Utah Home, Then and Now

 As we're getting ready to move to Oregon (by the way, we're moving to Oregon!), I thought it would be fun to do the same Before and After series that I did for our Pullman home. 

When we moved in, everything was brown, dead, and dry. There were very few flowers, and a lot more fruit trees. Our outbuildings have changed quite a bit. Are you ready? Here we go!

Front of House

THEN

NOW

Not a huge difference, except the lawn and the little maple tree are both alive and green.

For those with very sharp eyes, you may notice that the swamp cooler is also no longer on the roof--we switched to central air!

Front Flowerbeds

NOW

Admittedly, this bed is chock full of bindweed.

I should have taken a picture after the last time we weeded it!

It has a couple of rose bushes, a peony, some irises, and lots of spring bulbs.

                                        

I do enjoy this front corner bed. It's got all kinds of things in it these days: sedum, daylilies, asters, roses, peonies, irises, scabiosa. It makes me happy all summer long.

We also added these front flowerbeds all the way down the fence on either side.

I still feel like I was just getting started with those, but what's in there is pretty.

Front Shade Beds

THEN

NOW

A little more greenery in there. 

I meant to put matching hydrangeas on each side, but ended up only getting the left side planted with those. I also added lady's mantle, feverfew, heuchera, and hostas.

Back Yard

THEN

Garden spot, orchard, and the woodshed there on the right.

Woodshed, fire pit, garden shed

Looking back towards the house.

Far back corner

NOW

Garden with greenhouse

A much more sparse orchard, unfortunately.

Chicken Palace in the background.

Our fruit trees have died off like crazy!

Our new fire pit area, and the shed we put in.

Woodshed and garden tool storage add-ons to the shed.

The inside essentially became my husband's workshop.

Garden area, from the back deck.

Looking back at the house. New deck.

Toward the far corner.

Back Flowerbeds

THEN

NOW

This bed doesn't look all that different than before, but the surroundings are much nicer! :) 

We did finally get this corner flowerbed put in.

This is another flowerbed full of good stuff, and also full of bindweed.

It has been a losing fight on my end with the bindweed here.

This bed also holds 5 peonies, coreopsis, yarrow, daisies, a couple of sickly rosebushes, and several spring bulbs.

Oval Flowerbed

THEN

NOW

Well, this is not the glamour shot by any means!

Also, I had this bed completely weeded a month ago and now it's full of grass and bindweed again.

Sigh. 

So from 6 lonely rose bushes, it now has a pie cherry tree, several roses, a peony, lots of spring bulbs, 2 ninebark bushes, bachelor's buttons, asters, phlox, and coreopsis.

Here was this bed back in May:

A little better representation of the goodness!

I am proud of what we accomplished in the 3 years we've been here. 

Now we're headed off to a rental home, with a tiny little yard, and no landscaping duties at all.

I wonder what we're going to do with our time? 

First and Last

Last of the daffodils for this year.

This was a great week for us here at Bluebird Flower Farm! Our Spring Subscription started last Friday. YAY! I’m always watching for what’s blooming, but last week I was watching everything like a hawk, I tell you! Particularly the tulips—as I mentioned, tulips blow open very quickly in the heat, and I knew we were going to have some warm days mid-week. I needed every tulip I could get my hands on for the subscriptions (x 3) plus 7 Mother’s Day arrangements.

So I was going out a couple of times per day to pull up any tulips that were ready and get them in the cool garage. “Ready” meaning “still closed but showing a hint of color.” I also cut lilac buds and harvested the last of the daffodils, and the first of the perennial bachelor’s buttons. Fun times. I did end up purchasing some flowers from a flower farm in Ogden that sells wholesale, which was great too! Tom grows such beautiful flowers and I was happy to be supporting a fellow flower farmer. I purchased a little bit of greenery from the regular wholesaler as well. I had a good mix that was mostly locally grown blooms. Just a note: as my subscriptions are a harvest share, I used all my own flowers and filler for those!

I had a lot of fun putting together arrangements again. I missed that in April! I put together a few for myself last month, but there’s nothing like making them for someone else and then seeing the joy they bring to that person when you deliver them.

