Manolo for the Home

Raise your hand if you’ve had quite enough of winter, thankyouverymuch. If you’re not raising your hand I’ll have to assume it’s warm where you are, you’ve just gotten back from a long and warm vacation, or you can afford to keep your heat cranked all day and all night. None of these conditions apply to me and mine so I am ready for summertime to arrive, even if it means chilly (but not cold) blustery days and a glut of April showers before the truly warm weather shows up. Here are some pics of summery gardens that may help you last out the winter!

(photo by Randy Son of Robert)

(photo by epSos.de)

(photo by Fr Antunes)

(photo by Margaret Anne Clarke)

(photo by Crinklecrankle.com)

Lawn lovers who haven’t yet joined the landed gentry take heart! You, too, can care for and cry over your own little patch of green — or brown — like those of us who battle blight and bugs and the mysterious creeping death that comes a’calling every dang fall. Haffsteinn Juliusson’s Growing Ring lets you experience the trials and tribulations of lawn ownership in a tiny little take-it-with-you package.

Silver and soil, a little TLC, and some water are all it takes… a green thumb doesn’t hurt, though. And $179, which is how much your personal plot will cost you. Hey, it’s cheaper than real estate!

Walk around any town with more than a few triple-decker apartments long enough and you’re bound to see at least one or two faded armchairs or loveseats that have obviously been exposed to their fair share of rain, sun, and, here in Massachusetts’ North Shore, snow.

I personally have always maintained that there is indoor furniture and outdoor furniture, and never should they meet. No plastic chairs in the living room and no couches on the deck, in other words. Not everyone shares my opinion, however. Just out of curiosity, I thought I’d post a poll to find out just how many people do or don’t. Have at it, please:

Do note that so far as I can tell, this pretty upholstered plum settee from The Quill Pen was only let out of doors for a few moments for a unique furniture photo shoot. Otherwise it dwells inside where it is protected from the elements awaiting its forever home. If you’re interested, the price is listed at $850.

In one of my upstairs rooms, I keep what my wonderful old Opa calls a Wintergärten. Being that it’s upstairs and therefor both out of sight and out of mind, my little indoor garden is by necessity made up of plants that thrive without much help from me and mine. Oh, and did I mention that while my house gets all sorts of gorgeous southern light, the upstairs has no south-facing windows. When we choose plants, we can’t be too picky.

Succulents, as a result, are all we keep other than spider plants, which share a common trait with succulents in that they don’t mind much if you forget to water them or go away for a week or the sun doesn’t show itself for the entire month of July. According to Wikipedia, succulents, also known as fat plants because their water-retaining properties make them look positively chubby, have evolved all sorts of adaptations that make them perfect for the lazy gardener. They can be green or pink or some combination of orange, yellow, and red. Some succulents even look like stones!

Aren’t they gorgeous? Especially when grown in vintage tins and cups!

You can grow them yourself from seeds, or let someone else do the work for you. The succulents above in their darling little pots come from Etsy seller Monkeys Always Look, purveyor of both fine succulents and vintage housewares.

Thought you were done, eh? Not quite! When things get chilly, it’s time to put your garden to bed for the winter. What, you didn’t know that gardens hibernate just like squirrels and bears? I kid. Winterizing a garden is less about cleaning dead things up and more about prepping your flower beds and vegetable rows for the growing season that’s months and months (and months and months if you live where I do) away.

The specifics will vary by region and by preference, since when you winterize will likely be determined by your climate and what you like to plant in your garden, but there are certain rules anyone can follow when winterizing a garden. First, if you have a bit of yard to your name, don’t expect to be able to do everything in one day or even in one weekend. Schedule plenty of time so you don’t feel overwhelmed. Second, when you’re done dealing with the flora, remember to put things like planters and hoses in a shed or basement.

So what does winterizing a garden actually entail? Here’s a basic to-do list for those planning to put their gardens to bed in the near future.

• Pull weeds, dig up the roots of invasive plants, and pick up any debris like twigs, if you haven’t been doing these things regularly. Raking isn’t a bad idea, either. This gives you a blank slate to start with.
• Cut down the previous season’s annual plants, like flowers and veggies, then trim your perennials. If any of your perennials need to be divided, now’s the time to do so.
• Dig up any bulbs unlikely to survive the cold. Cannas, tuberous begonias, gladiolus, dahlias, and quite a few other summer-blooming bulbs cannot make it through the winter in USDA Zone 9 and colder. Then plant hardy spring-blooming bulbs.
• Prior to the first ground freeze, water and apply antidesiccants to any vulnerable evergreens.
• Apply a winter mulch to perennials, evergreens, and newly planted trees if you live somewhere where winter temperatures generally fall below minus 10 degrees F. These can also be covered in burlap to avoid common wintertime damage.
• If you have a vegetable garden, cover it with weighted lack plastic to discourage early weed growth or unwanted seeding in the springtime.
• Water all remaining plants and apply fertilizer as necessary, but consider that fertilizing later in the season can spark new growth that simply dies when temperatures drop.

Photo by Johan van Beuzekom

Many people look forward to summer’s end for it means a period of slower growing grass that doesn’t need frequent mowing and trees that won’t need to be pruned. Others look toward autumn as a time to plant cold-weather flora or to lay down the foundations of next summer’s garden. Me, I think of summer’s end as a time to let the last tomatoes rot in the vine while I hole up inside trying to adjust to the change in temperature, but I’m a weenie like that.

