Walking the Dogs

When the weather is nice, I love to grab the leashes and take Daniel and Ruby for a walk around the property.  We have 9 acres, and access to Hartwood Winery's acreage next door, so the dogs and I can take a really nice walk in the country ... without leaving home.

On this particular day, there was a light breeze, and a beautiful blue sky with cottony white clouds.  Come along with us, and I will show you around.

In the corner of our pasture, we have an ancient apple tree.  I like to think that it's the last survivor of the orchard that I know was here in the 1890s.  (We have a copy of an advertisement from when our house was sold at auction at that time, and it specifically mentions an orchard.)  The tree bloomed better this year than it has in a while.

As I was looking at the apple tree, Ruby was distracted by something ... it was a pile of some sort of small animal poop.  Fortunately, I noticed what she was doing before she rolled in it.  (Remember last year when I found the bear poop?)

The ramblers on the back fence of the Rose Field are really big now ... too big, to be honest.  This year's early spring cut into my window of opportunity to prune these before they leafed out.  On the bright side ... there will be a whole lot more flowers on them like this ... I can't wait!

That's "Peggy Martin" in the foreground, and 'Erinnerung an Brod' farther down the fence.

This is my view from the back of our property toward Hartwood Winery's vineyard.  (There's something on my lens in these photos, and I didn't notice it until I was processing the photos for this post.)

The grape vines are all pruned and ready to grow and produce the grapes that will be this year's wine.  It was an early spring here, too, and the winery's crew of two raced to finish pruning as the vines broke bud and began to grow.

Here is the view of our barn from the vineyard.  The neighbors have the BEST view.

My back neighbors have a horse farm ... which is still for sale, if you or someone you know know wants a great horse operation.  As I stood at their fence talking to these two guys, I heard a low growl beside me.

It was Ruby ... hackles up, tail at attention, growling under her breath.  It's the first time I have heard her growl at anything!  I guess she doesn't care for horses.

While we are back here, let's head toward the barn.  See that little yellow building on the left?

It has the worst of the damage from last year's earthquake ... which, fortunately, isn't really all that bad.  I can fix it.

The two new gardens by the barn are still empty.  The Labyrinth is still staked out, awaiting paths and edging and plants.

The Miniature Garden is in the same condition ... but with the underlayment on the paths in place.

The English Garden is doing great!  These roses were planted a year and a half ago, and most of them are thriving.  A few are struggling, and I plan to replace them as soon as I can with others that I already have on hand.  That's what I was doing when I found the cannonball earlier this week ... right where the arrow is.

The weeds you see have already been shot with herbicide  and they're beginning to look a little sickly.

The bottle trees at the entrance to the English Garden didn't stand up to the winds this winter.  They're still firmly anchored in the ground, it's the metal 'trunk' that bent over like that.  Fortunately, none of the bottles broke.  I need to run next door, get some empty wine case boxes, and store the bottles until I can straighten and reinforce the trees.

The figs I planted on the south side of the barn are looking really good.  This bed is an experiment ... planted with eight different varieties to see which does best without irrigation or winter protection.  These two are thriving, but I don't know which ones they are because the tags are lost.

At this point, it was getting late and it was time to turn for home and give the dogs their dinner.  I don't think I've shown you this view of the back of our house before.  The green building is our detached garage ... the dormer is a storage attic.  The little white building to the left will eventually be a studio/workshop/I-would-love-to-put-an-antique-shop-in-there-one-day.  It's a dream to work toward.

As I predicted, the cool weather of the past few days has pretty much stopped the progression of bloom in the garden.  This is a good thing, because I don't want everything to be TOO early, and I'm definitely not at the point where I can open the nursery and garden to visitors quite yet.  It's getting close, though.

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I remembered that I have a photo of a 'view from space' of our property that I used in a post in 2010 (which was about burning the brush pile, which is why the brush pile is noted on the photo).  With a couple of modifications to highlight landmarks mentioned in this post, this should help you get your bearings.  Pretend the red property lines are straight.  :)

A Random Sort of Weekend

Like most weekends around here, this one was full of random things that aren't very interesting by themselves.  When gathered together like this, I think you can see that it makes for a really fun few days.

On Friday, I had lunch and went shopping with a friend.  I'm on the hunt for a cardigan sweater -- one I can wear with practically everything and use instead of a jacket.  Sweaters are super hot right now, so you would think that finding one I like would be easy ... WRONG!  Everything is too trendy and we didn't find a single one that I wanted to take home.  I did find these babies, though ...

