Month: March 2008

joining the 20th century with our new-to-us car

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Our new-to-us car outside our house.

We bought a car this week. The car is the first one I’ve ever owned so we’re conceptualizing it as my starter car, which will hopefully make my partner’s shift from a red Mustang convertible to a gray Saturn Ion moderately less ignominious. Like I said, we’re hoping. In the big picture I’m thrilled to have a car and be able to again shop in stores more distant than one mile from my house. Not to mention go to the shore or out to the country for bike rides or to our friends’ houses without having to spend upwards of two hours on the train. Don’t get me wrong, I love being able to get around on the train, it’s just wearing a little thin for the times when we’re crossing the entire city by going all the way downtown and out again.

There are lots of folks who made this happen, and they deserve credit. First and foremost, the credit for being the deciding factor needs to go to Zipcar. Thank you, Zipcar, for buying out Flexcar and making our customer experience with you so unpleasant. Were it not for your infantilizing attitude, punitive fee structure, and higher rates, we would have easily gone at least another year without purchasing a car of our own. However, the very last thing we did with one of your cars was drive to pick up ours. So, thanks!

Next, Opal at Budget customer service contributed to our purchase in an entirely different way. Were it not for her willingness to look up the numbers of our defunct drivers’ licenses from old rentals I am quite sure that we would currently be stuck in limbo with the DC government and not the proud new owners of a used car! I believe that our conversation may have been the least painful and most helpful customer service call I’ve experienced in my entire life. So, thank you, Opal!

Of course all of the usual suspects were helpful, too: our local Erie Insurance guy, our credit union lady, and the passel of sales people at CarMax who fielded my calls, transfered the car, showed us around, and graciously offered to remove the red and white racing stripe from the car once we’d seen it in person and both agreed that we just weren’t going to buy a car with a stripe. Because, you know: it’s not 1985 and I don’t live in rural Indiana anymore. They were also gracious about removing the CarMax sticker; I wasn’t willing to give them free advertising after signing a waiver giving up my right to civil litigation in favor of arbitration — those waivers are generally ruled unenforceable in the case of criminal activity, as criminal cases are brought by the state rather than the consumer. At any rate, besides the arbitration waiver, which just happens to be a huge peeve of mine, our car-buying experience was quite positive.

So, thanks, everyone! I can’t wait to slap a sticker on it and go.

joining the 20th century with our new-to-us car

garden log : forsythia in bloom, plants a’poppin, and pruned trees

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Sedum by the south fence.

I was happy to see that the sedum wasn’t at all hurt by being moved a foot to the west last year. I discovered it popping up under the rose bush along the far part of the south fence when I was clearing that area of vines. When I transplanted the peonies gifted to us by our neighbors I also moved the sedum to give both it and the rose bush some root room. The clump is a lovely splash of green back there now that I’ve cleared the fall’s leaf cover off of that bed, and it could probably be separated in two without hurting its overall growth. I have a small bit in the front bed, and I wouldn’t mind moving a larger bunch to the front. Herbaceous perennials are kind of a weird mystery to me, one of the neater forms plants take. I mean, they die off, right? And then they grow back. It’s pretty cool.


The forsythia bush at the back of our house, in full bloom.

This year I’m making a concerted effort to take photos of the shrubs and trees as they bloom. Partly for my own cataloguing effort, but also to have a reminder of what the yard looks like at various points through the year as I’m planning new additions or relocations. The forsythia is a particularly striking bush; set against the rear of the house it gets the setting afternoon sun and positively glows. Sadly, it is a plant that I’d never encountered before moving out here and appear to be specifically allergic to. Last year’s experiment with bringing in a striking array of cut branches for the dining room ended with a lot of sneezing and a lovely arrangement greeting visitors on the porch. This year I’m admiring them from afar and remembering to keep the window closed. The sheer volume of pollen from the pear and cherry trees in bloom in our town leads me to strive to keep the windows closed anyway, which is hard this time of year as the weather is just starting to get lovely and cool.