This is the exact stage my alliums are at right now—just breaking open. This was taken last year, on May 19. We are a full week ahead of last year!

This week I’m looking forward to subscriptions again. It’s going to be a purple week! I’ve got 2 different types of alliums in bloom, both purple, plus blue violet camassias, baby blue camassias, and purple perennial bachelor’s buttons. I may even find a few grape hyacinths (purple and blue as well!) to add in there. My daughter and I experimented last week, tugging the grape hyacinths down at the base, so that they come off the bulb itself underground. That gave us another good 6” of stem, so I think they would be long enough for the subscriptions. For foliage, I will probably cut the ‘Dart’s Gold’ ninebark that’s so pretty right now, as well as some of my ornamental plum branches which are flowering.

I want to add in lilac blooms, but I need to experiment first and make sure I know how to keep them hydrated. So maybe this week I’ll cut some and try some new tricks I’ve learned along those lines, and see how long they hold up. Then I can add them in next week if they don’t wilt in 2 days. The lilac buds were awesome in last weeks’ bouquets.

We are working on getting permanent irrigation installed in the garden (pvc pipes underground that connect to removable drip tape in the beds). That will be amazing, once we get it going. Then we can leave on vacation and not worry about everything dying off while we’re gone!

All the starts I planted out the first week of April are growing, but very slowly. I’m going to give them some fishy fertilizer this week and see if that won’t give them a bit of a boost. I need those flowers! C’mon ladies—get a move on! I’ve got dahlias hardening off, and phlox and statice still inside, that I need to bump up to 2” blocks this week as well, so I can start hardening them off.

I have found, in our dry and windy climate, that the 3/4” blocks just don’t do well at all in hardening off stage. If I want anything to survive past that, they have to be in bigger blocks, or in a plastic cell that will retain the moisture. I have a bunch of starts in peat pots, as well, but I’m not a fan. They dry out so quickly, and I think they are wicking moisture away from the roots of the starts, since the peat pot doesn’t stay moist. Again, wind. So I have decided from here on out, I will just collect the plastic 4” pots to reuse in that instance.

Lastly, I need to purchase some Wall O’ Waters for my kiddos’ tomato plants. They are hardened off and need to go in the ground soon, but we are still having cold nights. Again, I don’t want one night of frost to ruin weeks of work keeping those beauties alive!

Always more to do, right?

What do you have growing right now?

Compost Bin Finished!

Yet another garden project that my husband has built for me. Yay!

A compost bin.

He started it during the summer.

This is what it looked like for quite some time.

[By the way, I can't get over how pretty it is here.]

Now here it is!

The boards in front are fitted into slots on either side, so you can pull them out.

The big compartment is to fill up first, then as we stir and turn the pile, eventually we'll move it to the next 2 bins--I think.

Sides and back are mesh for airflow.

We immediately put it to good use.

We still have the black ones that spin, too, but this holds so much more!

Greenhouse in Progress

Guess what?

I'm going to have a greenhouse!

I'm so excited!

My husband is building it for me.

He figured out when he took down the shed that he could re-use most of the frame (including the trusses) to make a greenhouse.

Foundation dug out: Aug. 8, 2017

Partially framed in: Aug. 30, 2017

Roof trusses up: Nov. 2, 2017

These have been done for awhile, actually.

I loved how the birds were perching on each one!

Benches/shelves done; everything stained/waterproofed: Nov. 15, 2017.

My two older kids helped their dad with the staining.

This may be how we leave it until spring.

My husband would still like to get the new chicken coop built before winter settles in to stay, and as long as we get the polycarbonate up by March/April, I should be able to use it this year.

I can hardly wait to start using this space!

It's going to be especially nice for lengthening out my growing season on either end.

Oh, the things I will grow!

New Front Flowerbeds--Construction & Planting

I was going to jump right in with what I had planted in these beds; then I realized that I hadn't even really mentioned them on the blog yet!

So, my husband built these for me last month.

(He knows the way to my heart!)
They are right in front of our front fence.

First he had to dig them out, because it was pretty much straight gravel right there.

Then he set the blocks in for the border.

Getting blocks laid out.

Filled them up with topsoil.

Finished!

Much of what I purchased this fall was to go in these beds.

