more fence

Here's another photo of the fence that Mark made. I'm not sure you can see it really well, but all of the hoops interlace with each other - one side goes in front of the adjoining hoop, and the other side goes behind the next hoop. The top and bottom horizontal pieces all have holes drilled into them that the hoops fit into. The original fencing was made pretty intricately, and he copied it exactly. There was cutting, bending, welding, grinding and drill pressing involved - and I think you can assume a fair amount of swearing!! It's about 42 inches tall, and each section is 7 feet long. He made enough sections to go from the garage to the side fence on the street side of our property and the entire width of the shoreline plus 2 gates - so a lot of steel involved!

Our house is 100 years old give or take a couple years, and our lot was filled so it's higher than the neighbors on both sides (basically our lot has a very gentle slope to the lake, and the lots on both sides of us have fairly steep hills with level areas at the lake). We have a retaining wall going down each side line to hold in the added dirt. There is very old fencing that was set in this cement retaining wall. We don't know exactly how old the fencing is, but I guess it could be argued that it may be the same age as the house - they could have added the fill at the time the house was built, and the fence is set into the retaining wall.

The above photo shows the detail of the top trim piece on this old fencing. The bottom shows the wire detail. It's rusted, old and gnarly, but it has so much character that we didn't think twice about putting it back up when we had to replace one of the retaining walls a few years ago.

Gee - in a future post, I'll give the "garden fence tutorial" - test later, so listen up!!!!!

is winter ending maybe??

IT'S NOT SNOWING!!!!! IT'S NOT IN THE TEENS, OR 20'S, OR EVEN 30'S!!!! Wow.
Mostly sunny - and the 7 day forecast shows a slight chance of rain Tuesday night, but otherwise partly cloudy to sunny - and rising temps - to the 60's. I'm thinking we deserve it! (And, yes, I am totally prepared to have a foot of snow drop on us just because I was brazen enough to write that forecast here!)

When the pooches and I just did our garden tour, we found many things sprouting up. But, they're all still so small that I would have to lay on the ground to really show them to you. The ground is extremely wet with snow and melting snow, so that's not gonna happen today.



Here's a photo of a species tulip by the side door. I planted 10 bulbs there, and last year 10 came up. Thinking that there are not 10 now. How pathetic is that going to look - one tulip blooming. May have to make a run for pansies.

Other growing things we saw: tulips, daffodils, scilla, hyacinths, chives, sedum, delphinium, peonies, geraniums, Jacob's ladder, phlox, bearded iris, daylilies, snake root (or bugbane or the new name they just gave it that I can never remember), rudbeckia. Probably others too, but that's all I can remember right now.


This is my little rusted metal bird house. Last year some wrens built a nest in it - but didn't use it. The holes are too big for a wren house, so kind of surprised they wasted the effort - a good decoy nest, I guess. I have 2 wren houses that they also built nests in last year, but don't have them out yet.




This is a photo of the lovely iron fence that Mark made. About 10 years ago, we found 3 sections of fencing like this that we paid an arm and a leg for at Architectural Antiques in Minneapolis. I used them in one garden as support for clematis etc. When we decided to do the big dog thing - and then 2 big dogs - we needed to add fencing on the street and across the lake. So he made sections using the old fence as a pattern - and then made similar but smaller ones for me to use around some of the gardens. I absolutely love it - and everyone who comes to the house comments on this cool fence. It's rusted iron also - I'm very into rusted iron!