More Progress for the Screenhouse

Roof is all on, screens are all in, bugs are foiled... next step, shingle the roof, and really decorate the inside. I planted  Dragon King daylilies along the outside, a red daylily with yellow throat, with my Fernleaf  Buckthorn tree in the middle and a few hostas to break up the daylilies. I added some late summer color with Black Eyed Susans. The only new purchases were the Buckthorn tree which I had seen in one of the gardens on the hosta tour and the daylilies. The hosta and rudebekia were divided from plants I already have. I was very excited to find the tree at Skillin's as its leaf structure is more like a houseplant than a tree you would see in Maine. A trip with Vanessa to my favorite material store, Fabric Warehouse proved very successful. I am on their e-mail list, so knew they had their remenant pieces of drapery/upholstery on sale from $6.98 to $3.98, but to my surprise the clerk informed me they were marking it to $1.98 to reduce their stock! 46 YARDS of material later I was leaving the store just $100 poorer! My mission had simply been to get material, around 12 yards, for the screenhouse. I wanted that much as I have high hopes of building a "Passion Pit" like the one we used to have at Raymond Court. It is just a large round bed-like structure suspended from posts, made of stretched canvas topped with a huge cushion and tons of pillows. It would take a lot of material if I can pull it off, so I wanted to get lots. I also wanted to get waterproof canvas to make covers for the patio woodpile, the patio cushions and the grill. The covers you can buy often times have that flannel backing which really attracts mice as they love to use it for nesting, and generally either don't hold up very well or are very attractive. Well, given the sale price I was able to not only accomplish those two missions, but I also got material to redo all the front deck cushions when the spirit moves me, and the deck cushions at the cottage, and cover the teak bar at the cottage! Hugely successful! So, oil up that sewing machine and hit the foot pedal! I have yards to go before I rest.

Baa Baa White Sheep



The new garden wagon/grandchildren buggy.

 Thanks to a dear friend of Patti's and now of ours, Jack... we were able to purchase a lawn tractor which had put in years of service and had therefore finally dropped its mowing deck. It was a faded orange as it was a Husquavarna tractor, but soon after it arrived at Oak Hill, it was sporting a shiny white coat of paint,and I was fashionning a head out of a piece of wood to turn her into a sheep! Complete with a fleece upholstered seat, she is ready to haul the garden implements, the loam, the compost or whatever else may need hauling... but especially anxious to give rides to the grandchildren! Before she even had her head I had a fun time giving tours of Oak Hill with them in the trailer, until we stopped at the Root Cellar Pub and Gran came and stole the tractor with Jess as an accomplice. We chased them all around the field trying to get our wheels back! Not sure whether the kids or the grown-ups were having more fun!

The Screen House

Cocktails anyone? No skeeters invited!

With a huge help from Jess and Pete's donation of the entire framework for the new screenhouse at the Lodge, we are making every effort to outsmart the skeeters. The firepit works wonderfully, but when the temps sore into the 80's the fire makes for an awfully sweaty evening! Daring once again to attempt the classic hip-roof... which in our case is always a bit less than classic. We used the pressure treated we had used for Erica & Casey's wedding's for the base, (we had purchased the stock for a dance floor with this in mind). The pillars were all enclosed in the tremendous crate that Pete had built and hauled all the way up to Maine for us with all the metal framework, the screen panels and the doors. The hardest part was to reconfigure what had once been a rectangular 3-sided, up against the side of a house, porch into a free-standing square structure. Thank heavens for graph paper! Since the screen panels were two different sizes, they had to be placed with narrower ones with wider ones in some sort of pattern that at least made it look like we knew what we were doing. This required us to figure "filler boards" to make the sides long enough to match the railing length, which of course didn't really work either so had to be cut and fitted between posts. We were really lucky to come out only about 3 feet short in railing pieces and had plenty of spindles to recycle. So, the only actual purchases we had to make were the roof, the filler boards and a small piece of railing. We thought long and hard as to weather to keep it white or go to a more "Pam color", but decided that the white was nice what with the greenhouse and the raised beds being in such close proximity. The colors for the inside will be dependent on a trip to Fabric Warehouse, and the selection of fabric I make to cover the cushions.

Despite the weeks when we don't make it up to water the gardens as often as we should and despite a bumper crop of Japanese beetles descending upon the plants this year, the gardens of Oak Hill are especially beautiful. The vegetable garden promises a good crop and the roses have never been so lovely.

Hostas Huge and Healthy

The oldest hosta bed at Oak Hill is looking amazing this year what with the large amount of rain that fell in June and given that they range in age of between three and seven years in age. In fact, many have had to be moved and some I have been able to divide already. This first bed is mingled with astilbes and wormwood, along with some fast fading bleeding hearts. With the pine needle mulch and the size of the hostas, weeds are finding it increasingly difficult to compete for space... yipeee! A large amount of the hostas in this bed are from the gardens of Herb Hidu of Sheepscot and given my love for the larger species, it is dominated with Blue Angel, Krossa Regal, Elegans, Sagae and Sum and Substance, although many other varieties have found their home in this bed as well.

Well, My "Sheep" is Missing Its Head
One of my great pleasures at the Lodge is to give the grandkids tractor rides. What I really want is a Gator, but since that is a bit out of budget for now, Patti found a tractor for me that her friend Jack was getting rid of as the mower deck had rusted off. It is a Husquvarna, oldie but a goodie, and it didn't take me long to paint it from orange to white. My intent is to make a trailor pulling sheep...afterall, what eats grass better than a sheep! This will also no doubt, keep Eric off of my tractor! This past weekend I cut the head for it, but didn't want to attach it until I add its leather ears, so have brought it home to do so. Meanwhile, it serves well without its head to whisk the children through all the garden paths, making stops at all the little outbuildings.

Bugs Beware!
You are about to be foiled! The Lodge is soon to have a new screenhouse thanks to Jess and Pete. They had hauled a trailer packed with what once was a screen porch on the side of their house before their new addition was added, in a huge crate all the way to Maine for us. The original design was three sided, but we were to construct a four sided structure, which meant a lot of planning what would fit where and whether the plan could be completed with the screen panels and railings provided. Armed with graph paper and plenty of erasers, we set out to design it. We managed with the help of spacers, to find a home for every panel and all but two of the spindles. New lengths of hand rails were purchased to close in two gaps in the rails. All that remains to be done is the hip roof. If I do say myself it looks beautiful in a very "Williamsburgesque" kind of way! Can't wait to complete the roof and slide the screen panels into place... then we will have a "bug-free zone" for evening cocktail hour.