Renovation Progress: Floors and Kitchen Garden

For the past week, I've been caretaking a retreat center and its resident cat, which means I drive out to the center twice a day, first thing in the morning to feed and play with Talks-A-Lot, the cat (she does talk–a lot!), and to check on the buildings. I drive back out again at the end of the work day to either let Talks in and feed her if it's been nice enough for her to be outside all day, or to hear her meow! meow! meow! lecture if the weather hasn't been nice and she's been stuck inside. 

As you can see from the photo at the top of the post, the view of Heart Mountain from the center is glorious, a definite bonus. Talks is quite a character, and the friends who I am caretaking for really needed a vacation, so I'm glad to be able to help out. But the twice-daily commute takes a big chunk out of my energy budget. Plus I have a respiratory allergy triggered by cats, so I'm wheezing and coughing more than normal, and that's tiring too.

All of which is why I didn't get a blog post up last week. And also why I resolved to save energy and make time for one this weekend.

Today was bedroom-flooring day. (The floor in my bedroom was the one wood floor in the house that was too badly damaged to save.) The photo above is what it looked like when Jeff Durham, my contractor, laid the first few strips this morning. They're in the middle of the floor because he was working from the the new flooring he laid last week in my en-suite-bathroom-to-be (photo below). 

Looking in the opposite direction from the first photo, toward the en-suite-bathroom, which is now ready for plumbing rough-in

While Jeff laid flooring planks, I worked on my edible garden. First I made soil in my new mini-stock tanks, using a mixture of coir bricks (shredded and compressed coconut husks, an sustainable alternative to peat moss). Once I re-hydrated the coir, I added bags of local compost made by a farmer in Greybull, on the other side of the Bighorn Basin. (Thanks to my friend Joan Donnelly, who enticed me out to the Park County Home Show last Saturday, where Chad Yost and his wife had their local compost for sale.) 

Starting soil preparation for the stock-tank edible garden (the hunks of earth in the bottom of each tank are turf cut from my front lawn where I cut out a bed to plant peonies yesterday). 

I added a bale of organic soil amendments to the coir-compost mix, and then stirred it in with a spade to made sure the soil was well blended. (My back and shoulders definitely feel the work of hefting bags and bales, schlepping garden trugs full of water to rehydrate the coir bricks, and that stirring. Let no one tell you that gardening isn't good exercise!)

Sheet mulch in place, teepees ready to unfold and fill, tomato plants in the yellow garden trug.

Then I laid out red, breathable sheet mulch to keep the moisture in the soil and warm the little tomato plants' roots, and chose four plants, one each of black cherry, Pompeii Roma, stupice, and tangerine, from the forest of tomato seedlings in my living room.

As I planted each seedling, I unfolded one of the tomato teepees, stood the plastic teepee upright around the floppy plant, and, using a watering wand in one hand, carefully filled each chamber of the teepee with water so it would stand upright and provide thermal insulation and shelter from wind and high-elevation sun for the young plant. 

When Richard was alive, we used to fill the teepees together–it goes much more easily with two people. Unless of course, one of them has a brain tumor that impairs his ability to focus and control the hose, in which case both people get very wet. But they have fun anyway. 

Filling tomato teepees by myself involves balancing the floppy plastic structure with one hand, while aiming the water into each successive tube with the other. It's quite a dance, but it works. 

By the end of the day, I had four tomato plants in the ground, each protected in their thermal shelter. Alongside them, I planted chervil, a French herb that tastes something like tarragon, but with sweet licorice overtones.

While I was in gardening-mode, I also thinned the spinach and baby turnip sprouts in the old wheelbarrow that is part of my front-entry garden, planted some spearmint in a pot there, and watered the sugar snap peas and garlic chives. (All grown from seeds selected by Renee Shepherd and her staff at Renee's Garden, my favorite seed company for their unique, delicious, thoughtfully produced, and easy-to-grow varieties. Thank you, Renee!) 

And by the end of the day, Jeff had finished my bedroom floor. (The floor still needs trim, and the walls need paint, but those will wait until after the window-replacement happens sometime in June.)

My beautiful and smooth new bedroom floor! (I won't miss the splinters and protruding nails at all…)

If all goes well, by summer, I'll have a garden bursting with healthy, beautiful food. And my house will be… okay, not finished. I can't afford all it needs. But it'll be in much better shape than I found it.

