Last thing I remember was hunting wildflowers back in April. Hard to believe it’s the end of May and I haven’t been back. Busy, busy, busy. Oh, I shouldn’t forget extremely sore and tired too. The Long Island garden is finally underway. Looking back to March 2010 you can see the beginning of the destruction that lead to 6 years of gardening being wiped out.

To see more, check this out – Holey Moley

April 2012, time to start over. This is one of the few times I have taken ‘before’ photos. I really don’t like seeing them, they make anything ‘after’ look better.

The new house is beautiful but needs something besides the ‘contractors just left’ look.

The future secret garden. A fence will block the view to the area at the end of the house where the master bedroom is.

Doing an about face, the view looks towards the street. There’s gong to be one long narrow flower bed running along the property line. Over time it will gain more depth. Right now I have to limit the size of the planting areas. Even limited space is going to require 1000′s of perennials.

The old straight driveway is gone, replaced by a curved drive that leads to a large parking area. Yet to be finished, it will be done in crushed stone.

I couldn’t help myself. All the owner needed to say was he wanted to see a striking display as he drove in. There’s going to be one massive flower bed right off the bat.

Big plans turn into a hard-pan nightmare. Two full days of roto-tilling clay ‘concrete’ got me down about 3 inches. I wanted 6 but even with a rear tine self-propelled tiller I got pretty beat up. The tiller bucked and bounced more than a rodeo bull.

20 yards of ‘manufactured’ compost added another 3 – 4 inches of depth to the bed and made tilling much easier. The ‘topsoil’ is now mostly ‘compost’.

It comes as no surprise. Dig a hole in compacted clay and you end up with a pond after a heavy rain. Add loose clay and compost and the down slope section of the bed becomes soup. A thick pea soup like mess stopped my planting activities. I’ve changed my plans for the area not yet planted. There’s going to be a pond at the point instead of a huge boulder and Astilbes will be replace with Yellow Flag and Japanese Iris along with some Ligularia.

I said it was big. There’s already over 600 perennials in the bed. Astilbes make up a major portion in order to get one big mass of color. Other perennials are Bee Balm, Black Eyed Susans, Bug Bane, Joe Pye Weed, Ligularia, Siberian Iris, Sweet Woodruff, purple leaf Coral Bells and I’m sure there’s something else I forgot.

I did start planting the narrow flower beds around the perimeter of the property. I’ll get back to those later but here’s one quick view of a small section that’s adjacent to the secret garden area. The small lawn cutout is my sitting area. Behind the chair are 3 blueberries. What was I thinking when I told the kids what they were? Now I’ll have to see just who gets to them first.

This was pretty much the view in mid May. I came home for a week to plant a shrubbery then returned for another week to do some more planting. So far there’s over 1000 perennials in the ground. It’s a good start.

So if you were wondering what happened to me, now you know. I’ve been playing.

Nothing beats a small waterfalls and a shallow rock littered pool to attract dirty birds.

This waterfalls is part of the project I helped with to obtain my latest Rock Ranger. When I went back to take some photos I caught a pair of Grackles taking a bath. First the male flew in.

Grackle – Quiscalus quiscula

Then a female joined him.

The male ‘showered’ and left quickly while the female stayed behind to freshen up a bit more.

Let me zoom in for a closer look at the bathing beauty

She dove in and with one last flurry put on the finishing touchs.

grACKle

Now you know where the title of this post came from.

This waterfalls was part of the job I helped with to obtain my latest Rock Ranger. All I really needed to do was to set the sandstone slabs for the patio. The contracted landscaper (EarthWorks) had laid out the general outline, excavated the area and provided a strong back to lug the slabs to me. The strong back proved to be more than capable and I let him finish the work once I had setting done. He did a good job of filling in the holes.

The BFR in the foreground is one of the little finishing touchs I added.

Stepping back from the waterfalls the stream comes into view. Just to mention – the waaterfalls and stream are fed by a solar pond pump. It doesn’t flow at night or on cloudy days (about 4 hours on battery pack) but it sure beats paying the eletric company.

Stepping back even farther the pond comes into view.

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I was feeling a bit grACKlish myself lately. I had a bout with Diverticulitis and nearly lost. I’m feeling much better now but no where near normal. After 8 days of a clear liquid diet I admit I’m still a bit fuzzy headed and weak as a dead kitten. Just writting this post has exhausted me. Time to sign off and take a nap

The original plan was to make this boulder into a disappearing fountain. I had to put a plug in that idea and turn it into a bird bath instead.

I cleaned up and defined a path to the bulkhead using moss covered rocks and crushed stone. Once the rest of the area was mulched it became obvious that some kind of focal point was needed. Nothing wanted to grow under the hemlock tree in the full shade so I figured it was time for a BFR*. The home owner thought of a bird bath. I hammered out a compromise.

Using a rotary hammer drill I drilled a circle of holes and used a chisel to chip out a rough hole about 4 inches deep, just enough to allow me to use the 18 inch bit to drill a hole through the boulder. (it was going to be a fountain) Getting the rough hole was the easy part and only took minutes using the hammer drill. The boulder sat in my yard for a couple months before I got back to it.

I finished the basin with a 3 lb. hammer. I pounded on that rock for about 4 hours.

I was happy with the results.

It does look better wet.

I’ll be making some more of these.

*BFR – Big Freaking Rock