Deck Weather at the Duckworthy Estate

This afternoon I looked out over our deck to the gardens below and spied this daylily in bloom.  It's BELLA SERA!  I presented it to Kathy, who is polishing up a plan for the patio that will go below the deck.  We're using "Bella" stone, too.

A couple of days ago, the Branco crew laid the deck boards in front of the dining room and kitchen.  Here's Steve Brandt, President of the company, checking a spacing tool.  It has guides for narrow screws on either end.  The screws go into the deck boards at an angle, on their sides, so that there are no visible screws or screw holes on the surface of the deck.

You might notice in this picture that the deck boards are not at a 45 degree angle, while the corner of the frame is 45 degrees.  The reason the boards are not at 45 degrees is that Steve determined that he could use standard 18-foot boards at this angle.  At 45 degrees, he would need longer boards that are fabulously more expensive, and there would be a lot of wasted wood.  Knowing the level of talent and skill in the Brandt family, we told Steve to do whatever worked best.

This situation would make me freak out if I were building it, but to Steve, it's just a saw cut.

Voila!  I love the odd look of that corner.  It's what a custom deck should look like.  Here's Carl Brandt, Steve's father, working on the longer boards.  What a team they make!

And here's Tim Yanko using the "fine tool" to cut the ends off the siding boards so that the deck boards can have a snug connection to the side of the house.

Looking to the right from the deck that evening, I took a picture of my "Nebraska" keeper bed and my seedling beds below it.

I named it "Nebraska" because it feels like I'm weeding a large state when the weeds get the upper hand.  I've resolved never to let them get the upper hand again.  The little yellow flags along the lower edge of the seedling beds are there to mark a boundary so that I can sprinkle grass seed on the correct amount of path between the beds.

Here's deck weather at the Duckworthy Estate.  The only thing missing are the ducks.

One builds a deck for this time of year, not for the smoldering furnace afternoons of July and August.  The season from Labor Day to Thanksgiving provides many good times for sitting outside with a glass of sparkling water over ice with a wedge of lime.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of our move here.  A squadron of ducks were sunning themselves on the dock, "Boone's Dock," when we arrived.  Hence, Duckworthy Estate.

Quack!

For the Love of Landscape

Yesterday the Branco work crew was rained out at noon while fine-tuning the deck frame.  We had a gentle soaker rain all afternoon.  It's exactly what the ground needed, but it's only a beginning of nature's restoration of all the life-giving moisture she sucked out of the ground in the past ten weeks.  Today is one of the happy times to celebrate the renewal of growth in the gardens with members of our daylily club.  We're having a picnic at the finest and largest Victorian-era walking park outside of England.  I mean, of course, Tower Grove Park, near the Missouri Botanical Garden.

We're playing a "take-away" game at the picnic.  It's like musical chairs, but it involves taking away a prize donated by a member, either from the prize table or from another member who already claimed a prize you wanted.  Kathy and I are donating two of my hybrid daylily creations.

This one is named MOM'S MIRTH for the brightness and bigness of my mother's capacity for enjoying a joke.  I knew the moment I first saw it in 2000 that it was likely to be registered.  I had crossed Bill Munson's very fine COLLECTOR'S CHOICE with my favorite Whatley, ROSE IMPACT.  This 7-inch whopper is bigger and brighter than either parent.  It expresses the form of Collector's Choice and the rich color and veining of Rose Impact, picking up a good scape from both parents and hardiness from Rose Impact. It has four branches and 27 buds. It starts early and usually reblooms in the first week of July.  I call the color "popsicle cherry."  I introduced it in 2010.

The one below is DAVID AND ALAN, my first registration in 2005, also selected in 2000 after I was revived from the shock of first seeing it in a crowded section I was clearing out.  Having heard that CATHERINE NEAL was a superb parent, I took its pollen to every red, purple, and rose daylily in my collection in 1997.  One of the pod parents was Bryant Millikan's CARLOTTA, and that cross gave me this winner.

The color of this is a super-saturated cherry-violet blend, quite distinctive in intensity and hue.  It's a vigorous grower, a sun-lover for best performance, and a fine parent to boot!  It has four branches and 25 buds.  It survives, but does not really thrive, in the zone 5a garden of its namesakes, David and Alan, north of Burlington, Vermont in a micro-climate near the shore of Lake Champlain.  It perished in a Zone 4 garden about five miles inland from there.  In some other Zone 4 gardens it can live.  It does best in zones 6 and 7.  I've sent a few plants to warmer zones, but have no information on how they have done.