Front to back: orange daylilies, garlic chives, and yellow daylilies, with variegated violets off to the left side.

And, it’s amazing what a difference two weeks makes! The front bed is growing like crazy, and we haven’t had all that much rain. It’s supposed to be quite wet this weekend, though, so I’m sure that they’ll sprout up even more. I look forward to seeing even more violets come into flower; I love the look of the scattered throughout the front lawn. In terms of work I did in the garden this week, rather than work the plants did for themselves, I pruned the deadwood out of our neighbor’s cherry tree that abuts our house. It’s a lovely old weeping cherry, but it’s in close competition with several large maples for sunlight and it had a few large limbs that needed to be removed. I’m hopeful that I got to them early enough that the tree will start to believe it’s not actually dying and send up some new sprouts to balance out its lean. Even if it doesn’t, cutting deadwood out of fruit trees is one of my favorite gardening activities. Seriously, it is. It’s my favorite thing to do at the farm and I’ve gladly applied that experience to the trees around our property here.

Finally, I rescued from ivy strangulation and relocated to the front bed the last of the daylilies that were growing up along the alley at the back of our yard. There are still some along the back of our neighbor’s fence, but I plan to just pull the ivy up and mulch around those. I’m sure that with a little encouragement they’ll fill out to make a nice drift; he has a double lot with his garage off the street, so the alley facing is long and unbroken. First things first, though: killing the ivy in my own yard is of highest priority!

garden log : forsythia in bloom, plants a’poppin, and pruned trees

garden log : new composter & blooms a’bloomin

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Bloomin’ quince.

With the official coming of spring, plants are bursting into bloom all over the yard. The flowering quince has been in full bloom all week, joined yesterday by the forsythia and the opening of the daffodils. The flowers were a nice reward for the work I’d put into clearing the beds, and I was pleased to see that a liberal sprinkling of cayenne pepper was successful in blocking the attempts of the squirrels to dig to China and treat the crocus bed as a lunch buffet.

The outdoor work of this past week was decidedly less appealing than the flower rescue of the week before. We pruned the Eastern tent caterpillar egg sacs out of the small cherry tree, only just ahead of the appearance of the caterpillars themselves. I am loathe to have the trees sprayed, but the caterpillars really creep me out. If there are nearly as many as there were last year I may go that route. We also discovered that at least one of the cherry trees is diseased; I’m going to have our arborist advise us on whether it will recover or if we should think about just having it removed.

Our other main project was cutting deadwood out of the large quinces and cherry trees that form the north property border. While we were there we—and by ‘we’ I mean my partner—wrestled a six-foot high ‘stump’ covered in ivy out of the back corner of our neighbor’s yard. When we moved in the upper half of the ivy-covered trunk of this dearly departed tree had fallen and landed on our garage, held in the air by the vines. Having cut it free and wrestled it to the ground the first year we were here, we had some idea of what removing the stump would entail. Thankfully, the public works employees in our town are wonderful, and they took the whole thing away without us having to saw it into smaller bits. Earlier in the week I’d cut down three saplings that were crowding the larger trees, and they also took those trunks without a problem.


Our new double-barreled tumbling composter.

The other big development in the garden this week was the arrival and assembly of our new tumbling composter. I’ve always wanted to compost, having become fascinated with the process as a young child, and I persuaded my partner that it would be both possible and financially advantageous to do so in our small suburban yard. In selecting a composter, I was concerned with minimizing animal access and being able to do the manual work of turning the compost myself; he was concerned with odors and having an overly visible contraption that made us the laughingstock of the block. The selection that best met most of our needs was the Mantis ComposTwin, a high-tech tumbler that cost the most upfront but seemed most likely to be workable for us in the long-term. To address the visibility and mocking concerns, we chose to place it under a tree and behind the neighbor’s bush, on the south side of the yard. Because it’s contained and aided by ‘composting agents,’ I’m hoping that the relative lack of sun won’t impede the composting process; it will be a few weeks before we are able to fill the drum and find out if it will actually make compost.

