Shall We Introduce Ourselves? -Part 2

sciurus,
I so hope things improve for you!!! Sorry you're having to go through all these challenges!!
Chantell

Wow! You sure will have to be strong to get through this! I'm sure I'd be in tears.
Do let us know how the new leach field installation goes. Perhaps you can get
that stupid contractor to repair the terrain? I'm sure you won't be able to get him
to pay for all the damage to your trees & perennals but he should return the
property its previous topography!

Tam

Hello all,

Taking a break from the heat to browse DG when I found this group so let me introduce myself. I live and garden in Mineral Virginia which is that little cold section on the USDA zone map. If you travel 20 to 30 miles in any direction you manage to go from zone 6 to 7.

I teach so have the summer for gardening. We are going back early this year so the major project needs to be finished by the end of July. I am building a new retaining wall for a flowerbed.

I am lucky to have been able to buy the town lots behind my house which are wooded. I discovered a patch a lady slippers this spring.

Jim

Jim,
Nice photo - you oughta check out the photo forum!! Welcome aboard...I'm a bit north of you in Stafford but have been down your way a few times. Nice country down there!!
Chantell

Hi there, again!

Thanks for the welcome. We are now officially in the area, and we've put a deposit down on an apartment! Considering the horrendous problem with what was supposed to be our corporate housing, we are in very good shape.

My one requirement for our apartment was that it have a balcony or porch, and enough light to grow my babies inside and out. I think I got my wish!

I'll be posting more once we get settled in next week!

Eva

Hi there!---I was encouraged to introduce myself by our fellowmember, Hart. I live in Front Royal, VA, in the old part of town. Some people call this area the Bottoms. We are not far from Happy Creek and the ground is still soaking wet in our yard from the rains. This is my first house and first garden. The house came with many peony plants and old roses. It also has a tree variety of honeysuckle and a pretty magnificent tamarisk tree. The house is old and in bad shape...gosh darn it I got bewitched by all the old plants that were here in the yard! So we are feezing our butts off in the winter, but loving all the flowers in the spring. I live here with my husband, who is only into gardening for the food factor. He is a bit depressed about the drowned tomatoes, beans , and peppers. I am just experiencing empty nest syndrome part 2. You know where they leave, then come back, and then leave again? So much time is spent in the garden. I'm working with a landscaper in Rappahannock county for my full time job. This is another first for me. The work is gruellingly hard---but the pay off is much knowledge gained!Honestly don't know if I can do another season, the soil in Rappahannock is all red clay and rocks. My flower garden is a very mixed bag. I'm going for perennials and self sowers, with a few annuals thrown in. Very informal. Also put in a good sized herb garden and vegetable garden. I'm excited! I'm originally from Illinois where corn is king, then moved out to Oregon as a teen( where my mom is a gardening fanatic on the coast), now I'm here in the Blue Ridge Mntns, after many years in the DC area. Everything grows here! It's great!Looking foward to swapping stories and tips.

stripetail...welcome aboard...and friend of hart's is most definately a friend of ours!!! A honeysuckle bush? Ah....something else to add to "THE list"...LOL

I get blamed for everything around here! LOL

Stripetail, you'll have to come to the plant swap at Jenn's next month. Tell your hubby she had heirloom tomato plants at the last swap. And you can load up on perennials.

Get yourself over to Home Depot and get you a woodstove or a woodstove insert for your fireplace if you have one. You can cut a few truckloads of wood in the national forest for $20. There are also people who sell cords of firewood for a lot less than you pay in the DC area. You'll be sooooo warm and toasty.

Hey, keep me posted about the plant swap! That sounds like fun. I am defenitely going to be considering the woodstove. I just have a kind of paranoia....but everyone says if it is intalled properly the house won't burn down. Thanks for the welcome everyone!

Ah hart...all done in love...all done in love...LOL

We've done all our heating here with a woodstove and a pellet stove for 10 years. No problems at all. Of course you have to be reasonably sensible and get your chimney cleaned every now and then. (If you're not afraid of heights you can do it yourself. Ramseys sells the brushes for around $20.) If you have a fireplace, be sure to check out the inserts.

What's nice about the woodstove is that even in a power outage, we have plenty of heat. The pellet stove depends on electricity to run the fan and the device that feeds the pellets into the stove. Also, the price of pellets does go up. But we heat our house, and it's not a small house, for about $300-$400 a year.

Aww, Chantell. I heart you all too. LOL

Eve, I forgot to tell you I hope you get settled in soon and glad you have a sunny spot for your babies. You should come to the swap too. It's a very nice drive in the country.

We are defenitely going to go for the woodstove. I am amazed that you heated your house the whole winter for that little $$ ! Is Home Depot the best place to shop for one? I want to get a professional to do the installation, check out the chimney etc..we have and old oil furnace that vents into the chimney. we only have one vent in the whole house, a huge grate between the living room and dining room. Then we have to run two full size fans to blow it out of the dining room and into the rest of the house. The dining room literally cooks if we don't blow the heat out. It is just too stupid for words. But the garden is great! Has anyone else ever wished they lived in a yurt?