Plants like these two will be grown into 5-foot masses in our huge back yard, where the view from the house or the deck will require large graphic effects to create satisfaction or pleasure.  Any patterns on the flowers will not be visible from our vantage points.

Here is the view looking left from the sliding glass door of our kitchen/dining room.

The darker boards show the "Sierra" deck stain I brushed on last weekend.  If the wood dries out by tomorrow afternoon, I'll stain at least the top of the new boards.  I can get the sides done if time permits, or later, but certainly not in one afternoon.  Staining the tops will give some protection when they lay down the flooring boards.

Now, making a quarter turn to the right and looking straight out to Hidden Lake, this is the view:

 

There are too many small clumps of daylilies in the gardens below.  Over time, we'll reduce the size of the collection and have larger clumps with better spacing and a variety of other perennials.  In those "empty" beds to the right, I'm going to plant some peonies and some Japanese, Siberian, and Louisiana irises.

Turning another quarter turn to the right, this is the view of the seedling production and evaluation area:

To the far right is an evaluation bed so large I have named it "Nebraska."  Kathy's almost finished applying leaf mulch between the rows of selected seedlings.  Just below that bed is the first of two beds to receive transplanted seedlings I hybridized in 2010 and germinated in a dense planting in one of the lower beds.  The little transplants are mostly of good size for moving now.  They will bloom in 2012 and 2013, when I'll make final selections from this crop.

The heavy clay soil was impossible to till, having baked into brick hardness all summer.  I let the lawn sprinkler run for a three hour session on those beds and the Troy-bilt "horse" tiller made quick work of the task.  Once I broke up the soil, I tilled in two thick layers of leaf mulch to lighten it up.

As I raked the beds smooth for planting, I also made new measurements to assure no more than five feet of width for these garden strips.  The ground-breaking process had encroached by at least a foot into the grassy paths, so I marked the restored boundary with small yellow construction flags.  Once I finish planting the two beds (I am halfway through the crop now), I'll rake a light layer of topsoil over the grassy path and reseed with a fescue mix. 

Then I'll till and form the other beds so that side of the property will look neat, and I'll weed the two seedling strips closest to the lake shore.  They are choked with weeds right now.  Kathy plans to get some fall vegetable crops into those extra beds if I'm able to get them prepared soon.

It's work that couldn't be done if we weren't retired and if we didn't love to develop gardens and landscaping.

The Deck at the Duckworthy Estate

These past couple of weeks have passed so quickly, and I'm glad for that.  It feels as if my life has lately been one continuous weeding session with Kathy.  We've put in three or four hours every morning to get control of runaway encroachers of every kind, from varieties of prairie grass to some kind of woody scourge that spreads like a mat, to seedlings of several kinds of trees.

This drama has been an accompaniment to the construction crew's work on our new deck.  Getting the bandboard mounted, with proper flashing, took several days.  Then came the moment of building part of the frame and supporting it with two-by-fours.  Here's a happy moment on August 22 when Carl Brandt and his helper, Tim, started to mount the diagonal corner pieces.

As quitting time approached, the three-man crew finished the other corner.  That's Steve Brandt, Carl's son and the President of Branco, with his back to the camera.  He is applying pressure to get the boards into perfect alignment.  That attention to "better than good" is the signature of Branco work.  These guys were in our house doing interior remodeling for six months, and we never worried about them overlooking a serious flaw in the original construction or the subsequent remodels of this place.

They came back to dig the holes for the concrete piers.  Last week the city inspector approved their work and they returned this week to pour concrete.

I was up early yesterday to prepare for the final assault on a garden bed I've named "Nebraska" to remind me of how big it seems when I've let the weeds take over.  I went out to get the newspaper and saw this amazing dawn picture a few minutes before the sun came up behind the line of trees across Hidden Lake.

This sight took me back about forty years to a morning in Durango, Colorado.  I was a young professor then, living in a small ranch house that we'd bought (yes, bought) through some combination of miracle and fluke while I was staying over in town after accepting the job offer at Fort Lewis College.  I'd been unable to find anything to rent or buy in two days of looking with a realtor, when a future colleague called me at the hotel to say he'd learned of house that a man wanted to unload fast for the $500 equity he had in the house.  I was able to assume his mortgage and become a homeowner, thanks to a small nest egg my wife had saved before our marriage.  One winter morning I saw such a sky and took a picture much like this one.

