Driveway Maintenance

From frost to plow trucks, the winter season will heave and throw cobblestones. Hana and I took kinks out of stones while also weeding this customer's driveway. A little driveway maintenance goes a long way when it comes to an aesthetic drive leading to your home.

This week: trail maintenance

We trekked down into the woods with our tools in my backpack. I had brought the tamarack boards down (2x6x10') two weeks before with the four wheeler. Today Hana and I just nailed them in place.

Here, we made a wooden bridge for the brush hog. Its set perfectly to fit the wheels.

Oh, what good models we make!The same people who need work on their trails raise show dogs. This is the puppy area and I needed to put more stone in the bottom and put barriers up around the base so they couldn't get under the ramp.

Hana and I moved more than 3,000 pounds of stone! Phew!

This work tood us three man-days.

Franconia this week

One of my customers went on the WREN Garden Tour and saw something she liked: hastas planted around the trunks of trees. She asked me to create what she saw and this is what emerged:

I dug out a garden in the sod 3 feet in radius to the trunk and transplanted three types of hastas opposing each other in six places around the trunk. I then put mulch down that the customer had purchased.

The lovely thing about this garden is that it has a circular garden behind it in the lawn and a possible other circular garden around a tree just to the right of it. The landscaping ends up being just beautiful with all these matching circles. The second thing that I accomplished was an herb garden that outlined one side of the driveway. Its a beautiful spot, incorporating rocks into the plantings. Its a wonderful way to invite guests to your house, by having a beautiful garden that sends you to the house.

The customer purchased plants for me to put in. Various kinds of herbs like lavender, rosemary, chives and flowers such as creeping phlox. Again, I mulched it when through, the perfect touch.

This work took me 6 hours.

A Day on the Trails

I love gardening. Sometimes it's nice to do something on a little larger scale. So instead of planning for one garden, several hundred square feet, to plan acres of "garden" or a woodlot. When I work at this particular place I get to learn about forest/land management, in this case for wildlife. I also get to build boardwalks on trails! This gets me off my hands and knees for a few days and allows me to spend some solitary time in the woods (when Hana has a day off). When Hana and I make boardwalks together we life the bigger planks out across the streams and come up with fun tunes to sing while we do it. Today was a beautiful sunny day, one we haven't seen for a while. It was a particularly enjoyable time.

Here's the quad runner loaded up with the trailer and ten foot planks.

Here is the trail as it leads down to a section of 8 foot boardwalks. This is my favorite place in the trail system. There is something sort of mysterious about this particular place.Here, begin the boardwalks. I had begun to put them in last year and could not finish when I had to go back to school. I finished them today, making the boardwalks have different colors!

What a fun day! Thanks for visiting the blog!

This week in Bethleham

We had the pleasure of working in these beautiful gardens yesterday and today. We spent a lot of time dividing plants that had become overgrown, weeding, and uncovering the beautiful brick edge. I suggested that compost or mulch be added to the beds because competition for soil nutrients may have depleted the soils. This yard had another example of "forest gardens" that I worked with in Franconia several weeks ago. What a lovely design!Peonies, iris, and hasta:

Beautiful brick edge:

Hana poses, after a long day of work: Forest garden, with lily of the valley, hasta, and lungwort.

Here, birch logs were used as an edge to the forest garden. Wonderful!

Here, we uncovered a thriving blueberry patch amongst the ferns.

This work took Hana and I 12.5 hours.