My Half Acre of Paradise

After two+ years of renting a townhouse, my wife and I are buying a sweet house in a short sale. Closing at the end of January. The new house is in the Suncrest area of Draper, Utah. This is up on a ridge, 1,700 feet above the valley floor (same area where we’ve been renting these past two years). It’s a smaller yard than my last one (the half acre of paradise), and it has a KILLER view of the valley below and the Wasatch range. So, although it’s on a mountaintop and not in the valley, the website will remain valleygardens.com (I’ve owned this domain for 12 years!). HOWEVER, I need to change my blog title from “My Half Acre of Paradise” to something more fitting a smaller yard up on a ridge. Any ideas?

Maybe “A Garden With a View?” Suggestions are welcome!

Here’s a pic of the view from the backyard (it comes from the Realtor’s listing):

Well, I guess winter has come already. My home is at 6200 ft, so the weather is more extreme here than down in the valleys. Pretty big dusting of snow last night, but it is supposed to warm up to the 70s again soon.

So, I have some good news for those who have followed this blog in the past. My wife and I are probably going to buy a house before winter is over, and once again, this blog will be active as we begin developing the gardens at our new house. I’m excited for the end of rented-townhouse living and a chance to own a nice piece of soil again! Stay tuned.

I’ve had a few friends ask about timing for planting vegetable gardens along the Wasatch Front. The traditional rule of thumb is to wait until Mothers’ Day weekend, and that looks true this year. After the snowstorm last weekend, I was not sure Mothers’ Day would hold up as the right time this year, but the forecast now looks excellent. So, go ahead, plant your tomatoes, corn, squash, beans, and all that good stuff! Bring on the summer! :)

There are many joys of being married the second time, and one of the biggest for me is having a partner who is a closer fit with some of the things that matter so much in my life. Obviously, a big thing in my life is gardening. Especially flower gardening. Santia and I knew each other as young adults 24 years ago, and who would have known that we’d both end up being garden nuts now? Neither of us had that interest back then, although it was surely lurking just under the surface with the experiences I had with my mother and she had with her grandmother.

That’s a long lead-in to say that I find great joy in being able to give my Sweetheart a “bouquet” of 10 bare-root rose shrubs for the front yard at our California house. She was really quite taken with the idea, and that makes me so happy. In my previous relationship, this purchase would have been viewed as selfish, because plants for the garden were my thing, not hers.

OK, so, here are pictures of the roses and the happy couple. :)

I was doing my old “midnight gardener” routine again on Valentine’s night — I was out in the rain, removing all of these roses from their plastic wrapping and soaking the roots in a bucket overnight. Bare-root roses do best if you can soak the roots in water for a day or so before planting. It gives them a good, solid re-hydration. The next morning was still somewhat rainy, but we went ahead and planted them before I had to get on a plane and head back to Utah. We put a tablespoon (just eyeballed) of Miracle Gro Shake-n-Feed for roses in each planting hole with them. We were also careful to not over-compact the soil, since it was wet from rain. Here are the varieties we planted:

Grandifloras:

• Wild Blue Yonder (x2)
• Cherry Parfait
• Gold Medal

Floribundas:

• Cherish (x2)
• Pinata (x2)
• Rainbow Sorbet
• Betty Boop

I prefer floribundas for their longer summer bloom season, but our choices were limited at Home Depot, so we got what we got. I still need to look up these varieties and see how well they should perform.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Since I’ve gotten married, I now live a long-distance commuter lifestyle, so I’m often in California for a week at a time or a long weekend. That’s my other home now, with my wife spending most of her time there and me working and spending time with my kids here. So, here’s the gardening question: What works well for keeping containers watered while I’m away? Because I live in a townhouse, my garden space is primarily containers now. I want to have more garden containers this year, mostly on my deck and front porch, where they are not within reach of the automatic sprinklers. I have burdened a neighbor and another friend at times with the duty of coming over and watering for me when I’m gone, but now I’m gone so frequently that I don’t feel good asking for that much help.

Do you have any experience using automatic systems to water containers over a week or two? What systems work? I’ve seen some thing that uses a two-liter soda bottle with a special spout on it that you turn upside down and poke into the soil, but it seems that would just keep things too damp over an extended period, and roots need breaks between waterings. Maybe for my deck, I could hook up a drip line to a hose down below and put a timer valve on it. Again, any recommendations on what to do? Please post comments. Thank you!

