When our guests arrived at our house last weekend, they were very impressed. Our house was clean, but even more noticeable was our new, tidy, perfectly cut yard.

Mom does the mowing.

My husband and kids helped me clean the bathrooms, vacuum, get the outside entertaining area picked up, yard work done, pool cleaned, and I did the de-cluttering (a job for mom). Oh, and probably unlike most households, I did the mowing. It’s always been an outside chore that I love. I do the mowing here! There’s something about the satisfaction of how something so ragged, within a few minutes, can look so sharp and clean!

Yeah. This is how we roll when we’re hosting a bigger event or dinner party in our home. Our preparation is intentional, and usually involves a little more detail when a larger group is coming, because we want our guests to feel comfortable and welcomed in our space.

The cordless mower.

In steps our new RYOBI 40V Brushless (cordless) Mower. The lightest, powerful mower – ever! (more…)

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Starting now, my husband and I start living and breathing “garden,” so I’m happy to share my spring garden update with you today!  Right now is the season to prepare, plan, and plant for the plentiful months ahead. And it’s a great time to get out there. The ground is soft (true, sometimes muddy) and the air is cool–the right time for turning, relocating and spreading soil.

A few tricks of the trade are posted here, because almost 9 years of cultivating raised beds in our backyard city lot in southern Oregon, hast turned our vegetable garden into more than we’ve dreamed of.

Why straw? (more…)

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Earlier this spring we partnered with Lowe’s Home Improvement on a new 8’ x 6’ Palram Metal Polycarbonate Greenhouse for the corner of our property, because we wanted to take our gardening to the next level.

My husband and I enjoy gardening, but he really is the master gardener. I think the earth–the living stuff of life, purpose, beauty, and love—the ground beneath his feet, centers and brings him back to nature and his walk with God. Even though you are tired, dirty, shoes full of mud, fingernails lined with dirt, you still come back to the fact that there is something that the garden teaches you about life.

We also find gardening pleasurable (when it’s not too hot outside), and for my RE readers here who get to enjoy the photos I share, our friends who come for dinner–all get to benefit from a beautiful yard. (more…)

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On a glorious afternoon, a patio becomes an appealing alternative to the living or family room – a place to read, sit and talk with friends, or lay down and take a nap. At least for our family, our large covered patio needs a good cleaning when the first warm days of spring hit the Rogue Valley. It’s rather large, dusty, and dirty from the drudge of winter. So we have a routine each year to clean off the patio in preparation for the fun to come!

This year Ryobi, one of the world’s largest and most innovative power tool manufacturers, sent us their Ryobi 3100-PSI 2.5-GPM Honda Engine Gas Pressure Washer, and their very latest-greatest, which just hit Home Depot this month, the 40V-X Expand-It Cordless Trimmer. This cordless trimmer produces gas-engine-like power. Making it even cooler is its compatibility with gas-engine attachments, such as a cultivator, which we already had and love. (Hubby cleaning off the back patio.) (more…)

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Every year in March and April we get a few weeks of beautiful weather in Oregon.

So this month marks the official start of a fresh gardening season in our backyard! Yeah!

My heart is so warm toward the purposeful stride of my husband as he works our humble garden raised beds, 16 beds now, on our city lot here in southern Oregon.

But before I get started, I want to share with you the easiest place to find the garden zone where you live! Gardeners need a way to compare their garden climates with the climate where a plant is known to grow well. That’s why climate zone maps were created. Zone maps are tools that show where various permanent landscape plants can adapt.

This is the most important aspect of gardening, and you must be acquainted with it before you read blogs and magazines, and you pine over those gorgeous garden pictures and posts! It’s a must that you know the details of your soil and weather, the critical climate information.

The USDA Hardiness Zone Map divides North America into 11 separate zones; each zone is 10°F warmer (or colder) in an average winter than the adjacent zone.

How to find your gardening zone

1. Go to the National Gardening Association website.

2. Plug in your zip code. Click GO.

3. You will find the zone you live in.

Once you get your gardening zones established, you can move forward with planting a garden!

We are a Zone 7B.

I can’t help but think back to 8 years ago when our yard looked like this. One of the first things we did, before we built our raised beds,  was build our own $5 Compost Bin which was made from FREE pallets from our local Grange Co-Op.

We also brought in amended organic Rogue Fine Compost from our local disposal and recycling company. If you live in my town, please look in to this. It’s tested and approved for organic gardening!

As soon as we start the planting process, WOW does our backyard garden area gets cluttered and dirty!