At any rate, it arrived on Monday, in three large and heavy boxes, and a friend came over that evening to help us put it together. Yes, that means we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by assembling a contraption into which one places food scraps to rot. Now you understand my life. The assembly process took us about three hours, with a break in the middle for dinner. We quickly lost the light, so after assembling the frame outdoors we moved to the foyer and front porch to assemble the drum. There was quite a bit of pushing and pulling and cursing, so I highly recommend having at least two people to assemble this beast. Once together, we placed it on its frame and threw in an inaugural mix of leaves and kitchen scraps, in the backyard in the dark. And then we had some beers.

Next up: pruning the deadwood out of the neighbor’s dogwood and weeping cherry that border the north side of our yard. I also plan to cut down another sapling that’s grown up right next to the maple’s trunk. And, of course, there’s always more lirope to kill.

garden log : new composter & blooms a’bloomin

garden log : crocus rescue and a new bed

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Shoots in the front bed. From top to bottom: early-blooming yellow daylilies, garlic chives, and late-blooming orange daylilies.

Assessing the yard this spring, I’m relatively pleased with what I have to work with. A thick leaf mulch still covers the beds, although I’ve raked the leaves away from the plants I’m trying to encourage: the crowns of the peonies, the bluebells, the poppies. I have big plans for the whole year, and I’m raring to go; it’s hard to believe that this is more than two weeks sooner than my first garden-related post last year. Granted, it’s been a mild winter, and the warm weather has caused everything to pop up a bit earlier than usual, which contributes to the feeling that every moment is one with valuable potential for yard work. Nonetheless, I’m proud of myself for the progress I’m already making.

My nemesis in our overgrown garden is liriope. For reasons that remain unfathomable to me, folks around here love their liriope. I see it all around the DC area: taking water from trees in city boxes, smothering flowering bulbs in residential border gardens, and running wild from any bed where it’s been planted and left untended. This last is the case with our yard: we had liriope crowding trees in the back yard, smothering bulbs in the front yard, and popping up all through the backyard in competition with the grass that my partner is so keen to preserve. Never have I been so keen to kill something, and I relish every chance to get to dig those suckers out by their runner roots.


The bed to the right of the front steps, after the first day of weeding. Behind the daffodils, in the rear left corner, are the crocuses rescued from the left bed. The remaining liriope is still visible in the lower right corner; in that area was another clump of tenacious crocuses.

Given my animosity for the plant, the first thing I did in the garden this year was dig some up. I cleared it completely from the small bed to the left of the front steps, unearthing a sizable cluster of crocus shoots when I did. I made it about halfway through the bed on the right side of the steps before hitting my three-hours-in-a-row wall for laboring in the garden. The right bed required a bit more care, as it contained the daffodils that I am working hard to preserve. After only two flowers last year, I’ve been granted ten buds this year, and the last thing I wanted to do was stress the plants so much that they wouldn’t open. Three hours got me one and a half liriope-free beds, and a gigantic bag of lawn trash. I was reasonably satisfied, and vowed to return to dig another day.


The new bed, with spindly daffodils from the backyard and a variety of crocuses from the front beds. I don’t expect they’ll bloom this year, but I look forward to seeing what they’ll produce next spring.

That other day was today. Having discovered daffodils along the south fence of the backyard and even more clumps of crocus in front of the house on the left, I was eager to create a more permanent spot for them. I created a little bed around the front light post (sorry, grass), into which I moved all the daffodils from the backyard. That took about an hour, after which I broke for lunch. After lunch, I spent another hour moving all the crocus sprouts that weren’t blooming, with their resident earthworms, to the new bed. Finally, I tackled the remaining liriope to the right of the front steps. I successfully cleared the rest of the liriope from the small bed itself, after which I moved the crocuses to the new bed and the freed daffodils to the vacant corner made by the steps and the porch. I expect that the daffodils are tall enough to get light over the steps and smaller plants can be set between the daffodils and the lawn. Another day. After covering the new bed with a light leaf mulch and clearing up the weeds, which generated another big lawn bag of refuse, I called it a day.

