2020 outdoor projects

Following up on the garden post I did in April, the corner where our parking strip touches the alley saw a lot of action this year.  First, trucks including garbage trucks, drove over it a bunch and made it muddy.  I got the biggest rocks I could manage off of craiglist and put them there.   Someone took them.  Then the street and the alley were torn up over the course of several months and the parking strip was part of the staging area.   Several smaller plants were destroyed, but our trees made it through and they did replace a section of our sidewalk that was in bad shape, saving us the expense and hassle in the future.    

February - my short-lived rocks in the mud

May - pouring our new sidewalk

May - they definitely re-paved some sections more than once

June - four months in and still going strong

September - the rosemary we transplanted from the roof is happy, along with some yarrow and wildflowers

November - I moved the small pavers to the curb and put in some much bigger and more useful pavers

The road and alley work was prime entertainment during the first covid lockdown, when Dd was out of daycare and most everything else was paused.  They put data cables in our block of the alley and the block to the north.  In March and April the work was shockingly close to our house, but nothing was damaged.

I think something they did broke the storm drain just outside our house.   I know that the pipe that goes under our transplanted rosemary bush is ancient and broken, but I can't be sure the drain worked or the pipe wasn't broken before all this work.   In any case, the drain just overflows and the water runs down our sidewalk, rather than draining under our trees and rosemary busy and out in to the street.   If we have prolonged ice and snowmelt there might be a problem.  

So far in this post I've mostly described work we observed, but we did do a few more outdoor projects ourselves.

• On the roof Jack modified the planters so that the two roof drains are easily accessible for cleaning.
• As a birthday present to myself, we bought a box leaf azara tree (evergreen, fragrant flowers) and a 170 gallon trough planter and put in on the ledge in the boîte.   It was hard to plant and it had terrible transplant shock.  After almost all of the leaves turned black and fell off, there is some new growth and I think it will live.   Lesson learned.

• In November and December we finally took the plunge to cut the sports net we have in the boîte, which allowed us to attach it to the fence on the north and south sides of the boîte.  This gives us about 75% more play area and makes it way easier to get bikes in and out.   
• After three Christmases with our last tree "Lefty Right Northtip", we bought a new Black Hills Spruce in September and brought him in for two weeks for Christmas, successfully preventing him from experiencing a false spring.   

• Other new roof plants were: sage, thyme, a new lavender (lavandula angustifolia), a drwarf Alberta spruce, two low pink flowering plants (Dianthus Gratianopolitanus) and a yellow flowering plant whose name I have already lost.

The blueberries were a flop that flowered but did not fruit (hence the little bluegold bush we added to befriend the existing high country bush).

I'm not sure why, but I pruned the raspberries back last winter, so they spent all summer growing and only considered making berries in the late fall, when it was too late.   This winter I didn't cut them back at all.

We had good luck with our carrots and the fragrant jasmine plant continues to be one of our most pleasing roof plants, blooming several times.

Roof gardening continues to be a learning experience.  I've found that it is too sunny for most greens on our roof in the summer because they bolt immediately.  Parsley, on the other hand is self-seeding and growing even in January.