Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

Robert Frost said that. The poem? "Mending Wall." I've always loved that poem, since I first stumbled across it in my first or second year of college. I could tell you by pulling the book down from the shelf, because I used to date my books ... though that would require me to turn on the light. I look at the shelves in the half-light of the computer and realize, horror of horrors, that I have lived in one place for two full years and not alphabetized my poetry. Unbelievable!

Can't find Frost. Dickenson. Homer. Eliot. Yes, in that order, reading backwards, up the shelves. Oh here it is. Before the Eliot. On the flyleaf, with my childish signature. February 4, 1982. Not a surprise. The formative semester of my sophomore year, when I began to read for myself. So then. Mending Wall. Let's see.

I think it starts, "Something there is that loves a wall ..."

But no, in fact, surprise! It starts,

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

I love walls. I am not as fond of fences, but this one, like most of Pugsley, is right. It's meant. Someone has found it useful and it's stood the test of time because it serves a purpose, and when it was down this past six months, something was not right in the yard. So, well, now it is back up. Here were the final few shovel fulls of dirt, tamped down around the last post, which I caught from the kitchen window last weekend.

I have photos of the other side, the pretty side. Capel put the caps on and re-stained it today. But they will save for another day. Good night all.

Thyme is on your side: Update on patio crabgrass

I tackled the patio crabgrass again last weekend. It's slow going so there aren't enough photos for a decent post. This is the part of the summer when its hard to keep ahead of the crabgrass. It grows like, well, like a weed. The thyme on the other hand, doesn't.

My strategy, for about a year now, has been to remove the crabgrass, mostly by hand, and substitute thyme. My last post on this topic is here.  Since that last post, almost a month ago now, I also planted three new kinds of thyme and a creeping shady creature called Corsican Mint. In this post, I'll show all four, and my method of planting.

Here is Corsican mint. It likes shade and moisture, and since I have an abundance of both in certain spots in the patio, I added it to my arsenal. It seems to be doing well in the month since I planted it.

More of the patio, though, bakes under sun and especially in the dog days of summer has very little moisture. Thyme loves those conditions, and so I'm trying pretty much every version of a creeping thyme I can lay my hands on, without special ordering. Here is a variety called Pink Chintz Thyme. It is a faster spreader than the others.

Here you can see how I take a small pot and cut it into sections with scissors. How big they are depends partly on how much root there is and how big the cracks that I want to fill. I cut the pots down to plug size.

Here are the resulting plugs of pink chintz thyme:

Here is one planted:

Here is minus thyme:

Here is Wooly Thyme. This one mounds too high, really, for the patio, but I put it over in a corner where we don't walk much and where a higher, faster growing thyme might be better competition.

Next up, how these fared in the latter half of June and first half of July, during a heat wave with  no rain. For the full series, see the topic "Patio Crabgrass" in the list of topics on the righthand side of the home page.

Trimming a monster yew hedge

We have two monster yew hedges in our back yard. I love them for the way they define the yard and set its bounds with green. Still, they're massive and the one alongside the garage has just gotten impossibly huge. Try as we might, we just haven't been able to get it trimmed to a manageable size.

I took a monster yew hedge out, in another life, and lived to regret it. In some ways it was the right decision, because it was a monster yew in the wrong place, but when the hedge went, so did the cheerful bird song in the mornings. And the replacement plants never quite did well, never quite looked right either. I learned that some things take decades to grow and can't simply be replaced overnight. And so ever since, I've said to myself, that if I had another house, I wouldn't make drastic changes the first year. And so, for the most part, I haven't.

We've owned Pugsley now for almost two years exactly. I think as I write this, on Sunday, the day after tomorrow, the 16th, will be two years. And today, we cut back one of the monster yews. It's an amazingly beautiful yew, matched only in amazingness and sheer prodigalness by another hedge at right angles. Together they define the back of the yard, as you can see in the three photos below, panning from right to left.

The yew in question runs alongside the garage and, as you can see in the photo below, is gargantuan. 

Despite a fairly severe trimming last June, by September it had rebounded and seemingly doubled again in size. It is much taller than I am and a good 10' deep. It runs right up to the garage wall and is virtually impossible to trim. Besides which, I've recently found increasing numbers of vines climbing up inside it and I know that in the next year or two we will have to paint the garage, which will not be possible with the current state of things.

So, when Capel decided to rent a hedge trimmer this weekend, I thought, it's now or never. And broached the subject of a drastic trim. He agreed, much more readily than I thought he would. And, what's more, he did the whole thing, start to finish.

