax for all.

I dug a narrow trench with a flat shovel and laid the stones lengthwise. It probably took 2-3 hours to do the whole line of them (completed in multiple sessions). After all the edging was in, I spread the rest of the rock in a thick layer (probably 2-3 inches). And done (finally)!

It looks a thousand times better, and I no longer feel like a bad neighbor! It's not perfect or professional-looking, but at least it looks like I'm trying. Considering that this area was bare dirt when we moved in four years ago, we can call it progress.

I am already discovering this is not a fool-proof way to keep out weeds. They just keep coming no matter what you do! But now maybe a five-minute weed-pulling session every week will be sufficient.

Landscaping intervention, Part 1: Painted drain pipe

About a month ago, I mentioned that tackling the neglected area on the side of our house was on my short list. It's a long, narrow strip of dirt (about 4 x 36 feet!) right next to our neighbor's driveway. 

And it's kind of weird because that line along the concrete is the property line. Where I come from, property lines are vague distinctions far off in the grass, not five feet from the side of the house. But it is what it is. Luckily, they are nice neighbors.

My dad kicked off improving the space by burying a drainage pipe last month, and I'm using that as a spring board to motivate myself to finish off the space.

First things first (well, easy things first): painting the short length of PVC drain pipe sticking up above ground. The pipe is great and doing its job, but the obvious white PVC-ness of it all was looking cheap. And that printed label on the pipe wasn't super attractive.

After wiping the pipe clean, I masked off the area with a couple pieces of cardboard. I wrapped a newspaper around the aluminum downspout and kind of shoved it inside the PVC, but I didn't use tape anywhere!

Then I used everyone's favorite spray paint, Rust-oleum's oil rubbed bronze. It's a paint and primer in one and it adheres to plastic (important!). It's not exactly a match to the brown downspout, but I'm OK with that. I just wanted the PVC to look like metal or clay or something other than white plastic, and the oil rubbed bronze color blends nicely.

See what I mean? Much better! This is one of those details that takes five minutes, and that no one but me is ever going to notice on its own, but it affects the way the area looks as a whole.

Disregard all of those weeds and the spray paint on the dirt. We'll save those for next time.

Even more backyard treasure!

When my dad was digging the trench for our new drainage pipe, he just kept running into all sorts of things. Chunks of concrete, old bricks, rocks, plastic bags, trash, etc. This is the norm around here. You can't stick a shovel down more than about six inches without hitting something.

So let's have a little show and tell so you can see what we found this time.

First, like I said. Loads of broken concrete, rocks, etc. Enough to fill those three plastic flowerpots. I know it's hard to judge the scale of things in photos, but I can barely lift any one of these plastic pots. I wrote "buckets" above, but they are 2.25 gallon flowerpots I'm re-purposing for rock storage.

And then there's the more exciting stuff. The pretty stuff.

Pieces of a green ceramic bowl. It seems so strange to think that the course of action for a broken bowl would be to bury it on the side of the house, but I suppose it's almost the same as what we do now. We just do it communily, with trucks and pick ups and a heck of a lot more garbage.

And a retro Pepsi cap in perfect condition. I thought this was old given the short ingredient list, but according to Wikipedia, this logo was in use from 1970 to 1997, so maybe it's not all that old.

And since I'm on the subject of buried treasure, I'll show you what else I dug up a week or two ago while transplanting some perennials. An old rotting timber! Exciting! My resident backyard woodpecker was so happy with me for digging this up.

I know it looks like it just shot up out of the ground, but it was horizontal underground and I lifted one end up 90 degrees. Elise is about three feet tall, and I think the fence is around six feet, so that gives you an idea of how big this thing was.

Want to see what else I've found in my backyard over the years? Of course you do! Click here!

Some light weekend trench digging: Re-routed drainage pipe

It's a post about dirty dirt! Sorry. But this sort of work lays the foundation for prettier projects, so it has to be done.

Last weekend my dad created a new drainage system from this downspout on the side of our house to direct the water away from the foundation and toward the back yard. We had a little bit of seepage into the basement in this general location and on the outside the ground had eroded away.

The former drainage system (if you could call it that) was here when we bought the house: a big piece of black corrugated pipe. With holes in it. So the water would flow out of the downspout, into the pipe and then flow out the holes and into the ground next to the foundation. Stupid.

I don't have a good before photo or lot of progress photos. I don't think my dad likes me taking photos of him while he's working. And I'm pretty sure he thinks I'm nuts for taking photos of holes in the ground or such things.

And I don't have a lot of details, but he dug a trench in the shape of a J and buried a similarly shaped PVC pipe maybe a foot below the surface.

The water now empties into an area I call the mud pit. Or the ugly corner. Or just the back corner. It goes by many not-nice names.

Now that the drainage pipe has gone underground and the surface has been re-leveled, it's looking much more put together. That black corrugated plastic pipe was ruining everything! Good riddance. This gives me some incentive to continue improving this area.

The hostas are just starting to come up here, and I have a plan to divide the larger ones and send them down the line to the blank spots toward the back. (I've been doing this for a couple of years now to generate enough plants to fill the space, and this might be the last time I have to do that.)

This area is on the side of the house that I don't see everyday. It's kind of out-of-sight/out-of-mind and gets horribly weedy. The loose plan is to lay down some landscaping fabric to stop the weeds and then add some rock to finish things off.

And then there's my mud pit where the water is going to drain now. It's pretty much wasted space. Nothing grows here, so my plan is to lay some rock and brick I've salvaged from around our property to hold the soil and make the area walkable in the muddy seasons.

p.s. No digging activity at our house would be complete without uncovering buried treasure. Check back tomorrow to see what we found!

Let the landscaping begin! Swapping out overgrown bushes

I've pretty much always hated the Rose of Sharon bushes that were in the front of our house. My hate only grew stronger last spring when hundreds (no exaggeration) of tiny shoots sprouted and I spent hours pulling them up.

When we moved in, they were much much smaller. Now they were as tall as the gutters, encroaching on the porch, blocking light into the house (in the summer, they get much leafier) and generally annoying me. I thought it better to get them out before they got any bigger.

At my invitation, my dad came over and got to work cutting them up. He makes these kinds of jobs look easy. What took him 30 minutes probably would have taken me all day.

While he was ripping them out, I ran to Lowe's to pick up something for another project and found myself wandering through the garden section. In a fit of impulse, I picked up three boxwoods for $11 each and brought them home. My dad planted the first two. I planted the last one after transplanting some perennials to make room.

Boxwoods are pretty low maintenance. They need a trim once a year, but overall, they are perfect for a non-gardener like me. And unlike the Rose of Sharons, which are essentially sticks in the winter, the boxwoods are evergreen. They look a little scrawny now, but they should grow to about three to four feet wide and tall, topping out just under the window.

I can't get over how open it feels and how the house looks so much cleaner. I know I still have a bit of work to do in this bed (and all over), but this is a good start.