Garden Plans



Just a portion of our new yard with the "vegtable garden" in the foreground



            In theory I live where there are four seasons –spring, summer, fall and winter. In actuality I live where there are two – when I can spend lots of time outside and when I really like the idea of spending time outside but it’s just too bloody cold to actually do it.  Sure, I can go cross country skiing when it’s nice (and in northern Minnesota in February, “nice” means you can go outside without being afraid of your eyes freezing shut every time you blink), or I can go ice fishing when it’s not (but then I’m not really outside).  But after a while you get tired of putting on every piece of clothing you own just to survive walking across the yard.

            So every year about this time I start getting what people up here refer to as “cabin fever” because it sounds nicer than “a vaguely homicidal hatred of snow”. This is only enhanced by the gardening companies who thoughtfully send me large glossy catalogs full of summer. Or at least all of the possibilities for what summer could be –presuming I had a million dollars to spend and nothing else to do with my time.  

            Our new home is in Zone 3 – which professional gardeners refer to as the “zone of despair”.  The 3 indicates that the growing season here is about three weeks too short. Doesn’t matter what the plant is, it would have been “really great” in another three weeks. In addition to really cold winters, Zone 3 also features really hot, humid summers. Not only do plants need to be “cold hardy” they also have to be “heat resistant”.  If I want vegetables or fruit, they can’t be bothered by “early frost” or “late frost” or “why the @$&# did it just frost in July” frost.  So finding plants can be a little frustrating.

             This isn’t good because I’m going to need a LOT of plants. The new house currently has somewhere between 2 and 3 acres of yard - not counting any of the already established gardens, of which there are only a few. There’s the ubiquitous northern Minnesotan “randomly shaped front island bed full of overgrown irises and quack grass” garden, the “we planted stuff around the foundation but it turns out that large solid objects like houses create a lot of shade so daylilies are the only thing left” garden and the several thousand square feet of vegetable garden that has some strawberries and herbs of questionable parentage. 

              On one hand this is awesome. I basically have a blank slate. On the other hand it’s a really big blank slate. So there are a lot of options. I know there are a lot of options because I’ve taken my usual route when I don’t know how to do something which is, read everything I can get my hands on about a topic until I’m so frustrated by conflicting information and a lack of real advice that I say “screw it” and do things my own way.

I was really just trying to get some ideas for designing a largish garden on a budget. To anyone who reads gardening magazines and books, no, that last statement wasn’t meant to be a joke.  I was unaware that neither the concept “large garden” nor “budget” were discussed in garden literature. Every article seemed to be obsessed with how to spend as much money as possible to cram as much stuff as possible in the smallest space possible.  Near as I can tell, the ultimate garden design would be to spend three skillion dollars putting eight hundred plants, four fountains, two Adirondack chairs and a patio onto a lot the size of a standard newspaper.  

            I was also unaware that I was going to have to learn a whole new language to read these books.  Well, not a new language, they are technically written in English. It’s more like a whole new set of definitions for the current language. For example, when garden writers talk about “elegant” what they really mean is “expensive” and when they say that something is “solid” they mean “heavy”.   Garden furniture that is “aged” or “charmingly rustic” is really “rotting”. And when a plant is “enduring” or “care free” it actually means “you’d better like it because it’s going spread like crazy and take fourteen burly men with jackhammers to remove it”.

            And then there’s the garden’s “style”. Do you favor English Country Gardens, or Cottage Gardens? What about Zen Gardens? And have you tested the soil’s pH? Is it well drained? Did you mulch? What kind of fertilizer are you using? How about….AAaaaaah! Screw it!

            This summer I think I’m going to experiment with something completely different.  Mostly because I think it will be fun. But, partly because if you try something in a way that no one else has – there isn’t anyone to tell you that you’re doing it wrong.

Drywall is an acceptable Christmas present - right?

When we looked at our house for the first time we made a deal that, if we bought the house, my husband could turn the full basement into a game room complete with pool table, dart board and bar.  

            The pool table showed up less than two months after we moved in and the dart board wasn’t far behind. Now we were spending a lot of time in a space that featured pink fiberglass insulation as a major decorating element. Every time someone missed the dart board they had to dig the dart out of the “wall”. The basement needed finishing and, since we were hosting a New Year’s party in three weeks, that was his goal and this was going to be his project.



What the basement looked like when we started. This is about half of what needed done.



Before we go any further, I should let you know that the one house project above all others that my husband hates is drywall. I’m not talking about the normal distaste for tedious projects either; this is the “would sell several major organs and perhaps even some reasonably profitable minor ones to not have to do this” kind of hate. 

Enter: one of my Great Ideas.

My husband had to be gone for four days (leaving Sunday night and getting back Thursday evening) and I would drywall the basement for him, during that time, as a surprise.  The studs and insulation were already in; it was just sixteen or seventeen sheets of drywall and the trim.  I helped with a little of the drywall in our last house.  It’d be fine.

            In case you were wondering, my compensating for a lack of comprehension for the enormity of a project with a completely disproportionate sense of my ability to tackle it will probably become a re-occurring theme in this blog.

