Accessibility Design for Doggos

The time has come, my furry friend, to put you up on blocks.

No wait, scratch that.

This is Shelly! 

Shelly is 15 (approx. 90 in human years, for a doge her weight/age/breed).  She old.  And her poor joints - especially her knees - have been aching her something fierce this past year.  At her vet's urging, she went on a diet about a month ago, and began taking supplements for her joints.  It's helped quite a bit already; but the step down from the back door into the patio area was still really difficult for her.  Watching my girl try and try and try, and shake, and stumble, was just too heart-breaking!

So, a few weeks ago, I rounded up some scraps from the garage - a leftover shelf board from the built-in shelf project and a couple of short 2x4s - and made my poor doge a handicap ramp.  It's a very simple design - just a board on top of a 2x4 with another 2x4 under the middle for support.  Here's my very detailed scale diagram, which I made during the planning process:

Both of the doges were vv heckin confuse:

"wut"

After many minutes of tentative tries, first with one foot, then another - and Daisy finally just leaping over the thing - I realized that they were confused because the smooth wood was too slippery.  I dropped a soft bathmat onto it (with a non-slip backing), and that solved the problem.  It took Shelldog a couple of days to get used to it; now she trots up and down the ramp with ease.

bathmat is...bathmatty.

Although this works great for the dogs, I've since discovered that the ramp is WAY too short to be safe for humans.  The angle is far too steep.  For now, it works for Shelly, and that was the point.  Sometime before the warmer weather shows up, though, I'd like to replace the ramp with a much longer one, with a proper non-skid surface on top, so that neither Shelly nor I ends up on our face on the ground.

More soon!

Unflattering Pictures

On a whim, I looked up my house on Google Maps - the last time I checked, they still had pictures from 2006.  They've updated them since:

This appears to be from 2009.  I can tell by the visible bean trellis arbor in the backyard, and the line of stones still wrapping around an old garden bed that doesn't exist anymore.

The yard was in *terrible* shape.  In 2009 I had recently been divorced, and had the place to myself for the first time.  I worked two jobs for most of that year:  40 hours a week at the state university, and another 35+ a week at a fast food joint near my house.  I did NOT have time to garden, or even weed the yard, or water it; which resulted in several arguments with the HOA that year over the state of my landscaping, unfortunately.

This photo is also a pretty good way of showing you, gentle reader, how pitifully small and weird my property actually is.  Long and narrow, just like the house;  with a teeny-tiny front yard, and a backyard that's little more than a playpen - 25x37 feet.

Yeah.  Yikes.

The house faces due north, so when I say my backyard is in full sun, I mean it:  it's fully exposed from sunup to sundown.

Or at least it was. The Mulberry tree is finally mature enough, the last two years, to shade about half the yard, thank goodness.

A little helpful labeling, to relate to all these pics I post of my various rooms inside.  This is really, REALLY not to scale, but it's just a quick MS Paint thing, hehe.  But it shows the approximate placement of all the rooms, and the comparative size - and yes, I really do have a long, football-field-shaped living room, LOL.













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Gardening: I Has It!

The other thing that happened over the weekend, after I got back from vacation, was a LOT of yardwork.  This last Sunday, the front yard got a good mowing and a fresh coat of grass seed (maybe it'll grow this time..?)

The back yard got the same treatment, along with some flower seeds in/near the shady corner garden - a mix of pink and red and white Cosmos, some native annual and perennial wildflowers, and larkspurs. Yay!

I also found some really cool stuff around the yard:

a volunteer Lemon Balm seedling in the yard!!!  Another plant
joins the ranks of survivors of the Martian Death Fungus. I
potted it up to keep it safe, and to keep it from spreading into
unwanted places, as mints are prone to doing. 

New berries/flowers on the Mulberry tree

OMG LOOK GRASS!!!

The little Chasteberry I planted last Fall, going strong! 

A white Yarrow, one of only three plants in the former Herb Garden
to have survived the Martian Death Fungus in the first place.  Until
this spring, it survived as a wee, weak sprout.  Now it's glorious! 