Leopard/Rose print rubber cowboy boots ... the only pair in the store ... on the clearance shelf ... $20!  I'm not sure there's any way to make me much happier for $20.  I wore them to dinner on Friday, and all day yesterday.  Aren't they great with jeans?

One day, I'll get the nerve to wear my jeans tucked into the boots.  For now, having them peeking out at the bottom is perfect!

Let's go from beautiful boots to something that is perfectly hideous.  This was what I saw while I was sitting in the drive-through at McDonalds ( medium Caramel Mocha, please).  As if red or black dyed mulch isn't bad enough ... now they have ORANGE.  The contrast between the sickeningly orange mulch and the yellow-toned shrubs was more than I could stand.  Who thinks this is stuff up?

The herbicide that I sprayed on the area that will become my Labyrinth Garden is doing its thing.  The grass and weeds in that area are looking pretty sickly.  I should be able to lay paths and edging later this week.  I may spray another coat on the areas that will become the rose beds ... just to be sure everything is dead.

The same day I sprayed the Labyrinth, I also sprayed the edge of my English Rose Garden ... being especially careful to keep the chemical well away from the roses themselves.

Weeds are still a bit of a problem, though some of them are lovely, and we really ARE making progress in eliminating them.  How can I get too upset by these white asters (though they are huge and everywhere) when the flowers are so irresistable to butterflies?  At one point while I was standing there watching them, there were FOUR Monarch butterflies on this one weed at the same time!

We had a Greyhounds Rock meeting this weekend.  Our "Take a Bite Out of Canine Cancer" event is four weeks away, and there are a thousand details still to be dealt with.  (and there's still time to register to attend.)

Taylor and Quinn are standing at the door, watching the neighborhood children play in the cul-de-sac.

I'm so glad that so many of you enjoyed my series about my visit to Hollywood Cemetery last week.  I had no idea that it would take four posts to show you my one afternoon's worth of sights.  If you missed any of the posts, here is a list of links:

Carved in Stone (cemetery monuments and sculptures)

Rockin' the Red Roses

In the Pink, and Yellow, and White

The Circle of Life

Laying Out the Labyrinth

I'm one who likes to walk and think, and the idea of a Labyrinth in my garden has stuck in my head for a while now.  I still have about 300 roses in pots left to plant, so I cannot bear to spare the time or space preparing an area where roses are not destined to live.  Over the weekend, while scribbling modifications on graph paper for the design of my Cemetery Garden back by the barn, I had a brainstorm ... I could turn this GARDEN into a labyrinth!  It took some doing, but I think I have it.

each square = four feet.

Originally, this garden was going to be made with concentric squares ... eight-foot beds and four-foot paths, with a central aisle.  The design needed only a small modification to the path on the left to create a switch-back element to make it into a labyrinth!

A labyrinth is not a maze.  It is a winding path that takes you from the outside to the center, with one path in and out.  I saw a great labyrinth at a house by a cemetery that The Husband and I were visiting this spring.

The area I have for this is a sixty-foot square.  I was out there all morning on Saturday, measuring and staking and laying string, getting the beds and paths laid out just right.

aerial photo taken from the loft of the barn.

Here's the same photo, with a little Photoshop magic to show you the paths.

Yesterday morning, I sprayed the whole area with herbicide to kill off the grass and weeds.  I did this once already this year, but the weather and other factors conspired against me and I never got the garden laid out or planted and the area filled up with weeds again.  Turns out that this was a good thing, because I wouldn't have thought of this new design at that time.  With cooler fall weather now, things are growing more slowly so the herbicide will take longer to work.  I'm okay with that, because I know it's doing its thing, while I'm off working on other things ... it's like I'm multi-tasking, the easy way.

All staked out!  (doesn't everyone carry their tools in a cat litter bucket?)

If you are curious about how to lay out a labyrinth, here is a diagram that I found online that makes it simple to do.

I spent a while yesterday afternoon going through my pots of roses, inventorying and dividing them into groups.  As of now, I have 41 that are destined for this new garden, with a few more 'maybes'.  Most of these are Noisettes and Chinas and Gallicas, a few ramblers, and a couple of climbers on the arched entrance ... roses that are perfectly at home in old cemeteries, which is what this garden was originally intended to represent.  The design is the only thing that has changed ... the roses remain the same.