In fact, it already is: even partly-finished, the house's inner beauty shines, and it feels like a happy place. That makes me smile, and my heart proud. And it's part of my mission to leave my patch of earth–both the built environment and the natural one–in better shape than it came to me. 

The living room in this evening's lovely late light, viewed from the dining table, where I sit finishing this post… 

Spring Garden Discoveries & A Brag

One of the delights of buying an older house is discovering the surprises planted by previous owners. Like the daffodils, grape hyacinth (the purple flower clusters) and columbine leaves in the photo above, in a flower border now overtaken by lawn. 

I'd guess from the yard's unkempt and overgrown character that no one has done any actual gardening, or pruning, or tending anything except the lawn in this yard for a very long time. Perhaps many decades. And even the lawn isn't in great shape. 

Which means I have the delight of coming to know what may be the original mid-century modern garden plan, much like the way I am coming to know the original mid-century modern house, also neglected for a very long time.

And just as the original details of the house charmed me when I first toured it–Who could not love the vintage kitchen in the photo above, even if it was covered with grime and bad paint?–I am finding the vintage plants appearing in the yard a delight. 

Like the daffodils, grape hyacinth and columbine in the photo at the top of the post.

Or these English irises, which have been untended for so long that their rhizomes have grown into a densely packed mound in the front yard. I spent a couple of hours yesterday cleaning up and starting to weed around them.

This fall I'll carefully dig up and divide the rhizomes, and will likely end up with enough to fill an iris bed about three times the size of this one. Which is fine with me; I'd rather have irises than boring lawn any day!

The shrub above, which I think is an old-fashioned variety of flowering quince, and has been languishing in the shade of a large and sickly honey-locust tree that my arborist removed last month. Now that the shrub is getting sun, I expect it will put on quite a flower-show next spring. 

 

The peony leaves sprouting from a grass-infested triangle by the driveway. I had been contemplating planting a peony bed this fall; now I will, since they're already part of the yard flora. (The red pigment coloring these baby leaves protects their delicate inner cells from both the intense high-elevation sunlight and the cold temperatures that come with spring in the Rocky Mountains, like today's four inches of snow.)

The rhubarb I discovered the other morning when I was surveying the narrow yard off the kitchen as my prospective edible garden. I had ordered rhubarb to plant with asparagus and raspberries, so I was thrilled to find one already in situ–the more the better. 

Yup. Those tiny, tightly crinkled leaves are rhubarb.

Many of these plants are what I call "heritage" garden plants, the kind carried from place to place and traded from gardener to gardener, their roots/tubers/bulbs wrapped in damp cloth to keep them alive. Many are long-lived; individual peony and rhubarb plants, for example, may thrive for a century or more.

The happy surprise of them emerging in my neglected yard is no doubt why my mom's been on my mind more than usual. Mom was my plant-love-companion and garden inspiration: she could grow anything from ornamentals to edibles, as well as wildflowers and other native plants. 

These particular plants are all old friends, familiar from the gardens Mom tended in the house where I grew up. Same with the lilacs and bush honeysuckle that dominate this yard's overgrown hedges. She would have loved the wild chokecherries threading through them too, gifts of visiting birds. 

Mom (Joan Tweit) in the middle between Dad (on the right) and Richard (Cabe) on the left, on a visit to Betty Ford Alpine Gardens in Vail. I must have done a booksigning there, because Richard is holding a box of my books. 

Finding these plants is like having Mom with me, cheering me on as I work to restore both yard and house. (Mom died in 2011, the same year as Richard; April 3rd would have been her 86th birthday.)

It feels like this place was just waiting for me to come home and adopt it. I'm so grateful I could and did. 

****

The brag? This week I learned that I'm a finalist for the 2017 Colorado Authors League Awards in not one, but two categories: Essay and Blog. 

It's an honor to be a finalist for these awards juried by professional writers. In my two decades of living in Colorado, I won three CAL Awards; whether or not I win this time, being a finalist is an especially sweet coda to my time in the state. 

Keep your fingers crossed for me. The Awards Banquet is May 5th, and I'll be there for one last celebration of award-worthy writing with my CAL friends and colleagues.