Kathy and I finished "Nebraska" in the mid morning, leaving me time to drive over to University City and dig the last forty selected seedlings at the Green Center, where I have been a "resident hybridizer" for eleven years.  Now that lovely chapter is closed, and all my daylilies are in one accessible spot for the first time since I began to hybridize in 1993.

This morning I planted those forty while the crew began to work on measuring and cutting notches in the first two support posts.  By the end of the afternoon, they had the support beam in place for the eight-foot wide walk-out section from the dining room.  Here's the view of the scene from the sliding door there.

We've had regular visits from a family of Canada geese all summer.  They like the seeds of weed grass and the tender shoots of things sprouting in the drainage swale and on the edge of the lake.  They have two teenage children.

 Either Dad or Mom are guarding the rear of the procession.

I was so happy to see the main support for the deck take shape that I rushed to Westlake Hardware and bought three gallons of stain, color "Sierra," because of the California connection to Kathy.  Of the three Haas girls, I am convinced that I got the one who is perfect for me, as I am for her, so she says.

Tonight at dinner I played a CD that just arrived, a reissue of a Paul Desmond jazz LP that I discovered in a New York record shop about fifty years ago.  That is a span of time I find difficult to talk about, though it seems like just last week.  It was Desmond's first recording session with the guitarist, Jim Hall.  The CD is titled "First Place Again."  I just about wore out the LP.

 

That's a nice image on the CD cover, but the car looks mid-50s to me.  I wish they'd used a picture of a '58 Chevy Impala or a '59 T-bird.

 

Another memory from almost fifty years ago is seeing Paul Desmond and the Dave Brubeck Quartet play at the Lambertville Music Circus across the Delaware River from New Hope, PA.  I sometimes went with a date, sometimes with my family.  I remember seeing Ahmad Jamal, the Count Basie Orchestra, the Maynard Ferguson Orchestra, and Pete Seeger there.  These musical excursions were the highlight of my summers at that time of my life.

Tonight as we enjoyed grilled salmon with sauteed spinach and some rice, all these memories came into our Now.

Sodder But Wiser, She Says

My Kathy can be a goofy girl, and she is also sometimes a mime.  The expressive faces are a reflection of her good-natured father, Al, who I wish I had known.  I suspect she gets her superb knack for taking pictures from him, too.  Oh, Al, I think I got the best of the Haas girls!

Kathy took these pictures the last couple of days to document the continuing saga of sod here at the Duckworthy Estate at Hidden Lake.  I've never laid sod before, so before two weeks ago I'd never made a sod pun.  Today the pun is Kathy's.  She named the picture folder "sodder but wiser."  Har har har!

Here's the work site behind our house.  Steve Brandt had graded it to assure good drainage away from the house.  In fact, he was still doing tractor work when the big rains of June came our way and spoiled the back yard by washing the loose dirt off the slope.  Today's the one month anniversary of the worst rain in living memory and it was to have been the completion date of sodding in the right side of the graded area.

This is the view of two ruined planting beds taken from "Boone's Dock" on the lake.  The piles of dirt came from my digging of the swale.  The big chunks of Highway 94 came from the swale, too.  The whole lower back yard is an asphalt and concrete mine from a time, years ago, when the previous owner requested the highway crew to drop truckloads of "fill" in his back yard to improve the slope.  He forgot to say "Clean fill," of course, and the rest is History.

I'll wheelbarrow the chunks up to the driveway and have Steve haul them away with the debris from the deck when he tears it down in two weeks.

Here's a better view of the graded area waiting for sod.

Carl Brandt told me I could lay sod up to the chimney and not be in the way of the builders when they construct a new deck. (Carl is Steve's dad, the founder of Branco Construction, and he is somewhat retired, though still active in the business.)   In the foreground of this picture is the recently-laid sod covering the new swale and its sides.

First thing to do in an area like this is establish a straight line and rake the area smooth.  Don't want any rocks or bumps.  Then lay a first course and stagger the ends of the pieces in subsequent courses.  You try to make the edges meet tightly and invisibly, but my reasonable amounts of effort, pictured above, did not make the seams invisible, though the pieces are snug.