I heart my Mulberry tree. :) 

Unfortunately for the grass seed in the front yard, and the flower seed in the backyard, last night it stormed like you would not believe.  I knew it was going to rain, but I neglected to check the weather reports, or I'd have seen that it was going to rain frogs and plagues, and wash away not only my fresh seeds, but also about half the dirt in the part of the backyard still mostly only covered by dirt.  SIGH.

plans for the veggie beds I want to build in the backyard...

Hey, guess what? I built something.  Show you tomorrow. :)


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Alive

I got a wild hair this morning and just felt like mowing the grass in the back yard.  What little there is.  With the weed-eater, since the mower actually doesn't work.  There was enough grass, enough weeds, and enough dead leaves floating around that I thought I might be able to get the compost bin re-booted with what I could cut and scrape up with the rake.  

Imagine my surprise when, upon digging out and turning over what I thought was a dead compost bin - not having been fed or turned since it got so blisteringly hot in June this year - I found a compost bin very much alive.  Gross and dry on top from not having been turned, yes (and there was a sock in it - wth?), but underneath was fluffy, rich, soft, black, fragrant compost.  Mmm.  

And I also found that the 'Delfino' Cilantro that I found back in the corner by the compost bin has not only come back, but re-seeded itself all over that corner - the whole area is filled with baby Cilantros, and baby Yarrows.  Seemingy out of "nowhere". 

A promise for the turning of the year?  Hope is a thing with leaves.




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Surprise Flowers!

I love gardening moments like this, especially after the bad gardening year it's been.  I went camping over the past weekend, and came back to find the 'Romantika' Clematis in the backyard, which partly covers the temporary fencing in front of the bed I built last month behind the back porch, in full bloom:

<3

Yardnation!

Nothing fancy, but a little elbow grease (as well as a few scratches and a ruined pair of sandals) goes a long, long way towards creating the Backyard of Dreams from the chaos of the Creeping Death Fungus of 2010 and the worst drought this state has ever seen, in 2011.

Another step along that road:

Ooh, ahh.  *SPARKLE*

That nice clean corner was full of THIS.  O_O

It doesn't look like much, it was worth about three hours' work, and a whole lot of peace of mind.  I didn't find any deadly spiders, scorpions, snakes, or rats in there...but I was always worried about it.  Not for my own safety (having, as I do, boots and gloves and common sense), but for my dogs, who would chase bugs into the pile and can't tell me, "Hey, mom, I was just bitten by a Black Widow. Maybe we should go to the animal hospital right now."   You know?

Plus, it clears out a HUGE corner of the yard.  The one corner, actually, where I don't plan to plant anything cool.  This is, to put it simply, the Dog Poop Corner.  As long as they have a big, open space to use, the dogs don't use the rest of the yard, and I plan to keep it that way.

Next on the list for the back yard:  a canopy over the patio, some raised beds for vegetable gardening, and some new sod in the Spring.

it's going to be seriously cool.

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Success!

The new backyard plans proceed apace, largely due to the fact that I'm on VACATION this week at home. No work, just work around the house that I never have time to do!

Look What I Made!

This is the couch cover I've been working on for a friend of mine for the past month:

TA DA!!!

Only one more to go, and I'm already [mostly] done with the seat cushion covers, with all this wonderful time off.  :)

And also....

Kress and I hit the backyard for about thirty minutes this morning to move some fencing around, and the trellis that was behind the little Chastetree.  Here it is before:

And after:  

This is in the shady corner behind the patio.  It's mounted on the fence with eye-bolts now, and ready for plants!  

Here's the little Chastetree without the trellis and giant weed behind it (egad); we removed all that temporary wire fencing from around that half of the yard, too, and used it to corral the Chastetree and the shady corner, to keep the dogs out until they can deal with the new additions without digging them up. :)

that grass is going to be SO GREEN in the Spring.

I wonder how long this will be the "little" Chastetree - this thing is growing like crazy!  No kidding, it's already settled in and has already put on about 8" of height since I planted it three weeks ago!  YAY!

The Beautyberry, however, I suspect is not long for this world.  It's having a REALLY hard time getting established out there.  Here's hoping.