I had the whole thing planned out. I would go to the home improvement warehouse and get half the drywall (that’s all the weight my little truck will hold) when my husband left Sunday night. That would give me all day Monday to install it. Then I could go Monday evening and get the rest of the drywall and install that Tuesday. I would do the first coat of mud Tuesday night, and the second on Wednesday. While the mud was drying I would stain the trim. Painting and trim installation would happen Thursday before he got home. Piece of cake.

So, for anyone else with the ability to underestimate a project and overestimate their ability to do it at the same time, here’s what I learned.

If you tell a good friend about a project and their eyes get big and they say something like “Wow. That’s going to be a…challenge” because they’re the kind of person who’s too nice to say “Are you @#$&ing crazy?!?”,  you may want to reconsider the project.

For major home improvement warehouse cashiers: When a 5’3” girl is buying 9 sheets of drywall, drywall tape, and a 5 gallon bucket of drywall mud by herself  do not tell her to “Have a nice day.” A nice day is not in the cards. Especially when it involves getting 9 sheets of drywall into a basement that can only be accessed by a set of stairs with a 90 degree turn in them. When she returns the next day for more drywall, do not ask her what she did with the last batch. “I built a bonfire in the front yard. Turns out this stuff doesn’t burn worth a crap so I had to come back for more.” Really? What do you think I did with it?

It is possible to miss a 2 inch stud eight times with the same screw. Mark stud locations on the cement floor with chalk. This won’t make it any easier to hit the studs on the first try – but it will make you feel smarter.

There is no good way to determine the location of an outlet box until you get a hole cut for it. Oh, sure, some people have a theory about measuring, but that will only get you close. Your best bet is to cut the hole, lift the drywall and stagger forward with it while attempting to look down and determine if the hole is even close to the box. Assuming it is, push the drywall in place and gently tap the area around the outlet box until enough drywall breaks off to let the box slip through the hole.  The hole may now be slightly larger than planned. Mud will fix this.

Drywall looks flat. Walls look flat - until you’re trying to get two sheets of drywall to line up on them. Then you may realize that individual studs can be out of “alignment” by several inches and your house still won’t fall over. While this is comforting to know, it doesn’t make mudding the drywall any easier. You may have to build up several coats of mud to hide the discrepancy. Or you may want to put a really tall, really permanent piece of furniture there. I’d recommend the furniture.

Hanging a 12’ ceiling trim board alone isn’t impossible. Drive a screw partway into the wall about a foot from the where the end of the board will go and high enough that it will eventually be covered by the board. Set one end of the board on the screw and attempt to get the other end of the board attached where it belongs before the screw falls out of the wall. Realize that you set the screw too low and now there’s a hole in the wall below the trim. Fill this hole with paint until you can’t see it.



And, most importantly, it turns out that drywall is a completely acceptable Christmas present. At least, it is when your husband returns after a week away to find the basement that he had been dreading the entire time he was gone more or less drywalled, painted, and trimmed.

The basement as my husband found it when he got home.

It Has Potential

When my husband and I bought our new (to us) house one of our criteria was “It should need almost no work.” Not needing any work wasn’t in our price range.  We had just finished three years of fixing up a hundred year old log home that we bought because it “could be amazing.” We were done with sanding, scraping, sealing, plumbing, wiring, trimming, flooring, and replacing pretty much every structural and non-structural part of a house. We wanted a place that, when people walked in, their first comment wasn’t “Well….. it has potential, I guess.” Our new house should have completely recognized its potential and settled comfortably into its mediocrity.

We found the perfect house. Only 20 years old, it had a new roof, new septic, nice kitchen, great floors, and all the key systems seemed to be in working order. I mean, some of the rooms needed painting – but you’re going to have that with any house, right? Overall, we could just settle in and enjoy.

So, it’s probably not a surprise that within a month I realized that we needed to rebuild the front porch. Not just replace some boards, but rebuild the whole thing. Actually, NEED is probably a strong word. The existing system of getting from the ground to the door worked fine, it just didn’t make any sense. There was a whole lot of wasted space that wasn’t used for much of anything except keeping weeds dry. 

The front porch as we bought it

My husband was…less than thrilled to hear this. Apparently, to him, buying a house because it needed very little work meant that we wouldn’t actually be working on it.  What it really ended up meaning was that he wouldn’t be working on it. We came to this conclusion based on one of the key principles of our marriage, “Who Cares More”.  Any time there’s a strong difference of opinion about something, we determine who cares more about the outcome and it becomes that person’s problem or project. This was obviously going to be my project.

I did manage to talk my husband into helping me hang the ledger boards, but after that point he fled the property for the rest of the day. By the time he and some friends showed up that evening, I had almost all the decking installed. I probably would have had it all in place but, it turns out that 2x8’s that were salvaged from another deck and stored outside in a pile for 10 years may have warped a little. It took all four of us, and several pry bars, to wedge the last of the boards into place.  
But, once we were sitting on the new porch enjoying a well earned refreshing beverage, even my husband agreed that this design made way more sense, and that these “done in a day” projects weren’t so bad. But we weren’t doing any major projects – right?

Ummmmm….yeah…..right.