But by the end of the evening, we whip it back into shape. :)

It’s good to grow a good life

As I’m out working the beds with my husband (and it is a work out!), I think about the food we are growing, and then what comes next.

In due season, we’ll have harvest, preparation, dinner invites, and enjoy a simple farm-to-table meal in our backyard.

I love this picture with our friends, a backyard dinner party where we moved the table out by the garden beds!

It sounds so … romantic, in a way. Sometimes it is.:)

Especially when you capture the beds at dusk!

What we’ve recently planted

A few weeks ago we planted potatoes, moved the rows of raspberries, planted lettuce (Buttercrunch and a few other varieties), Brussels Sprouts, Red Russian Kale, Cilantro (Santo), and Sprouting Broccoli (Apollo). Remember my Superfood Salad Mix? We’ll soon be making our own!

Like I said, living in southern Oregon, our gardening zone is Zone 7B.

Because of Medford’s drier climate, it is prone to more severe cold snaps, usually getting below 20 degrees every winter, and most winters contain several weeks where the lows are in the 20s, which is normal from November through April.

Our newest gardening tool/attachment to help with soil

Because we’ve added new beds this year, we branched out and bought the Ryobi ZR15521 Expand-it Tiller Attachment to help with the process.

Wow. What a difference! Our new Ryobi is actually designed to break up soil that has already been worked, not hard soil. So in a way, it’s more of a cultivator.

Here in Medford we don’t have the best soil to grow vegetables in, so we’ve embarked on years of amending the soil in our yard. The Ryobi is a quick and effective way to do that and has shaved hours off of the time we’ve previously spent in the garden. The cost is around $80, but what a great investment.

What we like is that it creates a more pillow-y soil. Pillow-y soil is important because when it comes time to plant, you don’t even need any tools. Your hands become the tool because the soil is so soft and easy to work with.

It also makes for more attractive and enjoyable gardening.

The scoop on raspberries

This year we tried something different with our raspberries. We created rows of them instead of brambles.

If you want to grow a berry, start with raspberries. Short of creating an easy support structure, they are so easy to grow. They don’t get dirty, they’re off the ground, easy, SO flavorful. The ones that grow outside the row, we dig up and move by a fence line.

Add wire like we did, here.

Raspberries need a decent amount of sunshine, and they don’t require any special care or soil.

They need dirt, water, sun.

Sort of like a car needs gas, spark, air. (These are also raspberry plants climbing the fence out by the strawberry beds. More on these in another post.)

The scoop on strawberries

This year we built 2 beds on top of our strawberry patch. We wanted dimension to make the picking easier. Back in late February we planted the ever-bearing roots, and replanted “new” plugs., last year. I wrote a post about how to Add More Strawberry Roots to an Existing Bed, if you want to learn more about it.

Now we get to sit back and watch everything grow!

We welcome the southern Oregon rain. And of course we love the sunny days, too!

Do you know what zone your soil is? What early-Spring jobs/gardening have you been doing in your yard?

I’ve not been paid to review any brands or items in this post. As always, all opinions are my own.

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Hello, friends! I hope you had a lovely Easter weekend. The weather has been fantastic in southern Oregon, very springy, and we’ve gotten a jump-start on our yard and garden. (Garden post to come!)

Get fertilizer down before weeds pop up, is what my husband always tells me.

We aren’t lawn experts, but the first few weeks of nice sunshine in Oregon, we get the mower out and fertilize the lawns.

We try to save money and service/fix the mower ourselves. This year Paul replaced both wheels and got it going in no time. That’s one thing I love about the iPhone. You snap a quick photo of what you want to replace and take it to the store. It’s so easy to find replacement pieces/buy home improvement parts this way!

I’m the mower in the family, by the way. I don’t know what it is about that job, but I love it. Maybe it’s the satisfaction of a job complete, nice and neat, and looking great.

So every spring, after the “first mow,” we get the fertilizer down, using Scott’s Super Turf Builder.

Stomp on the bag to get rid of any clumps.

And hubby gets to work.

The goal for lawn fertilizer is to not kill weeds, but to prevent weeds in the first place.

I love the smell of a freshly mowed lawn. It truly reminds me of Spring and Summer.

And I associate the smell with people coming over to our backyard for a nice sit-down-dinner!

Oh, and see those 9 trees that line the back fence line? They are now gone. Gone! Our neighbors removed all of them last week. One morning we woke up and the tree service was there. (See the man in the tree?)

It took 2 days, but in the meantime, after our initial shock, we realized that we’ll have more sun for our 11 raised beds this year. And, the neighbors reported they are building a new fence. Yay!

