Manscaping or uh...er...the "Manly Art of Gardening"

[Dan in Pasadena]

So I'm wondering if all you guys with the uber cool garages are also **** about your yards and gardening? I confess I am on the tiny plot of land I have around my SoCal house. It's modest, but I take pride in it.

You guys with 50x100 pole barns and the acreage that goes along with tht probably can't be but I am wondering and decided to ask.
Here are a few photos of my backyard space immediately adjacent to my garage. The 911 and the awning are gone but the car has been replaced by the '46 Chevy in my avatar and a taller awning is going in soon to protect my monster Lance 1181 camper and 4x4 dually crew cab truck. Its a lot crammed into a small space that many of you won't relate to but its SOP here in California for many of us.

These pictures are older now. Everything is more mature and greener. None of this hardscaping was there when we moved in 10 yrs ago. There were no sliding back doors, no shade arbor, patio or hot tub & deck. I knocked the wall out to install the sliding doors & side lights but they weren't entirely done in these pix.

This last photo has my beloved and now-departed best friend, Dudley the black Lab. He was very old in this picture, a shadow of his former self. Sooner (the blonde Lab) is now 6 yrs old and a wonderful dog.

Post your pix, I'd love to get ideas from you guys.

 

[markviii]

Very nice, Dan. It's apparent that you put a lot of time and effort in to everything.

Tom (BB767) is **** about his landscaping (and really everything he tackles). He got the landscaping bug early from his parents. They were real outdoor people, unlike me. They knew the names of everything they planted and my mother-in-law would get real exasperates with me when I couldn't remembers the names. Tom can envision and create what he envisions. Whether its the home, the shop or the future retirement home and acreage, he has a house and landscaping plan and will spare no $ until he gets it looking how he wants. He's got a good sense of design which I can only hope to develop a teensy bit of! We have different tastes in design, but his wins out in the end and always looks good. I just enjoy the finished product.

(see Restored 1930's Auto Shop thread for the landscaping pictures)

Chris

 

[Mustanger]

Nice back yard Dan. Think that would be too much work for me and might take me out of my garrage for too long. I am a mow weekly; fertilize twice a year; and trim the bushes in the fall. Anything else is too much work.

 

[Kiwi Kev]

I hate gardening. I do manage to keep the lawns mowed. Your place looks nice!

 

[Bib Overalls]

If you are really obsessive about your yard you would have a dichondra lawn. They were popular when I was a kid in San Gabriel. A real status symbol.

I wounder if anyone still does dichondra.

 

[N8]

There is a reason I chose to live in the desert - I have a black THUMB!
Plus I work 80+ hours a week. If it can't take care of it's self then I cant have it on my property..LOL

Your home looks like an oasis. Great job.

 

[Dan in Pasadena]

Thanks guys for the kind remarks. I actually love puttering around my garden because after awhile I realize I've been out there for hours and don't have the slightest idea what I've been thignking about...same thing in the garage. I ALMOST look at what I've been working on and wonder who did it?

"Dichondra"? Wow, I haven't seen a dichondra lawn since my parents had one when I was a kid. Mine's low class St. Augustine. I like it green & mowed but I'm not a slave to it.

No one else has my disease? Since my garage is back there I want the whole backyard to be my getaway.

 

[DIC]

Man that is nice but where do you pour your used motor oil? ....LOL just kidding...........

 

[Steve from Socal]

I would love a putting green lawn; I have my front yard down to dirt right now. New sprinklers, drip irrigation and drainage. I live in the hills on a cut pad and just a few inches under the surface it is clay. I am going to have 10~12 yards of top soil brought in and till the clay. Very few houses around here on cut lots have great lawns; between drainage, summer heat and water restrictions or, gophers the land here just *****! My back yard looks like a mine field from gophers, I kill em and flood the holes only to have more come around and take up residence!

And to make matters worse my dog ate every single peach off my tree last year, it is a dwarf tree. I am growing more edibles in the garden too, grapes, lemons, oranges, peaches, berrys and, peppers.

Steve

 

[ZRX61]

I have a very simple philosophy when it comes to gardening:

As soon as anything vaguely green appears I spray it with RoundUp.

I have an 80 x 310ft lot that contains 1 Elm tree, 2 cactii & a Joshua tree. EVERYTHING else gets sprayed.

 

[51rider]

Very nice & it clearly works for you as a space in which to relax so enjoy.

For me, unless it involves construction of some kind, I have a wife & mother-in-law for the garden

 

[Jpfreak33]

Very nice foliage!! I love to plant and maintain my garden and my trees. Yet I loathe cutting the grass and going around with the string trimmer.

