Privacy Trellis Construction Begins

With prime Spring planting time upon us, Red and I got started on the construction of my privacy trellises.  My house sits on considerably higher ground than my next door neighbor, and I feel as though I am towering over them, looking down at them.  I actually am looking down at their driveway - and we are friends and they claim they don't feel like I am looking out at them all the time, but nonetheless, we agreed some privacy screening would be nice.  The trellises will provide the extreme height that is needed, and also will be quite narrow - perfect for the sideyard.

We are building two; one to go outside my dining room windows, and one to go outside my living room windows.  If they turn out as fab as I expect, I will likely want one at the end of my porch as well, but probably using cedar 4x4's as in the photo below instead of pipe.

I dreamt up the design for the trellises by looking a ton of trellis photos and privacy screens online.  Ultimately this design became the basis for my design:

Photo Credit: http://www.oclandscape.com/ocblog/archives/work_in_progress/index.html

Mine will be out of galvanized fence top rails, painted (copper color) to match my gutters, set in concrete, with braided fishing line (it's green!) strung between the posts.  Mine will also be an astonishing 10 feet tall...

And so we begin.

First, I scrubbed down the pipes with detergent to remove the oily coating.  I rinsed them, and dried them, in preparation for priming for painting.

Next I brushed on primer.  I had primer especially for galvanized metal left over from my corrugated pipe project. (You can read about that here: http://my1929tudor.blogspot.com/2011/06/splash-of-color.html )
I bought the primer in a gallon can at Sherwin Williams.

Here are the pipes primed, and clamped down for the next step:

Next we marked off the bottom 20 inches, which is the portion that will be sunk underground in concrete.  Then we marked off every 6 inches up from that.  Each six inch mark will be a row of fishing line strung between the posts for vines to climb on.  We marked the lines, with a hash mark to mark the middle of the pipe:

Red drilled a hole into the pipe (not all the way through to the other side, just through the top side) and I followed behind him with self tapping screws.  His drill hole was just slightly smaller than the screw diameter for a tight fit.

I didn't screw the screws in all the way - allowing us to later wrap the fishing line around the screw post, and then screw it in the rest of the way to hold it tight.  This will also allow us to paint the screw heads when we paint the posts:

We then took a 5th length of pipe and cut it into lengths to add to the 4 posts to increase their lengths to 10 feet (above ground length.)  I forgot to take photos of that step...

We brushed off the metal shavings, smoothed the cut ends with a file, spot painted primer on a few new spots of raw pipe, and began spray painting the copper colored paint:

You can see that by that time we needed a cold beer... but hey!  I can multi-task...  : )

It turned out that the paint color is too orange.  I completed one coat of it for consistency, and I'll need to go buy a different color and go over them again.  The color the pipes are now would make everyone at UT very happy...

New paint color tonight, and then hopefully installation sometime this week! 

So far, so good.  The next challenge will be to get them set into the ground so that the holes and ends of the posts line up with each other.  We've learned that my house is notoriously not square, and I know that my yard is sloped...

And then we will learn the answer to the great debate of whether or not we will need a cross post for stability. I'm hoping we do not, as it would take away from the very clean look.  I guess we will find that out when we start installing the fishing line supports.  Up on ladders... with fishing line, scissors and a drill... We could probably sell spectator tickets for that day!

But overall?  I'm very excited.  I need to start thinking about plants.  I know I want jasmine, as it blooms and it is green year round.  I'm also thinking of Dutchman's Pipevine which is a host plant for butterflies.  I think I would have to order those plants online, and I don't know if they would be evergreen in my climate.  Must do evergreen vine research this week!

Also coming up - brainstorming for the pipe cap design.  Stay tuned.

Butterfly Season Begins

I was sitting in the sun yesterday afternoon in my garden and saw this beautiful Giant Swallowtail butterfly floating around all my plants. 

 It floated lazily in circles, around the yard, out in the alley, back in the yard, circling, circling.  It was huge.

Finally it found what it was looking for:  my Rue plants.  I had planted them last year specifically for the Giant Swallowtail -- it is their main host plant.

She bounced around on the two plants and finally came to rest and laid a few eggs:

And then floated lazily in circles all over the yard again...

Here are two posts from last year about the swallowtail and Rue.  I wrote about them in June -- they are really early this year!

http://my1929tudor.blogspot.com/2011/06/more-on-rue.html


http://my1929tudor.blogspot.com/2011/06/rue-and-giant-swallowtail.html

Starting Seeds Indoors

I finally got a few seeds started indoors yesterday morning,  Started, as in, in the dirt, watered and covered.

