Yard Begone!

We've been working to get our yard landscaped and renovated for about a year now.  As with all home projects, its taken way longer than I would have thought. But we're on our way- at least with the front yard!

Until now, we've been "that house" on the block- the one that clearly needs some love and care.We've done a lot of great things on the inside, which frankly is where we spend much of our time. Sadly, that left the outside mostly neglected except my veggie garden and an occasional clean up from the neighborhood gardener. The first step was to install and paint fences, which we did last summer.  We also got a landscape plan made, but when all was done,  Fall had come and we decided to wait.

While winter has tried to keep its clutches on us this year, it is technically spring and we decided to get the front yard tackled. Our gardener has the plans in hand and he's been working in between the rain squalls to get the job done. The plan for the front includes ripping out all the grass and replacing it with wood-chips and drought tolerant, native plants.  The move towards low-water, native landscaping is slowly taking hold in LA, and is especially working its way through Altadena. After living in Flagstaff for a summer, I know beautiful, environmentally-friendly landscaping is possible, and I'm thrilled we're making it happen in our own smidge of land.  So far, the grass and the awful brink-lined flower beds are gone. Irrigation is coming next week. I'll post more pictures when we get the plants and ground cover it.

Spring Garden

After a long hiatus, I'm back to gardening. My fall garden didn't go well- we had a lot of rain and the lack of gutters (normal in CA) resulted in a flooded bed. Thanks to la Nina though, we're now having a dry, warm spring.  After spending the morning de-weeding the neglected bed I put in the following seeds:

• Choi Sum (like baby bok choi) from in-laws
• Pak Choi Mei Qing Choi
• Gai Lan? The package is in Chinese
• Te Yu gai lan
• Hatakena
• Snow peas from in-laws
• Purple Dragon carrots
• Golden Beets
• Little Finger carrots

You'll notice a theme with the garden this season. I promised Jon that I'd try to grow some Asian veggies for him. It didn't go so well this fall, so I'm giving it a second go now.  Its definitely an experiment- I'm not totally sure what some of these plants are suppose to look like. It makes weeding a little more adventurous.

Garden Update

The vegetable garden appears to be doing fairly well, which is coming as a total surprise. I guess watering your vegetables regularly makes a difference! I'm glad that I installed the automatic drip system. I was gone on business last week and didn't have to worry about my plants. I was pleasantly surprised to see how big they'd grown while I was gone. My tomato plants are nearly 4 feet tall and starting to develop little green tomatoes. I'm already seeing some beans and a bell pepper appear too. The zucchini has struggled, surprisingly, but it appears to be on its way now. Hopefully we'll have a bountiful harvest in the near future.

Vegetable Garden- v1.0

After all the work we've done on the yards lately, I was inspired to start a vegetable garden. I'm not known for my green thumb, so I did a lot of reading up on getting a garden started. I'm hoping the studying will pay off and we'll have a bountiful harvest later this year.

Before I could plant anything in our raised bed, I had to de-weed it. It took me a day to get all the weeds out and the soil fit for the growing good things. The picture on the right shows the raised bed before I cleaned it up. It's on the south side of our house, so sunshine won't be a problem. Hopefully it won't back the vegetables too much come summer. Some of the weeds were waist high and tough little buggers. Now that the bed is cleared, we have a 3-foot by 20-foot bed to work with.

To conserve on water, I installed a drip system to irrigate the veggies. I'm hoping it works as advertised, since I don't want to be spending my evenings watering and weeding. We'll see how that experiment goes. In further experiments, our outside electrical conduit runs right behind the garden box, so I also had extra piping through to allow future lighting. It required digging a deep hole to and getting really dirty. Jon couldn't resist grabbing a shot of me in my sullied state.

The final results of stage I. After getting the drip system in, I transplanted a my first set of vegetables. So far, I have a set of sweet corn, Two different kinds of tomatoes, two different peppers and some bush beans planted. Phase II will be planting the vegetables from seeds. These will include zucchini, pole beans, and a second crop of corn. If all goes well, we'll be have some tasty veggies coming our way in a couple of months. I'll keep posts updating our progress. Advise is welcome, and very much needed.