 

[z28snksknr]

I enjoy gardening, it definately serves as another outlet for my OCD though and I get easily frustrated when it is not all "clean lines and orderly". My wife limits my time out there as a result.

 

[Dan in Pasadena]

Z18, I can relate to your OCD. First thing on my mental weekend list is edge, weed a little and mow. If I don't do my yards before I do other stuff it bugs the hell outta me...**** retentive, I know.

As for the guys that hate gardening I relate too. As a kid I HATED that my Dad was "on me" if i didn't cut the grass (by that time they'd given up on Dichondra), missed spots, etc. But when I got my 1st place & it was a mess of over 50 yr old ivy I took on re-doing it on a shoe-string budget. That's how I found out about St. Augustine cuttings and cheap *** (then, not now) Sulfate of Amonia fertilizer. I bought yard sale plants in tin cans for 50 cents or $1. My brother In law is a landscape architect; he laughed at me for buying these scraggly plants but helped by tellng me where to put them, how to bring them back. It started looking good, neighbors commented, and the lifetime hook was set.

 

[Bob Heine]

Like Southern California, gardening is a year-round effort in South Florida. I've been spending more time in the garage than the yard lately but I'm trying to get back to it. Planted a couple of maples in May.

I don't have a huge piece of property but for the center of the city it's big --about a half acre. I gave up the lawn mowing more than 20 years ago. I pay a crew to cut and edge the lawn and trim the hedges. If I lived in a condo I'd be paying for groundskeeping so this way I stay in the house and let someone else mow the lawn. The wife and I do the rest.

A few gardens in the front yard....

A few more in the back yard...

We start the palm trees on the patio and then plant them in the yard...

The retaining wall gave us a spot for some bananna trees and orchids...

Every once in a while you get to renovate the landscaping. Had this pile of renovation after hurricane Wilma in 2005...

Along with a little pool cleanup....

 

[Dan in Pasadena]

Alright Bob!
Finally someone else as ill as I am, ha...ha...

I tried having someone else mow my lawn freeing me up to do the stuff I like better. That was at a different house. What ended up happening was I never "got around" to doing the other stuff - planting annuals, pruning, fertilizing, etc. The house in these pictures is my post-divorce house so it is tiny compared to what I used to own

Bob, I envy your having all that space but I'm pretty glad I don't have to deal with hurricanes. Wow, that looks like a mess in your pool area. Do hurricanes/wind storms give you damage EVERY year? My only regualr problem is I am close enough to the foothills here in Pas that we usually get a night or two of frost that kills some of the tropical plants I prefer in my yard.

 

[Dan in Pasadena]

Man that is nice but where do you pour your used motor oil? ....LOL just kidding...........

This is funny because when I was a kid my Dad routinely had me use a post hole digger to dig a deep hole for draining motor oil. By today's standards, that yard is a hazardous waste dump! I wonder if the current owners have ever been digging in the yard and wondered what all the black dirt is from?

I' really like to see Tom's (BB767) yard. Maybe someone can tell him to drop us a few pix?

 

[bindernut]

Dan, your place looks like a resort! Very nice. And sorry to hear about your dog. My 2 year old beagle mix is laying on the floor behind my chair, she's my best friend! My fiance kidds me that i love Cub more than her, because I have her pic as the background on my phone, home and work computer.

 

[DaleK]

Got a bit of a garden.

My backyard.

Hayfield. Bald patches are where bedrock comes within a few inches of the surface.

Working in the garden.

Had a few thousand guests for a farm show a few years back. Building in the centre of the picture is in the process of being converted to a shop/storage.

Nice picture of the neighbourhood

From my front door

 

[DaleK]

Oh yeah, the "manscaping" threw me for a bit. You do realize that term is more often used for trimming something.... um... a little closer to home?

 

[s_ontario]

Like Dalek i garden a bit also from last year

 

[Dan in Pasadena]

Ha...ha...that's AWESOME. How many acres is that and what's it planted in?

By the way and before I forget: THANK YOU for farming and providing food for us all. The American farmer is waay to forgotten these days. Family farm? What's the history?

 

[DaleK]

Nice beans. I like the more conventional styled RJ Equipment grain wagons. My neighbour has one of the old A-frame ones where the whole front end pivots right under the bin and you're always looking over your shoulder expecting it to jacknife and tip over on you.

Dan we milk 50 cows, grow just under 1000 acres of corn, wheat, beans, barley and hay, and log about 240 acres of woodlot. Just me and Dad but he's getting pretty slow. Been on this farm since 1829, farmed about 10 miles south of here for about 50 years before that, before that we were Loyalists coming from Bedford, New York.