Change is hard at first, but sometimes it brings great surprises! Stay tuned for a new look in our back yard …

Who mows and fertilizes the lawn in your family, and what month is usually your “first mow”?

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Our Japanese Arrow bamboo in the backyard will go crazy if we let it. It’s a running-type of bamboo, so if we don’t stay on top of thinning it out, and cutting it back several times a year, it will travel and become invasive.

We don’t want to be bad neighbors. Right? Right.

Since we’ve been working in the yard the past few weeks and, do I dare say it? Getting ready for “entertaining season,” our bamboo is over by patio where we dine. Here’s a picture from last summer. You can see it swaying in the background.

Back to yard work last week.

Hubby cut the bamboo way back.

I took the extra shoots, placed in a container, ready to enjoy on our back patio.

We added bamboo several years ago, and I’m pretty sure it came from Maya Gardens, INC up in Eugene, OR. Which, by the way, is only 2.5 hours from where we live.

Here are the facts about Pseudosasa japonica, otherwise known as Japanese Arrow Bamboo:

The Japanese Arrow is perhaps the most widely planted bamboo in the U.S. In its native range of Japan and South Korea, it is most likely to grow as an under story plant. Pseudosasa japonica leaves are almost 12″ long. Although it can take deep shade, here in Southern Oregon we easily grow it in full sun conditions. It can also be brought indoors as a house plant. It is hardy down to-10° F to 0° F. Its culms tend to branch out low to the ground, making it an excellent choice for low growing screens and hedge. The Japanese Arrow is a great choice for wind blocks. It can be planted in coastal seaside planting, as sea air has little effect on it.

Synonyms: Arundinaria japonica, Bambusa metake.
Height x Diameter: Ht. 18’x1”.
Minimum temperature: Hardy to 0° F.
USDA zone 7-10, find your zone here
Light: Part shade to full sun.
Culm: Green.
Uses: Container, wind break, hedge, screen, houseplant, crafts.
Distribution: South Japan and Korea.
Spread: Running.

Most people sigh when they see bamboo, and I take that to mean that they let it get out of control. But we love it.

Do you have any experience growing bamboo?

The post #GardenChat: Thinning out Japanese Arrow Bamboo appeared first on Reluctant Entertainer.

Good Happy Wednesday, Friends!

I love “over-the-hump” day, as we’re looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend ahead, hanging out with family and friends. I look forward to long weekends, dinner guests coming over, and also dinner invites to other homes! And there’s just something about Labor Day weekend that permeates a hint of “fall” in the air! (Mums on the front step!)

You may have wondered how we finalized our Lowe’s Courtyard Project, which we started a few weeks ago. Here’s the story of how I ended up partnering with Lowe’s, and then how we got started.

Today I’ll share how we wrapped it up with the finishing details. But we’ll start where we left off a few weeks ago.

-A new walkway

-3 new pots

-Painted trim on door and window

So a courtyard/walkway that once looked like this …

Which sat for 3 years …

Finally looks like this (at dusk) …

After the pavers went in, my husband built a step up into the courtyard entry.

We added a row of grasses that will eventually give us privacy, plus a new border.

-We brought our adirondack chairs from the backyard, to the front.

-Added a few red touches of pots and lanterns.

-Love the nighttime glow.

Here’s our new “green idea” that we saw in a magazine. We want to add creeping thyme between the pavers to add color, a softness, and it will make an attractive walkable surface that will still allow the rainwater to seep through.

Our goal is to add a trellis up one wall, a low-profile tall water feature on the other, possibly a bistro set, and maybe string party lights. We’ll add in more plants and really make the area pop, but that’s Phase II.

As I mentioned here, our experience working with Lowe’s was superb. I’m not sure if you’re aware of the new “My Lowe’s” program. You can sign up and manage your projects online. This time we ended up working with Sarah, in the Medford, Oregon store. She was so helpful and gave us top notch service! Very impressive.

So last night, we ended the evening with a late night snack, sitting out in the front of our house, enjoying the breeze of the warm summer’s night.

It was our first time to enjoy this “space” this way since we moved in 7 years prior.

We’re big on sticking with a budget and using what we have, so the next phase of our home improvement, of adding in new fountains, lights, more plants, a trellis, etc.– will be started a ways down the road.

But for now, we’re grateful for Lowe’s for partnering with us on this awesome project. And I bet our neighbors are thankful, too. :)

Do you have a home improvement that’s been waiting to get started, or completed, where Lowe’s could help you get organized with their “My Lowe’s” program?

(This post is sponsored by Lowes; but as always, all opinions are my own.)

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