When I think of the work I’m doing in the garden, I am put in mind of a quote I read somewhere—maybe a blog, maybe one of the garden books I’ve been consulting lately, they tend to blur together—that said, the difference between a landscaper and a gardener is maintenance. I find that I move between these two roles, and a third one of ‘plant rescuer’: killing and uprooting the invasives; tending the successful beds I’ve been able to eke out of the overgrowth; and moving or nurturing the plants that we continue to find under all the mess. Maybe one day my ‘gardening’ will consist of a snip here and some weeding there, but today is definitely not yet that day.

garden log : crocus rescue and a new bed

turning the suburbs into a salt wasteland

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Road salt heading to the Chesapeake Bay.

One of the things I hate the most about living out here is the way they deal with winter weather. Or rather, the ways in which they don’t deal with it. During the first year we were here, there was a blizzard. A good old-fashioned three-feet-of-snow-shuts-the-city-down-for-a-week kind of blizzard, of the type that also shut down the east coast in February of 1996. Not surprisingly, DC didn’t have enough salt or sand or plows or trucks or workers to clear the streets in the days after the blizzard. I say not surprisingly not because DC government is a bunch of backwards eejits, but because no government could have had enough salt or sand or plows or trucks or workers to deal with this level of snow. I say this having lived in Pennsylvania during the blizzard of 1996 and having grown up in places where at least once per year two or three feet of snow can be expected; when these things happen, it takes a while to clear the roads. Period.

However, local residents’ expectations did not align with this reality, and so there was a lot of protesting and blaming and complaining and accusing following this blizzard, the result of which was overcompensation with regard to all future winter weather. In some ways, the overcompensation was amusing: schools were closed in anticipation of an inch of snow, snow which sometimes never materialized. As I was teaching at the time, I enjoyed frequent days off. The other way in which people in the area overcompensate, though, remains completely mind-boggling to me, and that is the coating of the roads and sidewalks with salt. Salt which is rarely needed at all, let alone to the degree it’s applied, and which therefore mostly ends up in the local soil and water system.

I can’t remember ever using salt on sidewalks except during an actual ice storm. Where I come from, we use a shovel and the sun: shovel the snow, let the sun do the rest. In the rare instances where patches of ice develop we either (1) walk around them or (2) use the shovel to break them up and clear them from the sidewalk. Out here, people either don’t shovel their walks at all or shovel them and then cover the damp surfaces with a layer of salt. Sometimes, as in the photo above, the surfaces are completely coated with salt in anticipation of the possibility of snow or freezing rain that never materializes. As a walker, this means I’m walking in the grass throughout most of the winter to avoid having my shoes deteriorate through constant exposure to chunks of salt. Which is annoying, but not nearly so annoying as seeing buckets of salt heaped at the side of the road and dripping into the storm drains, drains which flow to the Chesapeake Bay.

I took the above photo a month ago, on January 22nd, at the end of the day on which the salt was applied. Much of the pile of salt is still there, six weeks later. I suppose I could be glad that it’s still there, rather than all in the water system; mostly, though, it just makes me angry. I shudder to think what the water in our local creek must be like, and try to remember to fill the birdbath with fresh water each day. I know that other locals are concerned about the chemical runoff into the water system, including members of the Town Council. So I try not to let it get to me and focus on maintaining my little chemical-free soil haven for the local grubs and insects, which in turn feed the local moles and birds, which in turn feed the local hawks, possums, raccoons, and foxes.

turning the suburbs into a salt wasteland