Building fences

We've been working to fix up a lot of the interior of the house over the past year, and with the warmer weather arriving our thoughts turned to our yard. We've had a lot of people over the past year tell us that the inside of the house is a lot nicer than they expected from the outside, and we're hoping to change that. Before we started planting beautiful plants, we knew we had to do something about our fence. We had a wrought iron fence around both the back and front yard was pretty dated; the white paint on it was rusted through and looking pretty shabby.



In the front yard, we would have loved to get rid of the fence, but with all the foot traffic we get on our corner, it didn't seem practical. We decided to paint the wrought iron fence a red-brown that complements the house color. We're really pleased with the results- although it felt like it took us *forever* to get the job done and some help to get it all done. The picture above shows the old, drab white fence next to a section we finished. Lesson learned this project: when a paint product advertises "phenomenal adhesion", its probably a good idea to get it on your skin. Hopefully the paint job will last much longer than the rash...

In the back, a kluged together set of wood, wrought iron fences, as well as shrubs, were used to create a barrier and privacy. Time had not treated any of it well. The shrubs had been hacked to nearly the roots before we moved in, so we had no privacy. Rather than salvage the fence, we decided to put a new, beautiful wooden one. Our good friend Andy came down from Portland to install it for us. Its soooo beautiful!!! And it went up so quickly! We couldn't be more thrilled. We still need to stain it and treat it, which is a big job, but we're already enjoying our new, private backyard. We also now have a new drive way to park our car off the road. We keep the (broken) automatic fence from the old wrought iron fence to give us a little security.

Next step is to get the plans from our landscape designers and get started on the irrigation, hard-scaping, and then planting. It'll be a big job but so worth it!

We have a bunch of pictures posted here. Here's some of my favorites:


Upper Right: Demolition of the old fence
Upper Left: The finished fence
Lower Right: Andy and Jon thinking hard on how to get the fence to work out.
Lower Left: The beautiful gate Andy

Wild Weather

We've had some pretty wild weather in LA this week. It's rained about 10 inches in the foothill communities since Sunday. Fortunately, our little Altadena house has weathered the weather well. The community has managed well too, despite all vegetation lost during the wildfires. While all this moisture came down as rain at our home, it brought quite a bit of snow to our local mountains. We had a wonderful moment of sunshine this morning that revealed the lovely snows just above our house. I snapped this photo with my phone as I stepped out onto the porch this morning on my way to work. As you can see, we do get a taste of all four seasons up here in the 'Dena.

Stuffed Zucchini Boats

5 Zucchini
1 Red or Green Bell Pepper, chopped
1 Onion, chopped
1 Tomato, chopped
1/2 cup Mozzarella, shredded or processed into crumbs
2 slices of bread, toasted and processed into crumbs
1 lb Italian Sausage
3 cloves Garlic
1/2 cup Black Beans
1/2 cup of Parmesan crumbs

Set oven to broil. Cover zucchini with water in a large pot and bring to a boil. Cook for 5 minutes. While zucchini cooks, saute the onions. As the onions get soft, add the pepper cook until soft. Add garlic and cook for 30 seconds, until fragrant. Set aside. Saute Italian sausage until fully cooked. Combine Peppers, onions, tomato, bread crumbs, cheese crumbs, black beans in one bowl to make the stuffing. Drain the zucchini, slice in half, the long way when cooled. Scoop out the inside squishy part of the zucchini, chop and add the stuffing. Put the stuffing into the zucchini boats, cover with foil and put into the oven for 10-15 minutes. Remover foil, add parmesan on top of the boats, cook for 5 minutes until cheese is browned.

This recipe makes way too much stuffing, so you can use it the next night for stuffed bell peppers or freeze to use later. Also, any variety of items can be added to the stuffing- the black beans I added just because I had an opened can around. This recipe was inspired by one I found on Allrecipes.com