If you’ve followed this blog in the past year, you know that my gardening life (and my blog activity) has slowed considerably since all the changes in my life took me away from that piece of ground I cultivated and loved for eight years.  Well, on October 10th, 2010 (10.10.10!) my sweet Santia and I planted the seeds of a new, happy life together.

One of the things I adore about my sweetheart is that she loves gardening, too! As you can see in the first few pictures below, we had a garden party on the day before our wedding. We bought dozens of wonderful chrysanthemums and placed them all around our home. The next day, we spread the garden love around and gave most of the potted flowers away to our wedding guests.

Our wedding was on a beach at Lake Tahoe, with incredibly beautiful golden aspen trees all around. How much more perfect could our new start be? It was a perfect date, a perfect day, a perfect setting, and a perfect partner to do it all with.

And guess what? Santia comes with a whole acre of land in the Sierra Nevada foothills! I sense some new gardening adventures around the corner… :)

Hey folks! Is anybody out there watching anymore? It’s been nine or ten months since I last posted about moving from my former home and leaving my gardens behind to my ex-wife. If you have read this blog in the past, you know that it would be nearly impossible for me to not find some way to garden, even in my rented townhouse. So, this summer, I set up two large pots on the front porch and jammed them full of green beans (bush style), a pepper, a cherry tomato, and some fragrant petunias to fill in the gaps. Yeah, quite a bit in two pots. I’d take a pic, but they got a little ragged when I was gone to California for a long weekend and they didn’t get watered. Oh well, the tomato is still going strong, and I harvested most of the beans this week. Here are photos of this week’s little harvest. :)

I actually got three more cherry tomatoes this week, too, but you know, you can’t take pictures of every little cherry tomato, right? The beans were a great late-night snack, stir-fried in olive oil, with some chicken strips thrown in and a stir-fry sauce added after they cooked a bit. Nice, even without rice. I hope your harvests are going well! Next year’s garden will surely be bigger… :)

All things must come to an end, it seems. My time in this half acre of paradise was good. I had eight years of watching my new landscape come to life, establish and evolve, and develop its own unique personality. Gardens are metaphors for so many things in life, and this one was no exception. I poured my heart and soul into this garden, and I like what it produced. It responded well to the nurturing that it received. But there was another part of my life that was slowly dying on the vine over many years, and the time has come to clear the ground and make way for new life. My wife will keep this house and its gardens, while I have moved on to another home. My new home is a rental townhome, without room to garden, except in containers on the porch and deck. Perhaps I will blog about my containers next year. Or maybe this blog will sit idle during a year of transitions and I’ll pick it back up in 2011. I do believe I will start it up again one day.

Thank you for your interest in this blog over the almost four years I’ve been writing. It was a pleasure to share it with you.

Take care,
Steve

Hey, hey, my friends! My nectarines are ripe now! Been sampling some over the past several days, and it now looks like harvest time has come! Come and get ‘em! We don’t can them, so we really do like to share with friends. We’ll eat a big bowl full, make a cobbler or something, and that’s about it. I’m inviting friends to come over on Thursday evening this week to pick your own. Let me know if you’re coming.

Also, I just wanted to show how enormous those Hibiscus moscheutos flowers really are. Here’s a photo with my hand in it to give some perspective:

Early Saturday morning, before dawn, our Lacebark Elm (Ulmus parvifolia) suffered a major break from some heavy wind. We’ve had wind like this many times, but there was a weak crotch where two major scaffold branches were growing in too deep of a V-shape. When branches grow with narrow crotch angles, they end up with “included bark” which means a line of bark is sandwiched betwen the branches as they grow thicker and thicker. This line prevents the two branches from being knitted together, and it creates a major weakness that someday can turn into this kind of break. It’s heartbreaking to have this happen to a tree we’ve loved so much. It will survive, but I’m not sure if the remaining branch is strong enough where the break is to continue supporting all the growth on that side of the tree. We might end up with another break and another major section of the tree missing.

On a brighter note, check out these beautiful Hibiscus moscheutos blooms. These plants are in large pots on my deck, and they make a great accent there.

My nectarines are almost ripe! I actually picked one yesterday and ate it today, but it was still just a bit green. They should all be ripe in a week or so. Tasted good, even though it wasn’t completely ripe! I’ll also throw in a shot of our second veggie garden on the side of our basement walkout. Those zucchini plants sure are getting huge! And finally, here’s a closeup of some Caryopteris shrub blooms. It’s nice having some things that bloom late in the season like these. They add new life to the garden at the end of summer.