If you plant it, they will come

This beautiful black swallowtail visited our purple butterfly bush while I was watering the butterfly garden yesterday.  Somehow I feel rather triumphant about this.  Too bad Calvin was napping at the time...

Know what's exciting about this?

The sprinkler is running on water from our new rain barrel!

A mostly finished job

We have alluded several times over the past two weeks to the amount of work we've been putting into our back yard, and we are excited to say that we have now finally reached a point in our toils where we can sit back and enjoy the near end result.  Back when spring first greeted us in our new home we started forming plans for our wide backyard area.  Those plans, which we will carry out over the next few years, include improved drainage, property defining corner gardens, a butterfly garden, a rain garden, a wildflower garden, vegetable gardens, a patio, rain barrels, and composting.  Over Memorial Day weekend we shared pictures of the work we accomplished then - improved drainage immediately around the foundations of our house and a property defining garden that, when mature, will provide a little shade and privacy to our planned patio location.  In June we put in our butterfly garden and our vegetable garden, and we posted about the rain barrel we added last weekend to the front porch downspout.  Now, in July during some of the hottest days of the year (we hope), we have achieved what we feel is the crowning glory of our 2008 summer work - the rock creek (further improved drainage) and rain garden. 

The creek and garden both serve multiple purposes in our yard plan.  The rock creek is about eight inches deep and two feet wide, and has been lined and filled with rocks, all of which we picked up for free from Wing Farms (Dexter and Zeeb, Ann Arbor) where they are trying to rid their pumpkin fields of such intrusive items.  It begins where the downspout and sump pump end at the southeast corner of our house, and extends through our yard to the opening of the rain garden, so it not only keeps the runoff from making a sopping mess of that corner of our yard (which it used to do), it also supplies the rain garden with the water it needs, and will be the border on one side of our soon to exist patio.  The rain garden is about 9 by 18 feet, and about 1 foot deep .  The purpose of a a rain garden is to decrease the amount of polluted rain water runoff that enters our rivers through our storm drains, a job it achieves by "holding onto" the rain water long enough for the plants to drink it up.  In order to do this a rain garden has to be relatively level, but our backyard is one big slope, so on the high side we dug down 1 foot and used that mud and sod to build up a 1 foot berm on the low side, creating a level garden, 1 foot deep throughout, with hard packed sides to retain the water.  The dirt is mostly replacement soil, consisting of a mixture of top soil and peat hummus.  It took us a full two weeks to complete the digging, shaping, leveling, and soil replacement, as well as the smoothing of the creek walls and placement of the rocks, and just yesterday we finally got to the good part - the planting. 

The good thing about planting this late in the season is the sale aspect - by this time most nurseries are marking prices down and even sending some plants to the bargain tables.  Our plan was to outfit our garden with mostly native, water tolerant (not loving), wild flowers.  We did this by transplanting some plants from our old house, some from my mother's gardens, and by taking advantage of the perennial sale at Dexter Gardens (Baker Rd, Dexter), where the staff were not only helpful, but knowledgeable.  Now, nearly complete, our garden boasts a population of:  3 Black Eyed Susans, 2 Blue Flag Iris, 1 Sunburst Coreopsis, 4 Coneflowers, 3 Joe Pye Weeds, 2 Columbines, 2 Fox Gloves, 3 Cardinal Flowers (lobelia cardinalis), 2 Queen Victoria Cardinal Flowers, 2 Beardtongues, 2 purple fountain grasses, and 4 Phlox.  Several of these are already past their bloom time this year, but some are just starting to show their summer colors.  We can't wait to see the bright red Cardinal Flowers open!  Now we finally get to sit back and enjoy.  The only step left is to fit the berm with rocks (which means more rock harvesting), but we can take our time with that.  The garden is young and unestablished this year, making it seem sparse, but before three years is up it should be very full, and relatively tall, providing not only water relief to our sewers, but also some shade and privacy to the patio that will go in between it and the corner garden.

There are more pictures of our progress and our plants in the Yard Transformation 2008 album, and while you're there you can also check out pictures from our butterfly garden and our veggie patch.

Raining irony, and not much else.

Isn't that just the way it goes.  This morning we set out to tackle five errands, all at local vendors, on one round trip in the car, expecting thunderstorms and rain in the late afternoon and evening.  Our first stop, to the Dexter Farmers' Market, was fun and successful.  Our second stop, to the Dexter bike shop, produced only bad service (and no tire pump, since we finally got frustrated and walked out).  The early arrival of rain on our way to Turner's Garden Center to buy a rain barrel rendered that stop a bit disappointing, but at least the service was friendly and prompt.  The rain slowed in time for stops number four, to my parents' for transplant plants, and five, to the pumpkin field at Wing Farms to load our car up with free rocks (we can't wait to show you what we've been doing with those), and had stopped by the time we reached home at noon.  Still expecting storms and showers all evening I immediately set to the job of installing the new rain barrel, working straight through lunch, lest the threatening storm clouds should decide to produce a deluge with the downspout in pieces.  The installation was more involved than we had envisioned (meaning it required more tools) but was not difficult at all, the hardest part being the leveling of the the blocks we put the barrel on, and as I stepped back to take in my hard work, the sky cleared to a brilliant blue and the sun came out of hiding to reward us for our hard work and conservationism.  Not another cloud dotted the sky all day, let alone a drop of rain fall to test our new barrel, and ten days of forcasting don't predict any, either.  Mother Nature is truly a scornful omniscient.

All our frustrations aside, we are very excited about our new rain barrel.  Want to know more about them?  Try here.

Fireworks, grilling, and mud wrestling

What do you do with a three day holiday weekend if not scads of back breaking yard work?  Or maybe that's just us, but it has definitely become a trend this year at our house.  Memorial Day weekend saw us ripping sod and moving bushes, and the Fourth of July weekend found us digging a massive mud pit in our backyard.  A massive mud pit, you ask?  Well, what started out as a not so dry creek routing the downspout and sump pump water in the direction of the drain in our back yard quickly went from a two day project to what I can only assume is going be at least a two week project when we decided to add an 8x16 (that's feet, not inches) rain garden at the foot of said not so dry creek.  It's a well meaning effort, meant to lessen our contribution to the polluted rain runoff in our waterways while beautifying our backyard view, but the process can only be described as dirty and exhausting - removing sod, digging down eight inches, building up a berm, hauling rocks, hauling compost, sand, and dirt, all while the sump pump continues to send water in our muddy direction - and the project is as yet unfinished.  Now that the three day weekend is drawing to a close... we are definitely ready for next weekend to be here.

Of course, we did get in our fair share of partying, grilling, and great company this weekend, too, which are probably the more common Fourth of July activities across the board.  We partied Friday night with our family, Calvin's second cousin Iris and her family, a frog pool, a golf set, a T-ball set, some great grilling, and strawberry shortcake.  That was so much fun that we repeated the celebrations on Saturday with our family, our friend, Patty and her family, more water fun, more great grilling (smoking, actually), and more strawberry shortcake.  And we topped both nights off with sparklers and fireworks, which Calvin found to be "banging banging eek banging banging" fun.  Now if only we could manage at least one three day festive weekend every month...

More pictures in the July 2008 album.