We agreed we needed a good 18" distance between the hedge and the garage, and that the entire hedge needed to be a foot lower, to allow room for 6" of growth back. And away he went. The first cut, along the back, revealed a beautiful set of yew branches underneath, with plenty of vigor for springing back from a severe cut.

Note the green sprouts from the very bottom of the trunk. And, in other places, green sprouts coming directly out of the branches. This is a good sign, and means that once the upper growth is trimmed away, exposing the lower branches to sunlight, they will fill in, with new, green growth.

They're amazingly beautiful in their sweep.

Not so, a rather nasty garage wall in need of some work.

Here, a few photos, mid work. This one gives you a sense of the hedge's height up close. To take this photo, I held the camera as high as I could hold it and pointed down.

And now, the finished work, showing four beautiful yew bushes. And the stone wall underneath it, too, is finally visible. I'm already thinking about the shade plants I can put underneath. And when the hedge springs back, there will be lots of photos, you can bet on it.

Cherry pie, basil and tomatoes, and chicken with sage on the farm

We've come into the height of summer, perhaps my favorite time of year. Saturday we had the first corn on the cob from the farmers' market in Pleasantville. Yesterday I made a cherry pie. And tonight, we're having chicken grilled stuffed with sage and tomatoes with basil. They're simple recipes. A thousand people make them I'm sure. Tomatoes mixed with salt and basil, drizzled with a bit of lemon oil and balsamic vinegar. The chicken, too, very simple. Breasts stuffed with a few fresh sage leaves, salt and pepper, skewered back together and cooked on the grill. The tomatoes are not from the garden, but the basil and sage are.

And as I walked out to the garden in my bare feet to gather the sage, and, fifteen minutes later, some basil. Returning back, watching the clover for the bees in the early gloaming, the sound of bird calls, a song sparrow I think, chittering in the background, for just a moment, a nanosecond really, I wondered about other girls and women, throughout the 175ish-year history of the house, who have gone into the yard for herbs or lettuce or a turnip or tomato and returned in through the gloaming and bird calls to cook dinner. It was a passing thought, really momentary, but new, to me.

In the not too, too distant past the chicken too would have been known, named, its neck wrung on the spot and the feathers plucked on the back stoop, but my imagination hasn't yet strayed that far. I've never wrung a chicken's neck. My personal history does not go that far.

Pie, though, for me has an old and complex history.  Here is mine, pinched and decorated with a C, then wrapped with foil and, last, baked ...

When I was young, my great-grandmother, my Nani, had two cherry trees in her backyard. Her backyard wasn't a fancy affair. It was a very long and narrow overgrown city lot, sandwiched between some unknown something or other and a giant Jehovah's Witness church. She'd lived there on her own since the 20's (the 1920's, that is), thus seemingly forever by the time I was a girl in the 1970's, and I always thought (or maybe my mother told me) that the city must have grown out and around her in those 50 years, while she stayed put, just a 90 year old woman on her long narrow lot with the house set way back among cherry trees and a tiny flower garden, her dog, and the hubcaps she picked up on her walks on the roads and strung along like beads to make up the flower bed border.

Every year on a certain weekend in June, we'd drive the hour from Youngstown, Ohio, to her place in Akron to pick cherries. Up a ladder all day, sun spilling down and cherries hitting a pail for hours on end. Then home and the next afternoon, pitting them, all of us four girls, mom, and our old friend Mrs. Ruth Copham, sitting all on the front porch with bowls of washed cherries, pitting them until the juice ran down our fingers, wrists and forearms, dripping off our elbows onto the porch floor.

Then we'd make a pie. Or two. And I like still to make at least one pie a year. I've tried lots of recipes over the years and have finally landed back at my mom's recipe, from the Betty Crocker cookbook. One of the first editions. That's another story. If you don't know the book, it's worth looking up. The cherry pie filling is simple, too, made with just flour, sugar, cinnamon and almond oil, with one tiny Sherry twist, a dash of fresh grated nutmeg. No tapioca. And it's almost always best the second morning, for breakfast.

The C, too, carved into the top, always the same, has been my tag for 20 years now or so. C for Cherry. P for Pot Pie. A for Apple. There is no P for Pumpkin or L for Lemon Meringue or PBC for Peach and Blueberry Cobbler, those pie species being without top crusts. And that's the extent of my pie making and tagging.

I make pie and Capel sings a song about a girl who makes cherry pies, that I've only ever heard from him, though I know it isn't new.

