Garden of the Day: Center Slope Evolution
[nggallery id=”22301″ template=galleryview] The garden submissions keep rolling in…We’ve had our Center Slope brownstone for twelve years. When we bought it, the back yard (15′ by 25′) had a deck built, but little landscaping. A friend recommended that we use her boyfriend as a gardening consultant. He built raised beds for us and planted some…
[nggallery id=”22301″ template=galleryview]
The garden submissions keep rolling in…We’ve had our Center Slope brownstone for twelve years. When we bought it, the back yard (15′ by 25′) had a deck built, but little landscaping. A friend recommended that we use her boyfriend as a gardening consultant. He built raised beds for us and planted some ornamental grass, hostas and a hydrangea. In the years since, we added central air conditioning, requiring some of the deck space be used for the A/C compressor unit. We’ve learned that ornamental grasses take over raised beds like a cancer, so we removed most of it. We purchased some terraced display stands from a gardening catalog, allowing us to add about two dozen terra cotta pots of various sizes. Some larger pots are being used for roses.
As of today, the hydrangea is flowering nicely, daylilies are opening, more each day, the coreopsis is just past its first bloom, the three dozen or so geraniums provide a nice amount of red, tomato plants have flowered, we’re pinching off some basil each day. A variety of other annuals (stock, snapdragons, etc.) are providing more color and cuttings for the kitchen table.
In the future, I’d like to add a fountain or goldfish pond.
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You need to be careful about contacting poison ivy with all those plants. You especially need to take care that your guests don’t catch it
Squirrels generally don’t go for certain bulbs like daffodils. I’ve had good luck with frittilaria, squill, hyacinthoides, chinodoxia, and allium too. But they LOVE tulips & crocuses — yumyumyum
Love love love it!
I am 1:49 guest.
My understanding is your are OK until you start big renovation which requires DOB filing and DOB inspection. At this point you might have a problem with inspection if you have wood deck ( or whatever else is not up to code). Deck is a serious issue ( I was told ).
The NYC fire code is pretty heavy-handed about wood decks adjacent to combustible stuff like a wood fence. My neighbors are one of probably a handful of people in Brooklyn who went through the permit process for their new deck. It required a concrete block firewall (and $22k).
When I bought my house it had a steel deck. I thought about replacing it but it’s practically maintenance-free and will last a hundred years so long as I roll on a coat of Rustoleum every five years. OTOH, it’s dangerously slippery when things get icy and in the summer it expands with a *boom* after the sun hits it for a few minutes.
Can you plug your gardening consultant here? The work he did is lovely. I have a nice garden, but a brown thumb and no knowledge of what’s a weed and what isn’t. A good consultant would be much appreciated!
Thanks for the positive feedback.
Our garden faces south and gets about six hours of sun each day. I think it did better this year because a neighbor cut down several large limbs from her tree, giving us more sun than we had in the past.
I really can’t comment on the role of air circulation. We had dinner out back last evening and there seemed to be a bit of a breeze at times.
DOB-code compliant? Don’t give me nightmares.
Our biggest challenges are vine-like weeds that must be cut back almost daily and squirrels.
In fact, our block seems to be the home for a squirrel who loves spring bulbs. I must have planted three dozen daffys, tulips, hyacinths, etc. Perhaps ten bloomed this year. Would love to hear how other gardeners deal with the squirrel issue.
we are in the process of removing wood deck that covers our backyard because it is not up to DOB code.
Our deck is the same distance from our house and from both neighbours as yours and we were told that it will never pass DOB inspection.
Nice garden.