Meanwhile, I'm working on costumes today, and will update about that shortly over at my other blog. :)


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Planticular Update

Gardeny-Do's Done Last Weekend/This Week:

 1.  Planted a white, single-flowered rose in my front garden; part of a new design plan in that bed which I haven't discussed here just yet.  I will, as it slowly unfolds. :)

It's a great, healthy, strong plant.  It's hard to see in this pic, but it's COVERED in flower buds which have appeared just since I planted it.  I guess it's happy!

The sprinkler is a dog-digging deterrent!

2.  This is the American Beautyberry bush I planted in the backyard - the variety with the white berries, insetad of purple.  (Callicarpa americana var. lactea).  It's planted under a bedroom window, just off the patio.

The whole area looks pretty sad in the picture - but that's not barren dirt you see under the plant.  That's freshly-tilled soil mixed with fresh compost and new grass seed!  The spiky thing is a stand of Garlic Chives, one of the few plants from my old herb border that survived The Creeping Death Fungus of 2010. They're not all that excited about the drought.

 3.  This is the "shady corner" behind the back porch I keep talking about.  Another area that's not nearly as awful as it looks, LOL - my Clematis vines are shutting down for the year a bit eary, which they always do when it's been as hot and dry as it's been this year (which is hasn't, actually, since this year has been the worst drought and heatwave in Texas history, but I digress).

Tilled, composted, and mulched heavily, in preparation for the work I'll be doing in this corner next weekend.

4.   The Chasteberry Tree, two weeks after planting.  We had some droopy, yellow transplant shock for a few days there, but it's standing up proud now, and is already beginning to grow upward and produce new flowers.  YAY!

The "trellis" behind it - which is actually a headboard from Ikea! - is what I'm doing in the "shady corner" above:  it's hinged in the middle for flat-packing (bless Ikea), so I'm going to mount it on that fence corner and put another Clematis in there.  A Niobe, if I can find one locally next week.











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Yes, have some!

My backyard, in pictures: 

YAY! 

Ok, not really. This is what it actually looks like.

But then there was a tree* planted, and under that did I get all muddy.

Yes, that's this same area.  Stupid drought. That's a big weed behind the trellis.

So now it looks like this.

Plans for the next couple of weeks include:  removing some of the stones from the patio surface, clearing the brush pile in the southwest corner, planting a second Vitex tree, erecting the shade/roof over the patio that you see in the very first picture, and raking up the dog poop from the yard (not pictured).




*Chaste Tree, aka Vitex agnus castus, the one I bought on Monday.  A Mediterranean/north African native; extremely hardy, evergreen, water- and pest-resistant, covered in purple flowers and bees in most seasons here. Not really a "tree", rather a large shrub, 15' max. 


(Also, the house:yard ratio is waaaaay off in the drawings - the house is basically just there to show where it IS; but in the picture it makes the yard look huge, and it's really only about 36x23').




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Time Out For Some Leafy Business

Seems to be a little problem with uploading pictures today (argh).  So, rather than blathering on about my living room some more, here are a couple of landscaping updates:

The grass on the east side of the yard is getting fluffy and thick and dark, a far cry from only three months ago when I first leveled the ground and started throwing out new seed and laying down fresh sod:

My Mexican Orchid Tree is about four feet high now.  It'll be over my head in another couple of months (it grows fresh from the roots every Spring; so each Winter after it goes dormant I cut the entire thing down to the ground): 

ignore the furniture - it's keeping a certain dog from digging under here

And my Mulberry Tree, which was a gift from the birds four years ago, has gone from this:

March 2007

 To this!   This year it's finally big enough to block the neighbors' view into my yard (and windows) on the entire western half of the yard.  It's huge!  And while I haven't gotten any decent berries out of it yet (and won't, until it's fully mature, which should be next year or in 2013), the birds LOVE the tiny, almost-berries it's producing now.

June 2011

Um...yeah, not much grass on the west side of the yard.  Once the east half is done, this will be the next section I work on.  :)


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IT LIVES!!!

I've told you how I'm spending this year trying to fix up the lawn in my backyard.  Last time we visited it, I had just fenced off a section of yard, leveled it, put down fresh soil and compost, and a metric ass-ton of seed, and it looked like this:

egad.