It is a wet and dirty business no matter what the temperature. The sod is anywhere from damp to sopping wet, due to devoted watering at the nursery.  When I pick up a wet load of 12 pieces, there is water in the spare tire well of my trunk that has to be removed promptly lest the car stink.  I use my garden cart to bring four pieces at a time down to the back yard.  Any more than that and I'd risk the wheels and axle.  A sopping wet piece weighs about 40 pounds, I'd say, maybe a bit less, and I hold each piece close to me so as not to put a strain on my lower back.

I got this much done yesterday morning -- 36 pieces -- and when I took the last load, Daniel, my nurseryman, told me to feel free to come as early as 6:30 am, before they open to customers, and take what I need, paying later.  So this morning I was there at seven, and it made all the difference.  I laid 36 pieces yesterday before the heat drained me.  This morning I laid 46 pieces and heat was not what made me quit.  Tiredness was.

When Kathy took this picture at 10 am, I had a few more pieces in the car and I was ready to call it a morning.  Tomorrow I'll finish this section with about 10 more pieces cut to fit in snugly.

Upstairs at the sliding door to the deck, Lola the Poodle was wishing she could watch me better.  She feels anxiety when I leave the house, or when we both leave the house.  Where's Daddy???  Kathy takes her out onto the deck to confirm that I'm there, but then it's indoors for a black, heat-absorbing dog.

iPhone Wallpaper

When my iPhone Classic fell out of my shirt pocket and into the water at the lake shore last week, I shared a few choice words with the local turtles and with my walking companion, Lola the Poodle.  The speaker and microphone were ruined, making the phone obscenely expensive to repair, so I bought a new one for a quarter of the repair cost.

I have minimal needs of my phone and didn't need all the razzmatazz of the iPhone 4, so I bought the 3Gs, which sounds like some kind of sports car.  The new iPhone software comes with new wallpaper choices and none of the old that I liked so well.  Thus, I searched the web for wallpaper options and found so many that I decided to jump in and make some of my own.

The water lily with cloud reflection and water ripples is my current favorite.  The Missouri Botanical Garden offered many photo inspirations last week, so here are a few more.

This is an inverted reflection of a window in a lily pool.  I turned it upside down to enhance the strangeness.

This is Rudbeckia "Indian Summer," I think.  I thought it would be much too busy for a background, but it has a certain charm when used as phone wallpaper.

It's really hard to make a landscape picture work as wallpaper.  Lake water helps, because you can place the water under the bottom row of icons so that the focal point is not obscured by them.

This closeup of foliage on a Smoke Tree becomes little more than interesting texture behind the icons. I think it, too, works.

Several of these landscapes are keepers because the photo without the icons is so beautiful.  Can't let go of them.

Here I've placed grass at the bottom where the main icons rest, with lots of "reflection water" to occupy most of the screen and a beautiful bridge at the top.

I did a version of that one with no grass, more water, and a larger bridge.

This shot of a concrete shrine is more about the textures of trees.

Finally, this shot with two lily blossoms probably could have been made more effective if I had zoomed out when I framed the picture.  I didn't take alternate shots of this subject, so I'm left with an also-ran.

Completing the Landscape Picture

On May 25 I was happy with the way the landscaping was shaping up in the back yard.  We had a heavy rain, and I saw how the water wanted to flow across the garden.  I thought we could live with this.  I would just raise the bed a little to catch the water, and I'd plant Japanese and Siberian Irises there to enjoy the wet soil.

But then we had some grading done to ease the slope, and some soil was smoothed onto the slope to reduce the angle of descent.  The plan was to stabilize it with straw and then seed it.  However, some big rains changed our plans.  This is what the same area looked like on June 18.

Intense rains brought sheets of water down the right side of our property, washing the loose soil across the near flower bed and leaving a 2-inch thick layer on the grass and the circular bed beyond.

I sent this drainage plan for a swale to our contractor that day.

Even heavier rains came the next weekend, making any work with a tractor out of the question.  And so I began to dig the swale by hand.  Yesterday I completed the task of laying sod into the swale and began to fill in the picture on the sides.  This morning I prepared the area next to the swale in the two flower beds and laid sod to create a good mowing and walking path on either side.  Here's a photo I took before dinner tonight.