And after dinner, we sit under the clear turquoise sky, watching the clouds turn salmon, then pink, then dusky rose, then grey, as the fireflies come out by the dozens, winking yellow and floating up, yellow and up, like little momentary lanterns to light the way. The cicadas, too, join their chorus, as the evening descends, gently, and all is well, for one moment anyway, here on the old Pugsley farm.

Repairing/Restoring Privacy Fence--replacing posts but not fence panels

Like all good DIY stories, this story, which started with a sad beginning (see here)--hapless DIY'ers start on a project that seems endless, herculean and filled with impossible obstacles--now, finally, has taken a turn for the better. Happy endings are in sight!

Quick review. Small privacy fence shown here performs necessary task of screening patio from the street, cars from the patio and yard, and garbage and wood pile from the neighbors.

Blows down in a hurricane. Turns out the middle posts are rotted through and cannot be saved. Only one fence panel remains standing, and that one leans precariously.

But true to their DIY souls, Sherry and Capel are not about to pay to replace the entire fence. They're sure the panels are still totally good for another 30 years, at least. Into the garage go the fence panels for the winter. And there they rest through the spring and early summer.

There is much procrastination, because now, two years into DIY home ownership, there seem to be more projects than initiative. And so it goes. The months tick by. March. April. May. Lots of gardening and no initiative for repair work.

After one discouraging attempt on a misty rainy day in May (recorded in the above link) ...

... they hit concrete and give up again.

Hopeless. It's hopeless. They're both hopeless. Everyone is hopeless. And so the fence sits, and the record breaking rain pours all through June, the desolate yard and garbage and woodpile growing ever more and more unsightly, until as the rain clears up and the weather heats up, our two heroes, having taken to the patio in the evenings to cool off, are forced to stare at the ugly gaping lack of fence, and finally, finally, the inevitable cannot be avoided. Even Capel cannot procrastinate one minute longer. Sherry cannot pretend that the gardening is more urgent. And so, on their first real beach day in July, in a meeting of the minds, they agree the inevitable cannot possibly be put off any longer. The fence must be repaired.

They have learned one important coping strategy in the intervening fall, winter and spring. Some one person has to be project manager of a project. Otherwise--disaster! Capel likes the idea of fixing a fence. Sherry is just tired of projects, at the moment. So our man Capel forges into the lead. This is his project.

He researches. He calls. He calls again. Does more research. Looks at lots of YouTube video. Finally, a solution is arrived at. A lumber company up north carries 5X5 pressure treated lumber. This is the right dimension. They're 8' long though, so trimming will be required. Which requires a new tool. The new tool warms Capel's little heart. The project heats up.

The posts will be rooted in quick setting concrete mixed directly in the post-hole in 5 gallon buckets with the bottoms cut out, placed on a bed of gravel. There is measuring, measuring and measuring. The posts come home in the Volvo pick-up truck. Then the gravel. Then the concrete. Separate trips because the Volvo pick-up doesn't have much hauling capacity. What, you say Volvo doesn't make a pick-up? Right, then, that would have to be the Volvo convertible.  Convertible pick-up!

Holes are dug. Stakes are driven. The posts are stained to match the original fence panels. And, finally, after months of literally imperceptible progress, there are visible results to photograph ...

The new post holes are dug 8" to 12" in back of the original fence, at least 2' deep, with gravel poured into the bottom and a 5 gallon bucket with the bottom cut out situated on the floor of the hole.

The first post--one of the middle posts, not an end--is trimmed to height, placed in the hole, leveled and then a bag of concrete is poured in after it and mixed in the hole. It becomes immediately apparent that each hole will take more than one bag of concrete. Another bag is dumped on top of it with more water. And then the post is braced and left to set up for an hour. When set, the first fence panel is attached to it.

Now, the second post--this time an end post--is trimmed to height, placed, set in concrete and then leveled and braced, like so:

Measurements are retaken, stakes and string double-checked.

Then the third and fourth post holes are dug and the buckets set.

Last, as a final check, another fence panel is brought out and placed up against the middle post, to make sure the measurements are correct for the placement of the third post. 

This is where things break down a bit. Despite careful staking and measuring with string, the third and fourth post holes are too far apart and the fence panel will not meet the third post, unless the hole is moved.

At this particular moment it is about 95 degrees in the shade, midafternoon on a blazing sunny day, and Capel has been working since early morning. After not too much urging, he agrees to call it quits. There is much cheering about how unbelievably rock solid the first fence section is.