 

[Dan in Pasadena]

Dan, your place looks like a resort! Very nice. And sorry to hear about your dog. My 2 year old beagle mix is laying on the floor behind my chair, she's my best friend! My fiance kidds me that i love Cub more than her, because I have her pic as the background on my phone, home and work computer.

Bindernut - Thanks for the kind words. I take pride in my garden but it doesn't even rate a "postage stamp" title compare to Dale's and S Ontario's. I can't imagine owning that much land and even though I am sure it is back breaking work, how satisfying would it be to know you're raising such beautiful crops?

I love California; there are a lot of things to like about it but I have often thought that if I hadn't been born here I doubt I'd like it here. There is no such thing as "out of town", its perpetual sprawl and let's face it, L.A. is a reclaimed desert. I envy you guys those seas of green.

Dale - Yeah, I thought I was being clever using "manscaping" it the thread title. Now I feel like a jackass for using it especially with you guys posting pictures of that beautiful farm land. To be born into that lifestyle would b fantastic...to me. I know a lot of kids don't farm though their families always have but I think I'd love it. HUGE congrats to you guys. BTW, I didn't mean to leave you out of the first response its just that I saw it on my phone and hadn't seen your post because it was on the 1st page.

 

[bluesman2a]

Got a bit of a garden.

If you build it, they will come...

 

[markviii]

BB767 is off on his adventures with the camera, so I can't post another picture of the 5 acre facelift. On the Restored 1930's Auto Shop thread, you'll find plenty of before and after pictures of the reshaping of this property. I'll list a few posts of particular significance:
#1 - shows before/after of the front of the shop - you can see the vegetation
in the background
#163-pg.8 - an aerial photog from the 30s/40s note how "small" the property is
#449-pg.21 - SE corner of property and front of property pre clean-up
#1093-pg 55 - nature's pruning
#1142 - pg 58 - new plantings

It's a work in progress.

I'm also working (or trying to work) on our gardens at home. The waterfall pump failed last week, so a new one was in stalled yesterday. The gold fish were very unhappy for a week! I've gotten behind on pruning back stuff since I hurt my shoulder at the beginning of April. I hired two of my students to help me next week to tame the weeds. I'll try to get a picture of the very large dandelion before I dig it up. And the clover and grass is running rampant - very invasive if I don't keep up with it. The rain has been amazing in getting things growing and looking nice, but it's hard to keep up with the mowing/trimming along with all the other projects.

I'll try to post some pictures when Tom brings the camera home.

Chris

 

[Kevin54]

My wife has the green thumb but I love to work out in the yard. I actually like to mow the yard even though it will take me a few hours to do it. I think it is relaxing. I can grab a cold one, get on the tractor, and have my thoughts to myself without any of the daily interruptions that one normally has. Peace and quiet for a couple of hours except for the sound of the engine running.

It doesn't bother me to plant trees, trim trees, plant flowers, bushes, etc. Then to sit back and reap what you sewn. Peaceful atmosphere with various birds coming and going, watching bees and their habitat, even watching spiders and their way of doing things are all enjoyable to the wife and I.

I've got to get some updated pics as a couple of these are a couple of years old.

 

[Okie Pete]

Dalek and S ontario those a some major gardens.

 

[DaleK]

If you build it, they will come...

More like "if you plant it, they will come, tear out part of a row, plant their marijuana plants, and leave their styrofoam cups and watering cans for you to find when you combine in the fall"

 

[DaleK]

Guessing Kevin has a decent sized lawn mower.

 

[s_ontario]

More like "if you plant it, they will come, tear out part of a row, plant their marijuana plants, and leave their styrofoam cups and watering cans for you to find when you combine in the fall"

Very true found a band new longhandle shovel in the corn field last year , they must have been so excited with their harvest they forgot it or maybe they stole it also LOL

all i could think of was the damage i could have suffered if i didn't spot it in time

 

[Lippyp]

My wife is the gardener in our family, I just do the heaving and grunting stuff that she can't/won't do. The garden here is currently being brought back in line as it got a bit neglected when we had the twins three years ago.

Over at our holiday home in France we are constantly battling Ma Nature to keep it vaguely under control as we are not there that much across the year. 3 acres and everything grows like its on steroids. Thankfully our lovely neighbour is coming in to cut it all with his tractor this summer again.

This was before we had an access road

Just after the road was put in

Looking back up a year or so later

We will gradually get around to doing some landscaping, the wife wants a big pergola with seating /dining area underneath it, I want to build an outdoor firepit area where we can all sit around a nice fire on a cool evening and I fancy a pond down the bottom where we have a small stream come across the land.

