Just a girl with a hammer

Tags for Just a girl with a hammer: ranch portland fixer gardening 1930s

My 1938 pre-war ranch was a foreclosure I bought in 2009. It had been vacant for four years and neglected for at least ten. There was half a garage door, a non-functional sink in the bathroom, a mildewing basement, the original furnace (which no longer functioned), a new roof but no gutters, and a cracked kitchen floor.

I'm fixing almost everything myself but my real passion is gardening.

How to fill a really large pot

Authors: Heather

Do you have pots of soil lying around? Every time I move a plant around (which is a lot) I end up with extra soil. I don't know how it happens. I mean, I know why it happens but it's seems like there's way too much leftover soil. So I have random pots of it stashed all over the yard.
I've wanted a second galvanized tank for the area...

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Snap to grid

Authors: Heather

I'm at that point in the gardening season where I want to do something, but if I want to do that, I have do this thing first, which means that I might as well do this other thing while I'm at it . . . and so now I have a bunch of projects going all at once and nothing's finished and everything looks like hell.
It started with this...

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So say we all

Authors: Heather

Columbines always look like cylons to me.

Aquilegia caerulea 'Krystal'
Pretty cylons, though....

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Garden bloggers' bloom day April 2013

Authors: Heather

I didn't think I had that much blooming but then I started walking through the yard . . . we have a TON blooming right now. My dogwood is a beautiful shocking pink right now.

Cornus florida

Camassia leichtlinii 'Blue Danube'
NOID Lewisia 
Pieris japonica
Hooker's fairybells (Disporum hookeri var. oreganum)

Ribes sanguineum
'Oregon...

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One of these things is not like the other

Authors: Heather


One of my tulips mutated or reverted and is now yellow. And it had the audacity to produce an offshoot bulb! Part of me doesn't care, as I already have a mess of orange, pale pink, peach, black, and red bulbs. What's the harm in adding yellow to the mix? (For the record, the pale pink in the very back offends me the most in this...

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Help

Authors: Heather

I just need to admit something right up front: this is all my fault. I have badly abused a tree and whatever the equivalent of the DHS is for trees should be called on me.

In the NE corner of my yard, the one I want to be the focal point of the garden, I planted a Cryptomeria japonica 'Elegans.' It was beautiful. 


But then we...

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It was noisy

Authors: Heather

Well, the earthquake retrofit is done. It was loud and very messy. I wore my safety ear muffs while I worked on my laptop. It made me oddly productive. 



We went with NW Seismic. I was mostly happy with the experience. Two brothers own the company and the one with social skills comes out to do all the calculations. Then his...

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Why didn't you tell me?

Authors: Heather

Because my mind is a sad and boring place, I often stand in the shower after a hard day in the garden and ponder, "What's a gardener's bigger friend? The wheelbarrow or the nail brush? I should ask that on my blog." I've been using those cheap leather work gloves from Home Depot, which get so full of splinters when you spread...

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Retooling the back rain garden

Authors: Heather

I didn't really know what I was doing when I built the rain garden in the backyard. For starters, it's comically large. When I do something, I really do it, and I was like, "I'm gonna harvest all my rain water!" I really listened to the rain garden instructors when they told me to give the grasses plenty of room.

I also thought the J...

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Just FYI

Authors: Heather

If you give a castor bean plant water and fish emulsion every three weeks and plant it in a sunny place, it will look like this.

And the root ball will be so thick and sturdy by the next spring that you'll have to clip the roots and then hang your whole body weight on the trunk to get it out of the ground.

I planted a Chionochloa...

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