For pots, I used some toilet paper rolls that i had been saving for this Pinterest project:

I stood the rolls up in a baking dish, filled them with a potting mixture, dropped in seeds, watered with rain water and covered them with plastic wrap.

I planted heirloom tomatoes (probably too late in the season;) sweet basil, and dill.  The dill seeds are from my garden last year.  The other seeds I  had left over from last year's planting.



I've never grown dill from seed before, but I've nothing to lose and I had everything I needed on hand.  I planted quite a few seeds because I want several for caterpillars to munch on.  Hopefully my parsley in the garden will take off - its another caterpillar favorite.

Well... FAIL.

The weed tarping project, which I wrote about a few posts back, was, as predicted, a fail.  I pulled the tarps back Monday evening after having them down for about a week and really not much had changed.  There was a tiny bit of yellowing, but that's it.

I knew a lot of rain was coming, and those weeds were just covered in seed heads.  If I couldn't easily kill them, I at least could prevent them from reproducing!  So out came the mower.  I mowed, and I bagged all the clippings = millions of weed seeds.  I hated it.  I hated that after  all my labor clearing the lawn out last summer I had something to mow besides my dog's little rectangle of turf.  Drat it all anyway.  But that's what I get for not following through and getting the rest of the composite granite down.

Okay so it isn't a massive area.  And, the dog is really pleased with it -- in her mind I'm sure it's all just a special place for her!  I'll need to decide what is next. 

I suspect it involves my tiller and a huge bag of wildflower seed... but it could involve a tiller and a cover crop.  Or it may involve sand and composite granite, too.  I don't know.  Waaaah.

I Can Breathe!

Last year the people who lived in the house next door to me put in a new driveway.  (They have since sold the house, and new neighbors have moved in.)  Their old driveway was a split driveway, with grass/dirt down the middle.  The new driveway fills in that space and is solid all the way across; it is also wider than the old driveway. 

I have a huge pecan tree in the front yard sits on the edge of my yard, and when they poured the new driveway they had to cut off a tree root that was probably about 10 inches in diameter.  I was less than thrilled, but they were set on the new design they had chosen and there really wasn't anything I could do.  They had a tree company out for a consultation, and I had a tree company out for a consultation.  The consensus was that cutting off the root and making the driveway solid would cause the tree trauma - obviously cutting a large root isn't beneficial - and the new driveway would deprive the roots in that area of oxygen and water -- but wouldn't kill it.  My house research indicates that the tree is about 100 years old.  Although I haven't gone on a tree-to-tree inspection on my street, I think it may be the largest tree on the block.  I feel some custodial responsibility.

I learned in my research that in the 40's the tree was struck by lightening, and to save it, concrete was poured into the trunk where it split.  I can't see any evidence of that, so I guess the tree must have mended the break.  It seems like a crazy solution but clearly it worked.  And someone else down the line installed a steel cable that supports the limb that hangs over the street.  I had the tree service inspect that last year, and they said it was still in good shape, and that no additional cabling was needed.  All of that to say, others before me have expended efforts to give this tree a long life.

Both tree services last year suggested that I cut a circle of grass away from the trunk of the tree and mulch it.  They also suggested that I give it a nutrient injection.  I must admit, I didn't do either of those things at the time -- but they are both being done this Spring.

To wit, I give you the results of my work this past Sunday:

Not only will the tree be happier, but it's the first step towards abolishing my front lawn... [evil laughter]

To me that circle looks deceivingly small.  But compare it to the size of the neighbor's car... it's almost as wide as the car is long.  When Red and I stand on opposing sides of the tree trunk and reach our arm around the trunk, we can't touch hands -- it's that massive.   Monsta' big!

I cut a circle in the grass around the trunk with a shovel.  I used a shovel handle to measure around the trunk for where to cut the circle; I'd estimate that it's 4 feet out from the trunk. Then I removed all the St. Augustine grass inside the circle.  I composted what would fit in my compost tumblers and bagged the rest.  Then I tilled the soil, and picked out more grass pieces, and raked it to give a gentle berm around the perimeter.  Next I put down  commercial grade weed stop fabric and pinned it in place, and topped it off with 5 bags of mulch.  That's a lot of mulch!  I didn't want the weed stop fabric to show...

A day after I got that done, we got a huge thunderstorm over 2 days.  I checked my rain gauge this morning:

It's hard to see until you know what you are looking at; it holds 5 inches, and it's full at 5 inches.  It was still raining pretty hard when I took this photo...

So the tree got a great soaking - perfect timing. 

I just love my huge pecan tree -- it's big and beautiful, it provides great shade, it provides a home for a lot of wildlife, it's perfect for Halloween spider webs and Christmas lights, and it has a history.  I'm so happy it's in my yard!