But if you’re the French botanist Patrick Blanc, you never stop looking for new opportunities to dig down into the dirt. Or upside down into the dirt. Or even sideways into the dirt like he must have done to create the recently completed facade for the Athenaeum hotel in London.

What is it, exactly? It’s an eight-story antigravity forest composed of 12,000 plants from 260 species and covering more than 15,000 square feet. Most are evergreen, but some of the plants are seasonal, and the placement of each piece of foliage was carefully planned to ensure that all the plants get just the right amount of sun.

Blanc uses a kind of techno-trellis as the underlying structure: A plastic-coated aluminum frame is fastened to the wall and covered with synthetic felt into which plant roots can burrow. A custom irrigation system keeps the felt moist with a fertilizer solution modeled after the rainwater that trickles through forest canopies.

Like the look of vertical gardens? Then DIY your own!

I will freely admit that if I lived on a corner lot, kids and grownups walking over my lawn to shorten their journeys by a few feet would drive me absolutely out of my mind. I am a stickler about grass even if I do find dandelions cheerful and see no problem with letting them do their thing in my lawn for a few months. Even if I subscribe to the values of the Food Not Lawns movement and grow squash and other produce in part of my front lawn. Even if I hate most yard work other than trimming the hedges. A brown streak in my lawn? No thank you!

But I might stop short of installing a corner fence if I didn’t already have some sort of fencing. A tiny little bit of fence just seems so odd and out of place, leaving me to wonder whether I’d rather deal with a funny fence or a path running through my lawn. Am I the only one who thinks that corner fences look just a bit weird?

I have a good but casual relationship with many of my neighbors, especially since having a baby. Nothing encourages crossing the street or popping around the fence more readily than a fresh-out-of-the-womb infant! We chat about the weather and gardening and the baby, of course. We wave hello if we are in our cars. We occasionally lend one another implements like wheel barrows, and once, my neighbor Paul even took pity on our snowblower-less butts and plowed our driveway! And yet, there’s a closeness lacking that might be nice to have. If I needed a cup of sugar, I’d drive to the Stop & Shop rather than knock on a neighbor’s door.

With that in mind, I was intrigued by a post over at The Simple Dollar that explained how one could set up a simple neighborhood cooperative.

Household equipment Why not share a lawnmower with your neighbor? How about a snowblower? One great model for this exists in our neighborhood, where one person owns a snowblower and provides fuel for it, but is not in good enough physical shape to operate it. Thus, one of her neighbors actually operates the snowblower, using it to blow the snow out of both driveways (and often doing a large swath of the block’s entire sidewalk as well).

Gardening If two or three neighbors all have gardens, why not specialize the gardens and freely share the produce? This allows one family to focus specifically on a crop or two, making garden maintenance easier for all of the people involved. You can even carry this to the level of canning and/or freezing, agreeing to swap prepared garden products with neighbors.

There are other ideas in the post, though I’m not sure how readily I’d leave my baby with a neighbor or share cooking duties on a weekly basis. I would like to get to know my neighbors, however, as previous to this, I’ve been living in apartments for years and years. This was in the cheapest possible sections of Brooklyn, so there was a lot more wall banging and language barriers than friendly interaction. Now I’m curious to know how well you are acquainted with your neighbors.

Ack! The apex of the holiday season is approaching fast! What would last-minute gift buyers do without Amazon’s 2-day shipping? My guess is show up shame-facedly at holiday gatherings where grab bags and white elephant games constitute the evening’s entertainment. When you know who you’re buying for, it makes sense to spend a little cash on holiday gifts, but when you’re anonymously wrapped package is going in a sack and may just end up in the hands of that guy from accounting who you cannot stand, why pay more than twenty bucks?

Here are six holiday gifts that won’t set you back more than two ten-spots.

As usual, click on the pics for more info. Remember, all is not lost. There is still time to buy holiday gifts for all the people on your list (loved and hated alike) without succumbing to the press of the crowd and the overwhelming atmosphere of the mega-mall.

Selling foreclosures has to be a pain. When The Beard and I were looking at houses, we saw a few foreclosures and all of them had been trashed. I’m not saying that every foreclosed homes everywhere has been given a nasty once over, but I will put forth that houses that sit empty long enough begin to look…well, empty. A house with a rock “lawn” or lots of shrubs may not lose all that much curb appear for lack of care, but lawns can drop dead pretty darned quickly.

Some banks trying to sell empty homes are apparently taking the easy way out when it comes to lawn care. Companies like the Greener Grass Company in California and Tate Turf Painting in South Carolina will paint a lawn green for about $200. The benefits, according to Tate, are multifold:

• Have a green lawn in hours, not weeks or months
• Less expensive than the overall costs of over seeding
• Environmentally safe, no harmful chemicals in our paint
• Lasts up to 3 months
• Protects the lawn from harsh winter temperatures
• No mowing during the winter
• No Spring Transition Period
• Prepares grass to “green up” on its own faster in Spring
• CONSISTENT GREEN THROUGHOUT ENTIRE LAWN!

Apparently, it won’t harm the individual blades of grass or the root system, and the paint itself is applies in such a way that sunlight can still reach each blade. It seems odd, but at the same time, is intriguing. A quarter of my lawn recently died mysteriously, and we’re not quite sure what to do about it.