This last weekend was a frenzy of yard work, we’re in the process of collecting plants for our yard and this last week got some stone cut for a rework of our front entry. Early on when we moved in, we put together some step stones for our front entry. These were big flat stones leftover from our gabions, but we were never really happy with them so recently we tracked down a place to get stone from, and had pieces cut to fit our entry. This solved a couple of issues that we were having with our first attempt - as much as we liked having something a little ragged it really was just a bit sloppy and didn’t fit with what we wanted for our house, and the soil and step levels were just off

More Plants

In addition to the front entry, we have gone on a plant buying spree. We have also been refining our plan for planting our yard which we intend on implementing over the next month as spring gets rolling. Our priorities sort of break down to creating edible landscape and native forest and making the two schemes work together with a little bit of overlap (hazelnuts, currant, gooseberry, huckleberry, strawberries). We ended up mostly with natives from Bosky Dell Natives this weekend, but have also put in an order for a pile of fruit from One Green World that will show up on their Portland PlantMobile on Saturday, with then a whole new set of natives coming our way on the 19th thanks to the East Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation District’s native plant sale. So anyways, new plants this last weekend:

• Gala Apple (mini)
• Blueberries
• Pacific Dogwood
• False Solomon’s Seal
• Douglas’ Meadowfoam
• Deer Fern
• Maidenhair Fern
• Idaho Fescue
• Cascade Penstemon
• Fringecup
• Inside Out Flower
• Streambank Lupine

Trees

Our Pacific Dogwood has been planned for a while, for months we were intending to put it out as a street tree in small rebellion of the city’s very limited selection of natives on street tree lists. Originally we had planted an Oregon White Oak, which for whatever reason never took and sat next to the street all summer as a bare little stick. Over the course of the season, we had somewhat changed our mind about the oak and had gone back and forth about the scale of what we wanted out there, for a while thinking that a dogwood would be the way to go, but always preferring something a bit more large and grand… So the dogwood is going between our back deck and the sidewalk, in a shady spot that it would probably prefer, with a Bigleaf Maple ($2 from the native plant sale) out on the street where the oak had originally been planted.