Hi there........ Seems that most of you are in the same area, mine..... cool. I'm on the Shenandoah River across from Charles Town WV. Been here on an acre for about seven years. Yep, everything grows here and the deer eat it all... except the poison ivy... why won't they eat that? I grow my veggies in big pots on the deck and I run around after every rain spraying stinky stuff on everything else. Just got a paint ball gun to go after the deer with.... so, if you should see a deer with a pink butt.... that would be my fault. I had to put a portable electric fence up to keep the neighborhood dog out of my little pond.. gotta cool off on those hot days and too lazy to go down to the river. Really tore up the plants in the pond, took me awhile to figure out what was doing it. At first I though coon but after three weeks of trying to trap whatever was trashing it, I finally saw the bad doggie. Now I just have to be really careful when I need to get in there to weed or whatever..... course, if I wasn't so lazy, I could turn off the electric fence. Lazy dog, lazy person... oh well.

Woodstove....... that was the first thing I got when I moved up here to my paradise in the woods.... got the Home Depot one first.. just didn't do the job...... I'd recommed going to a woodstove store... there's a great one in Purcellville Va, although I'm sure there's one closer to you, and do get a pro to install it and check out the chimney. You're going to pay a lot more but I felt that it was well worth it. My son cleans my chimney every year but when I first bought the house, I had the pro check it out... the lining was cracked, I had him put a stainless steel liner in.... won't have to worry about that ever again.

You probably should shop around. My pellet stove came from Home Depot about 8 years ago and I couldn't be happier with it. I've found most of the woodstove stores are extremely expensive. There are some in the area including Winchester and the hardware store in Stephens City. I certainly wouldn't drive all the way to Purcellville. LOL

BTW, you can also direct vent a pellet stove out a wall without having to have a chimney. And they can go real close to the wall so don't take up as much room as a woodstove.

The heating cost was for pellets, doesn't include the electricity for the stove but that's probably about $30 a month max. We get all our firewood for free. It would be more if we did all our heating with the pellet stove.

You'll find the wood and pellets are a warmer heat than oil. I know, that doesn't make sense but the house is a lot warmer with either than it was with the oil furnace.

That is helping me alot to know all this stuff. I'll probably check out Home Depot first. Any thoughts on buying a used wood stove? I've seen quite a few listed in the Valley Trader.

I started to suggest that. For a woodstove, I think that's fine. I'd be a little more concerned about a pellet stove. Just be sure to check it out very closely. If the firebricks are cracked, they can be replaced. And definitely buy new stovepipe and gaskets for it.

Do you ever go to Manassas? Rice's in the old Manassas Shopping Center on Mathis Ave. carries a lot of stove accessories such as replacement bricks. They carry a lot of stoves too. I think it's actually called JD Rice's. We always called it Jimmy Rice's.

There's a great website with information on all the different kinds of stoves, comparisons, how to install and so on at www.hearth.com

Thanks a bunch. I'll be researching this.

hart,
Gosh, Rice's has been there since the Civil War at least...LOL I didn't realize they were open still. :)

I think Jimmy opened that store after WWII. I know it's been there since the shopping center was built and that was in the 1950s. Jimmy died a couple of years ago but I think his children run it now.

Geez...I didn't realize they'd been there THAT long...wow!! I didn't move to Manassas until 78'...so many things have changed. Good and bad unfortunately. Glad his kids are running it still!

Hello fellow sufferers from humidity,

We are still in the throes of post-new-septic-system recovery. The field of mud that was our back yard is still a field of mud but at least the contractor finally filled in the bigger holes and made some rough attempt to grade. The bad news is that they disrupted the normal drainage pattern on what is a steep slope and now all the run-off goes right onto the patio and pools there.

Installation of a new 90-foot drain field destroyed what was left after the intial tank installation. Trucks drove through the front and side yard with gravel, spilling as they went. The back yard, part of our woods, and the other side yard were already gone. We are faced with replacing everything for 20 feet on three sides of our house and a very large area behind the house that extends a good 100 feet into the woods. Grading of this area is rough, to say the least, and it's complicated by being extremely shady and on a steep slope.

We are currently trying to find a contractor who will grade, apply topsoil, seed, and mulch approximately 9000 sq. feet. Landscape companies that I've called tell me they don't do this type of heavy work or they don't come this far south. We have some local boys who just want to grade it flat, slap down some lime, and seed it with the standard grass blend that the local Southern States dealer has in stock. That's a rye blend that will not do well in shade.

I am not in favor of grassing all this area and would like to use this disaster to establish plantings that are suited for our environment and that will help direct the flow of run-off from the top of our property to the woods below it. Even before the septic disaster, we had a severe erosion problem and no topsoil to speak of. I have absolutely no clue how or who to consult to make sure we get the drainage right and to help draw up an overall plan. Meantime, if we get a lot of rain, the migration of all this raw dirt into the stream that borders the lower half of the property is going to be frightening. It's downright depressing to even think about.