About two weeks ago, I gave up on the seed--it had never come up at all--and decided to get a few pieces of sod at a time and try that way.  The sod tried to die on me, but then started coming back;  and around that same time, all the grass seed started sprouting! Hooray!

LOL

Funny; if I hadn't bought sod and then nearly killed it, this whole quarter of the yard would be FULL of soft, green, fluffy grass right now, and I could move on to the next section.  Whoops!  It doesn't look like it in the picture, but the sod is actually doing quite well, and the whole area should be all green and fluffy in another week or week-and-a-half.  (A friend of mine who saw my yard recently asked, "Hey, when did you plant the squares of dead grass?"  LOL).

YAY!



P.S. - I'm about to take my yearly camping trip, so I'll be gone for the next 7 days!  See you with pics when I get back. :)


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More Ideas For Projects I'm Never Going To Get Around To

So, that back patio of mine...

ooh, ahh.

Wouldn't be awesome if it looked like that, but with grass in between the stones?  Actually, it does.  And it's fantastic when I remember to take the weedeater to it every week, but who has time for yardwork? 

::crickets::

But looking pretty cool doesn't solve the real problem with it, which is that the stones are (a) really, really, really rough underfoot (because I didn't smooth out the concrete enough when I made them, and I should've used cement anyway, NOT concrete, because it's full of tiny rocks! Ow!)   Also, (c), I'm actually kinda bored with it.  And (d) if I'm going to have to dig some of it up to put up posts for a pergola-type-thing overhead...why not just scrap the whole thing and do something new? 

With me? Awesome.

So I keep seeing stuff like this...

O_O

And this...

if my toes could drool...

I mean, really, can't you just feel that soft, smooth wood under your bare feet?  I really wish I could find the photo I'm thinking of - I saw one not too long ago that's *gorgeous* and *perfect*, but did I bookmark/pin/save it?  Hell no.

It was little more than a "Hey, that's neat", until I remembered that in my hoard stash in the garage, I've got two buckets of black marble chips, another bucket of stones in assorted sizes/colors that have been in and out of gardens and fishtanks for years, a huge pile of lumber that's technically usable but which I know I won't ever really build anything with, including a couple of small heavy timbers and some end-grain pieces, a couple of spare bags of sand (for re-doing the base underneath the patio)...and I think I have some weed-blocking cloth in there somewhere, but I'm not sure. I even have a couple of gallons of deck sealant/stain sitting around in my paint hoard supplies.  Even if I have to buy more weed-blocking cloth, that's an entire project for like $20, done almost entirely with stuff I already have.

see also: breezy net sheers, moroccan lantern, hanging plants, live grass, time to do all this

Yeah?

Like I have time to do that.  But it's a neat idea.


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Inspiration Strikes When and Where It Will

For a bit of fun on this gorgeous Friday afternoon, I thought I'd share with you where I got the inspiration for the layout on my patio. 

In 2006 I used the Quikrete Walkmaker to make a concrete patio on the back of the house.  This is what it looked like the day it was finished:

Hey, look, I actually had grass before I had dogs...

(It didn't actually dip in the center like that -  I had to splice two photos together to get this shot).  The border around the edge would become a "hedge" of herbs surrounding the patio with green and lovely scents and lots of bees. 

Last year, tired of cracking mortar, weeds, and upset stones from the ground settling, I chipped out the entire thing, fixed the grade of the sub-surface, and laid the stones in a more organic pattern; intending to allow the grass to fill in between the stones, which would (a) create a softer, prettier surface to walk on, and (b) allow Nature to take its course on the patio instead of trying to fight it every step of the way.  This is what it looked like the day I finished it:

You can see here the GIANT Rosemary bush on the upper right, which was *tiny* in the first picture;  the little tree behind it is my Mexican Orchid Tree (Bauhinia mexicana),  which is the plant in the pot on the lower left in the first picture - barely a stick then!

it does have grass between the stones now, by the way

Another shot of the stones, which are arranged in concentric circles beginning at the four corners of the patio that meet at the edges like ripples in a pond. You can see the herb border fully grown in here - this was taken about a month before that Raging Death Fungus of Doom ripped through my entire garden and killed everything last year.  Sadface. :(

But here's the fun part:  the inspiration for the stone layout:

I have no idea who these players are, but they're totally cheating.