 

[DaleK]

Very true found a band new longhandle shovel in the corn field last year , they must have been so excited with their harvest they forgot it or maybe they stole it also LOL

all i could think of was the damage i could have suffered if i didn't spot it in time

One year we counted how many grows we found when we were combining. Out of 450 acres of corn, there were 22 places we could say somebody had definitely been growing it. Few other possibles. Most of these places had trails running to the nearest house. One house had three different "gardens" and three different trails, near as I could figure there was one for the parents, one for the teenage son, and one for the teenage daughter.

Got a police officer friend who, just for kicks, will go out in my corn occasionally when he knows somebody's growing a small amount and take their watering cans and whatever tools they leave and put them by their mailboxes with his business card attached. He knows perfectly well the amounts are too small for him to ever bother prosecuting, but he enjoys himself.

 

[Dan in Pasadena]

He could spike their watering can with just a few ounces of RoundUp!

 

[DaleK]

That might cause somebody to have a nervous breakdown Dan. I know one lawncare company here once sprayed dollar signs on somebody's front lawn with Roundup once because they were getting stiffed on the bill.

 

[DaleK]

Looks relaxing to me Lippyp

 

[Bob Heine]

Alright Bob!
Finally someone else as ill as I am, ha...ha...

I tried having someone else mow my lawn freeing me up to do the stuff I like better. That was at a different house. What ended up happening was I never "got around" to doing the other stuff - planting annuals, pruning, fertilizing, etc. The house in these pictures is my post-divorce house so it is tiny compared to what I used to own

Bob, I envy your having all that space but I'm pretty glad I don't have to deal with hurricanes. Wow, that looks like a mess in your pool area. Do hurricanes/wind storms give you damage EVERY year? My only regualr problem is I am close enough to the foothills here in Pas that we usually get a night or two of frost that kills some of the tropical plants I prefer in my yard.

Dan,

Our first Florida home had a small yard and I mowed that lawn every week with an 18-inch reel mower with grass catcher. Lawn looked great but even my tiny yard took half a day, what with edging all the gardens and walkways and weedwhacking all the corners. Final step was to cut a circle around each sprinkler head with one of these:

Big break in the winter was only having to mow every other week. In 1989, when we left the country for a two year assignment in Australia, I had to hire someone to do the lawn. When I returned to Florida, the job turned into a 14-hour a day 7-day a week nightmare and I kept the lawn service. After 9 months of that schedule, I decided my free time was too valuable for mowing lawns.

A couple of years after retiring we found this house and just the thought of mowing this yard made me cringe. The mowing is the smallest part of the job. A thousand feet of edging, 200 feet of hedges, 65 sprinkler heads and blowing the cuttings off the walks and driveway. A five man crew gets it done in an hour and a half.

This is our pre-divorce house so it's as big as it's gonna get. She's put up with me for 48 years but you never know....

I spent time working on a farm in Vermont as a child. If I helped the foster kids that lived there, they got their chores done faster and we all could go swimming at the lake. I've worked on the lawn and gardens in every home we've owned. I got a great sense of accomplishment when the lawn in Poughkeepsie, NY was green and weed-free in the spring.

We moved to Florida in 1975 and the first major hurricane damage to our property was from Katrina in 2005. Katrina blew over one coconut palm and a large pine tree before she headed to New Orleans. Couple of months later Wilma came through and that's some of the damage in the pictures. I think

We hunker down for hurricanes every couple of years. Most do little damage, with extra leaves and branches being the most common aftermath. There's a mature ficus on the property line that tipped about 15 degrees toward our house in 1999 during hurricane Irene. It didn't fall over and it didn't do any damage -- it just reminds us to be prepared.

Here's a picture of the backyard, with the pine tree and ficus (everything green behind the pine) taken in December 2004.

We had the ficus drastically pruned on a weekend (when the tree police aren't working) in the spring of 2005. They removed three dumptrucks full of shredded leaves and branches (and half a load of logs too big for the shredder). It was one of the few ficus still standing in our neighborhood.

Hurricanes are bad but at least the ground down here stays in one place.