I'm planting them in 3 sections, based on spaces between fence posts, with each section containing basically the same things. My color scheme here will be pastels--pale pink, purple, and blue, with occasional splashes of darker purples.

The shorter end sections--at the far end and by the mailbox--will be a little different than the main ones, but still have some shared elements.

I've got 3 English roses, variety 'A Shropshire Lad', coming next March, that will climb over the fence. I've also got several peonies; not all the same variety, but all fitting the colors. The tulips are between where the roses will be and the peonies, and I put in daffodils around the back and sides of every fence post. 

I want to add an ornamental grass of some sort to each end of the beds, as well.

* * * * *

Once I started planting the peonies, I decided to spread them out a bit further than my original plans. So I put them in about one per fence post.

Starting at the far end, these are the peonies in each section, left to right:

Far End: 'Lady Alexandra Duff' (double; blush pink) 

Section 1: 'Raspberry Sunday' (double; light pink ringed in gold)

Section 2: 'Eden's Perfume' (double; medium pink)

'Do Tell' (Japanese; orchid pink outer petals with rose, pink, & white inner)

Section 3 (between mailbox and driveway):

'Do Tell' (same as above)

'Vivid Rose' (double; light pink)

The mix of tulips I did was the same for each section as well.

'Sweet 16' (Emperor; ballerina pink; mid-April)

'Happy Family' (Multi-Flowering; rose pink; May)

'Green Wave' (Parrot; pale mauve pink w/ green flames; late May)

Layered on top of the tulips were Muscari 'Valerie Finnis' (pale blue; April/May).

For a touch of blue in June, I put Allium 'Caesium' in the end section by the mailbox, and in section 3, across the sidewalk. I want to get a few more so I can put them in the far end section as well.

(See?! Never enough bulbs!) At this point, though, I will wait until next year to see how it looks.

I've got 'Festival Pink' hyacinths in there as well, but I can't for the life of me remember where precisely I put them. Guess we'll find out next spring!

For summer bloomers, I'm thinking about putting in nepeta (catmint), salvia, and possibly scabiosa (pincushion flowers) or pink chives. There are many different options, though, so I'll have to just browse at the nursery next spring and see what catches my eye.

One of my favorite past-times is planning out flowerbeds.

I looking forward to seeing how it turns out next year.

(I'm sure there will be things that need adjusting--that's part of the fun as well!)

Front Porch Updates

My in-laws came to visit last week and we got some great projects done! The most visible is our newly spiffy front porch. It has definitely been a bit of a process, but after all the effort, it finally looks finished. I'm so happy with it.

Here's the progression, over several years:

When we first moved in, August of 2010:

BEFORE

Kind of a slanted view, but pretty basic: wooden & blue, with space between steps and house.

Dirt underneath.

We kept that original porch for 5 1/2 years, but by then it was really in need of some help.

A couple of the railings were broken, the paint was peeling badly--it was time.

So, during last year's surprisingly mild January, we hired a builder to redo it.

We put the same decking for all the boards with foot traffic as we used on the back deck.

(It was either Trex or something like it--synthetic, very low maintenance, lasts forever.)

The rest was still wood.

We also gave up on any sort of landscaping choices in the dry strip between the porch and the house, and just filled it in with platforms for pots or planters.

January 2016

The flowerpot platforms worked beautifully!

(The white powder is ant poison--we had a real problem with carpenter ants this year.)

May 2016

That was the status quo until we had the rest of the house painted.

As the railings and under part of the porch were all still raw wood, we knew something needed to be done with them before winter.

So we had the railings painted white to match the house trim.

October 2016

I was happy with this look, but my husband felt like it still need something a little bit more to finish it off. So last week, he and his dad stained all the support boards, and added one more layer to the railings.

AFTER

November 2016

I really like the wood on top--I didn't even know what I was missing until they put it on there, but now I love it!

You can also see all the rocks we used to fill in underneath the porch--a spring project.

(We did a layer of weed cloth under them first.)

Especially since this side of the porch is so open, I think the rocks went a long way toward making it look finished, as well.

Staining the support boards really helped them blend in, which was the hope.

(It will help protect them from the weather, too.)

Now--on to the next project!

(There's always a project of some kind going on around here.)