I've drawn the outline on the area I covered today and yesterday.  I'll lay sod on the bare rectangle on the far side of the swale and the small bare spot on the near side tomorrow morning.  There's more to do on the upper part of the swale, but there's an inconvenient growth of real grass and weed grass in that zone, so I'm going to spray that with Roundup and let the heat wave eliminate what would otherwise require an hour or so of brute force with a straight-edged shovel.

Here's the view of the upper part from the deck.

The swale extends another twenty feet up the side of the house, and there's another twelve feet of ground needing sod beyond the beginning of the depression.  That's part of the Roundup zone.  For the next few days, while the Roundup does its work, I'll try tilling the broken dirt of the seedling beds beyond the swale.  The heat should be drying it out so that I can use a tiller.  If things are favorable, I'll till in leaf compost and rake it smooth to eliminate the rough look.

It has been hard to feel any passion for daylily hybridizing when so few plants have set seed pods even on favorable days.  I think their energy is diverted to surviving a late move to this property.  I doubt that I'll have more than a few dozen pods for almost two thousand attempts.  But that is the way it goes with living plants.  Sometimes you have to be grateful that they survive the torments of heat and lousy soil to build themselves up for beauty next year.

It's not a water slide for the ducks

Today I laid the 110th piece of sod on the top half of the swale I dug to give the neighborhood storm runoff a direct route to the lake, rather than the "natural" route over our gardens in the back yard.

On the far side of the swale, I'm extending the sod to the existing grass, covering some bare spots that our contractor created while grading to assure drainage away from the house.  He got things pretty well smoothed out and contoured when the worst rains in decades hit our area and washed most of the loose soil on the slope down over the gardens.

On the near side of the swale, we're leaving the ground bare until the deck is replaced in three weeks.  Kathy's going to cover that bare spot with straw to help deal with the slipperiness of the clay when even a little water gets onto it.

I was driving home about a month ago when one of those epic rains hit around lunch time, and I got to our street just as the worst had passed by, so I saw the water run off the higher properties in sheets, across the street, and onto my front lawn.  On the right side, the sheets of water ran over my two curved daylily beds and on down the hill, carving a scale model of some lovely canyon into the bare soil that covered a recently-buried extension of the rain gutter system.

Another big storm at the end of June readjusted my landscaping priorities.  I was going to try to get the sea of mud off the grass in the back yard until that rain showed me the folly of attempting any cleanup before taking care of the source of all the mess.

So I spent three or four work sessions with my spade and carved out a curved depression about 33 inches wide.  We had a palette of sod -- 100 pieces -- delivered last Thursday morning, moved it to the big bare spot behind the house and watered it well as I fussed over fine-tuning the contours where the swale would make a slight S-curve.  We started to lay in the pieces on Saturday and Sunday, took Monday off because of killer heat, and finished the 100 pieces yesterday afternoon when the temperature and humidity both dropped in the afternoon.

This morning I drove the two miles to the nursery and bought 10 more pieces.  That's about the capacity of the trunk of my car, and I wouldn't want to put much more weight in there anyway, because they were dripping wet from irrigation.  Before I went there, I used my straight-edged shovel to scrape off enough dirt in my work area so the sod pieces would have their outer edges nestled into the existing lawn without sticking above the soil level and thereby drying out.  I dug and scraped for an hour, cooled off inside for a while, put on a dry tee shirt, and picked up the sod.  Because of the need to cut various pieces to fit, it took another hour to set in the ten pieces and then more time to set up a sprinkler for maximum coverage.  In short, it was a morning's work to finish the far edge of the swale with ten pieces of sod.

I can lay down about 20 pieces in an hour if there is not much cutting to do, but only 10 pieces if I have to make every piece fit into the "puzzle" of the previous work session.

The top part will require an extension of about twelve feet after I lay sod onto the lower half of the swale, but for now I've got the top even with the bare spot beyond it, so water will run onto and not around the grassy beginning of the "water slide" for ducks.

Tonight before sunset I'll go out and improve the slope and contour of the lower part so that I'll be ready to lay more sod in the morning if it doesn't rain.

At the moment I'm running a slow drip hose on my new Redbud trees on a berm on the right side.  The berm holds moisture pretty well, but the trees are looking stressed.  I should have done the drip line whether they seemed to need it or not.  That's my self-indictment of the day and I'm sticking to it.