 

[Indy_500]

I'm 15 and i do all of the "manscaping" at my house. I won't let any of my family members (mom, dad, sister) touch the lawnmowers (my lawnmowers, no seriously). My dad hasn't mowed our lawn in about 4-5 years. I'm so picky about the yard, that i think i'm the only one that can do it right. I fertilize quite often (well i don't buy that but i'm the one that makes it look pretty) i've fertilized the lawn 3 times this spring already. I'm not allowed to water it since we have town-water and it costs a ton, all of our neighbors have wells. But with all of this rain, my yard has been looking good. I got a push mower for my 5th birthday and have been mowing ever since. I live next to a school and mow some of it because i like to mow that much. I'm willing to mow for free. I pull all of the weeds out of the lawn, and the stone around the house. I trim all the shrubs around the house too. My yard is a little over a 1/2 acre i think? maybe around 3/4 of an acre? idk. maybe i'll post a pic of my beautiful lawn tomorrow, or maybe after i mow it again since i waited a day too long to mow it and theres more grass clippings showing than i'd like lol. Tomorrow i gotta mow a persons yard down the road from me since they r on vacation. I'm gonna hook up our lil utility trailer to my John deere, plop a couple push mowers in there and my weed-eater (i have 6 push mowers, i'll decide which ones best for the lawn) perhaps i'll bag it since the person waits too long between mows. And, i'm going to switch up the mowing pattern since he's mowed it the same for the past 10 years (same mowing pattern=not good for grass)


Yes, i know i'm a freak. I wish i was allowed to make our garage look as good as the lawn. My mom keeps saying it's fine. But if you give it one good look, obviously it's not lol

 

[lupinsea]

I like gardening. . . . but hate mowing the lawn.

Perhaps hate is too strong a word but doing the lawn has always been a chore. First when I was a kid and now again that I'm a home owner. I can't wait until my son is old enough to start mowing the lawn.

Anyways, shortly after we moved in we ripped up out lawn and put in some "eco-lawn" which was a mixture of slow growing dwarf grasses and small flowering perienial plants. It was supposed to take 75% less water and 75% less mowing. And in between mowings (about once a months or so) you'd get a field of flowers that would spring up. It looked great but I didn't get all the old lawn out and patches have been creeping back. Now it's a mixed turf. I still like it but would have much preferred a straight eco-lawn mix. I might re-seed in the next year or two.

My problem, however, is that last year and this year I've had some major projects so the yard has largely been neglected. Looking forward to project settlign down and being able to start refocusing on the yard. However, it's a bit of a struggle with my wife. She couldn't care less apart from wanting a plain old grass lawn. I can't stand the lawns and want a garden.

My goal is to rip up and replace as much of the lawn as I can get away with. So far so good. 1/3 to 1/2 the front yard is now a garden. And I just got rid of another 400 sq ft by extending the back patio. And there is probably another couple hundred square feet being eaten up by the new shed building.

It's great, it's that much less lawn to mow.



Some of my yard projects:


Retaining Wall and Patio Expansion

Last summer I built a retaining wall out of left over concrete. This matches the one in our
front yard. The effort was to creat a flat spot to expand our back patio into.

The wall was finished last summer but I had to wait to this year to pour the patio slabs.

Everything is still rough and "in process" but the patio slab is now poured. Looking forward
to cleaning up the site and doing final grading and planting. Might have to wait a few
weeks for a break in the shed project.









Front Yard To Garden Conversion + Freestanding Wall

When we moved in the front yard was just a lawn. So later that fall I started two project,
one to build a free-standing rubble retaining wall, and two, start planting the garden. Here
I'm starting to tear up some of the grass and build the wall. You can see a pile of top soil
in the background for the trees I transplanted from my aunt's acreage.

Building up the wall some more. Still have lots of lawn, too much lawn.

Now less lawn and some more wall.

Most of the vinca is getting well established in the front garden area. The back area you
can see where we tore up the lawn to plant the eco-lawn seed mix.

The wall has topped out and now I'm eating up more lawn.

It took about 1-1.5 full years for the landscaping to settle in pretty good.

Planting beds had filled out nicely. Yay, less lawn.

Setting up landscape lighting in the front garden.










Eco-Lawn

We purposefully killed out lawn and rototilled it, all 7000 sf of it.

Silly me, I thought rototilling would be enough to break up the old sod. No. Hand racking 7,000 sf of dead sod was not fun.

By late fall some of the eco-lawn seedling mix started to sprout and the fall rains kept everything nicely watered.

Eco-lawn in the front yard just before mowing.

Coming in with flowers.

 

[Kevin54]

That reminds me of what a detective friend was telling me one day (he is on a drug task force) They were in a helicopter searching for "pot" in the corn fields, when they came up on a very significant patch. The only thing was, the pot planters, planted their goods in a soybean field. Evidently when they watched the tractor planting, the guys planting their goods didn't have enough sense to check whether it was corn or beans going in. City Kids !!!!