I'm all ears if anyone can recommend a good landscape designer or a reputable nursery that offers design services who will work in Calvert County. The most prominent local nursery tends to have limited and, at times, not so healthy stock and their prices are excessive. Mst of Calvert County shops for garden supplies at Wal-Mart, I think.

I'd start a new thread if I knew where to place it. "Starting from Scratch in the Swamp" maybe.

Sciurius, if you're having drainage problems, you'd probably be a lot better off to hire a good landscape architect. At least someone with more knowledge about those issues than a nursery or local guys with a bulldozer.

Thanks. That's the way I'm thinking. Better to spend the money now that to spend it later, and a lot more of it, fixing yet another disaster.

Hi. I found DG's some time ago but then had an extremely busy couple of months...but I am finally moved into my new house near Leesburg, Virginia. We've got 5 acres, and an extremely OLD house. : ) I smiled reading stripetail's description of Rappahannock County. I lived in Sperryville for a long time and I know how hard the soil is...but trust me, Rappahannock is peaches and cream when you go a county south...in Culpeper you can hit the ground with an ax and if it's rained, the ax gets stuck in there for ever. If it hasn't rained, the ax bounces back up and whacks you in the head. : D

My new house...the owners did some weird things here. I first saw it in the spring before anything was up, and I was really hopeful, but now it's July and the place is a pit. I'll be pumping you all for ideas and suggestions, cause I am the black thumb of death, sadly.

Welcome Luna!!! Ask and it shall be given....lots of folks here with all kinds of knowledge...sounds beautiful where your home is located!!!

You live on the mountain, lunababy?

I wouldn't call the soil here hard but it's so rocky you can't get a shovel in it in a lot of places. We dug the holes for our water gardens using a digging pole, pressure hammer and pressure washer.

Hi Luna, Welcome! Can you post some pictures?

Maybe on a new thread, you could call it "Helping Luna-baby out" LOL

Are you finding any plants there that you like? Is it just a jungle? More information, please.

Chris

I have some pics of the house, but not of the garden/land yet.

Here's the house, which is mostly interior shots, sorry. : ) http://home.comcast.net/~paxamicus/newhouse.html


I do like a few things...since the time we bought the house (April) till now, the stream bank turnt up to be nothing but huge, HUGE ferns.

There is a very nice little pond, complete with 5-6 giant carp(?), turtles, and frogs. You can see the huge forsythia bush along one bank. Oddly, they took half the bush down. Just half. I don't know why.

At the moment I am still living out of boxes and I can't find the box that contains the hotwire for my cameracomputer. As soon as I do I will be taking close ups of a few things I can't identify.

I'm in Loudoun County, about as far north as you get before it turns into Maryland/West Virginia. I did live in Rappahannock in a sweet little hosue that backed up to the Shenandoah National Forest, but then I got married and my husband objected to driving three hours to work and three hours back, the odd little man. ; ) From here he can hop on the MARC.

Gorgeous house, Luna! Thanks for sharing your pictures.

I'm sorry, I missed the part when you said about digging your water gardens, hart.

This is the first place I've lived where there's been a pond. I'm working on the assumption that it's healthy, because there are peepers, crawdads and turtles, and a bunch of *really* big gold fish. (I know, they are probably koi or carp or something, but for now I'm working under the *really REALLY big gold fish* theory.

I saw a heron there three days in a row.

Although I was disinclined to muck about with the status quo very much, but I also didn't want him to eat the fish, although a quick, non-educated guess tells me he'd need at least three buddies to help him pick one of these fish up! So I didn't do anything, and now he is gone but the fish are still here.

Luna, Thanks for sharing the pics of your home. I love the red in the kitchen!

Oh goody a pond ! I have a small water garden that I just love to sit by. I have a few frogs, love to hear them croaking in the spring. The heron is probably looking for tadpoles, crawdads and any small fish.

One thing I like to do is look out the windows of my home and make notes as to what I would like to see, or what you don't want to look at thats already there!

Also pick out a spot for a compost pile so you can add compost to your new flower beds.

Have fun!

Chris

If they have "whiskers" they're koi but goldfish can get really big too.

A heron statue is supposed to scare away any live ones. They will get your fish if they can, even the big ones. They can also injure the fish trying to catch them. Someone posted in the pond forum about the havoc a heron caused in their pond.

hart, I will go check out the pond forum!

lady gardener, my composter was the first thing to get moved in. : ) I use a metal dog crate. I like cause it has a front door and a top which I can open, which means I can turn it regularly and still have access easily, also , I can hose it out, and it's very airy. Sometimes things fall out cause the gaps are big but that's ok with me. Also, I already owned it. Cheap is good. : )

luna_baby your house is georgeous. One thing for sure, you've got plenty of room to get crazy with gardening. I'll be curious about how your pond project goes. We've been working on one at my job. We should be sinking water plants in there in the next couple of days. It is fun, except pond water can be kind of gross. The mud on the bottom will suck the boots right off your feet.

I agree with everyone about the gorgeous house!!! I too love all the wall colors. You are a lucky lady Luna. Thanks for sharing.

Ruby