Heeheehee.  This is a screenshot from the game Gauntlet: Dark Legacy for Playstation (yes, Playstation *one*).  Specifically, this is the Lich's crypt, the Lich being the Big Bad Guy at the end of the first segment of the game.  I love this old game, and I still play it all the time;  and I've always loved the stones in the grass on the floor of this level.  Ever since I first saw it I've wanted to make a little grassy stony patio like it.   Obviously mine's a bit different, but this is where I got the idea.

LOL.   :)



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The Gardening Post

So.  The first gardening post.  First, a bit of background:  I started gardening when I was 21 (thirteen years ago, for those of you who're counting).  I've talked about the problems I've had in the last year and a half to two years; I won't launch into all that again.  Let me instead introduce you to my backyard:

sketch from March 2010

This is my backyard as of Fall 2009/Spring 2010.  The house is at the top (north).  There's an hour of shade in the southeast corner (bottom right) in the morning; and an hour of shade on almost the entire west (left) half of the yard right before sunset - but that's it. It's full sun exposure the entire rest of the day (and, for those of you who don't live in the south, it's not just about the light - the sunlight is hotter and more intense here because of our proximity to the tropics).  There's a teeeeeny tiny corner in the northeast (upper right) next to the back porch that does actually get full shade all day long.  Raven likes to sleep there. :)

The green highlighted area in the southeast corner and along the fenceline in the south is a ROCK.  That's right:  it's a slab of limestone bedrock eight inches under the soil's surface. O_O


Three feet in from the fenceline all the way around, marked with diagonal lines (  ////// ), the yard is sloped very sharply towards the fence, for drainage.  And it works...too well.  The yard holds no water at all, so it's extremely difficult to keep the grass watered.

• In 2006 I did put in the "currently unused border" (lol) along the south fence line as a "rain garden" - a garden bed in a low-lying area that takes advantage of the moisture that accumulates there.  I built it up in the back so that it'd still drain, but retain a lot more water than it used to, and filled in with compost/soil, and planted vegetables there.  Best. Garden. Ever!  The minor tweak to the drainage situation there has really helped the yard - it still does, even though I haven't used the bed in about a year and a half.
• The "trellis" garden in the east (left; over the giant rock) was an experiment.  Turns out the drainage slope there carries so much water runoff from my house and my neighbor's that after the first couple of really heavy rains, nearly all the mulch and soil in the bed was carried away,  and drowned all the plants there except for a single Spanish Lavender.  Oh, well. 

2011 update

This is what it looks like now.  I've removed the trellis garden, the vegetable garden, and the herb border around the patio.   The only plants that survived last year were the two trees (Mulberry and Bauhinia (Mexican Orchid Tree), a large Esperanza in the west near the bedroom window (wasn't in the original sketch), a pair of Clematis vines on the trellis on the side of the back porch (not labeled in the original sketch), and the aforementioned Spanish Lavender.  The Mulberry Tree is now big enough to cast some serious shade during the afternoon (2-5pm), thank goodness - I added that to the sketch, too.

It's hard for me not to show you pictures of my gardens from the past, but, if I'm honest with myself, it's only because I'm terribly embarrassed that my backyard has done so poorly the past two years, even though I know it's not my fault (two super-intense summers in a row, Crazy Death Fungus, too broke to put money into plants/tools/new sod/etc.); and that the only reason I want to do pictures is to say, "See?!  I don't suck!  I really CAN grow things!"  So, no...no pictures of the garden in its glory days from 2004-6. 

Instead, I'm starting here.  I spent last Fall undoing six years' work, and now I'm starting from scratch.  In fact, I officially started last night - but this post is already long enough.  Instead of launching into that story, I'll show you my first NEW gardening picture:  this is a 'Delfino' Cilantro plant that popped up this month all by itself, between my compost bin and the wheelbarrow that sits next to it, behind the trellis.  I nearly cried when I saw it there last week.  "We're here, waiting," it seemed to say.  "Come garden."   <3

hope is a thing with leafses  :')

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