Zanthan Gardens
Category: Garden House Project

The tagline from Croupier was “Hang on tightly; let go lightly.” That pretty much sums up my attitude in life. I have a hard time letting go but once I make the decision…poof!

Ever since last summer when we installed the new kitchen window, we’ve come face to face with an incontrovertible realization. There’s a damn ugly shed in our backyard. This pretty useless outbuilding with a leaky roof and infested with termites is a blight on the whole back garden. Worse, it collects junk. We fill it with empty cardboard boxes, rotting lumber, old bottles, defunct garden hoses, and broken toys.

Last year’s (still not quite finished) kitchen remodel left us sick of DIY projects. So we decided (the Garden Ranters will gasp) to hire someone to do it for us. And worse (please Garden Ranters, don’t go into apoplexy), we are going to convert it into an Outdoor Living Space. Our little cottage doesn’t have a separate dining room and although our kitchenette table is fine for the two of us, we thought it might be nice to have people over from time to time. (I did so enjoy having the Austin Garden Bloggers.)

I found a design I really liked (mouse over the upper right thumbnail). Our first job was to cut down the Texas Mountain laurels that are standing where the new deck will be. I never intended for them to grow there. I planted seed in the drip line hoping they’d sprout and they did. Thing is, I never got around to transplanting them. So there they’ve grown for ten years and 7 feet.

Our first job was to cut down the Texas mountain laurel that I’d grown from seed.

Next we had to clean out the shed. I collapsed all the cardboard boxes and bound them up for recycling. I took a decade’s worth of black plastic plant containers to Barton Springs Nursery for recycling. Pam @ Digging took my blue bottles and turned them into an artsy bottle tree. The rest of the stuff, we left for the builder to haul off as trash when he demolished the old shed.

Which he did today. Looks better already!

2007-05-01. I love the possibilities of a clean slate.

Ivan delivered the plans this morning. The gray rectangles are new beds to plant. Hmmm. They get a fair amount of sunlight….

I’ll have to look at this pictures every day to keep me going. Right now there is a small mountain of dirt and nowhere to put it.

I’m really too tired to write, so this may be incoherent. On Monday, digging the trenches for the concrete foundation beams commenced. You’d think we were building a skyscraper. The old shed/garage (which stood for almost 60 years) was built on a 4 to 12 inch slab, depending on the slope of the hill. The trenches along the edges of our new walls are 3 feet deep and the slab itself about a foot deep. I didn’t realize that the new concrete foundation would be so deep, so much more engineered than the old one. We’re nothing if not safe in the 21st century.

Now that I’ve seen the enormity of it all, I wonder, was pier-and-beam construction ever an option? I assumed not because of the existing slab. I didn’t understand that it probably could have been removed more easily than all this dirt.

Day 1. Monday.
We couldn’t get (by that I mean, I wouldn’t allow) any heavy equipment into my backyard and so all the digging has to be done by hand. As the dirt comes out, I get to direct where it goes. I marvel at having two men to move dirt around. Mounds of good black dirt begin filling various depressed areas of my yard. I rake and dig and take out rocks and throw them back on the fill pile.

2007-05-09. A 3×15 foot section is topped up with about 2 feet of good dirt from the original vegetable garden. I had just moved part of my mountain of mulch here and now the dirt is on top of it. Perhaps the worms will sort that out.

Then we hit caliche. And there’s no place for that anywhere in the garden. Wherever some drops it forms an instantly impervious layer. Yikes! We start to dump it on the west side of the little house, but that is uphill and will only compound the existing drainage issues.

Day 2. Tuesday.
A third man is added to the digging crew. Caliche is piled on the lawn and in the back where it will cause further drainage problem before we decide that this won’t do.

Ivan suggests building some sort of sculptural mound of dirt on the back lawn, like a big gum drop. . tentatively agree and then discover that it blocks the carefully made view of the south border from my bed. And it gets caliche all in the lawn.

We are running out of places to put dirt.

Day 3. Wednesday
We solve the caliche problem by deciding to haul it away. The men dump a mountain of it on the driveway. I spend most of the day dismantling the sculptural mound and trying to get caliche out of the lawn.

2007-05-09. More good dirt is piled on the low end of the lawn. I’ll probably take out that tree…where I let a fallen cedar elm sprout out of the old trunk.

A lovely rain about 10:30 pm–not enough to make things mucky or fill up the trenches.

Day 4. Thursday
A beautiful morning after last night’s rain. I take a break from moving dirt and rocks because the garden needs some work. I do manage to transplant a clump of society garlic (thanks, Pam) and dig up some bulbs that need dividing (or rather, need moving to a sunnier location).

Around 3:30, the digging is finished. On the northwest corner and the southeast corner the building is level with the ground.

The northeast corner, where the pond is, juts 22 inches above ground level. This makes a convenient perch to sit and dangle one’s hand in the water. But on the southwest corner, we are 16 inches underground. Hmmm. Just like the main house. As the Japanese say, Komatta, desu ne.. (This could be a problem.)

Angelina (of fab Dustpan Alley fame) asked me what caliche is. As it turns out, I’m not actually sure that I’m using the correct term but I refer to the yellow hardpan layer of clay that’s beneath our more benevolent blackland prairie clay as caliche. It’s common in all the places I’ve lived in the southwest US. My mother grew up in New Mexico and that’s what she called it. Maybe it’s just hardpan, which my online dictionary defines as “a hardened impervious layer, typically of clay, occurring in or below the soil and impairing drainage and plant growth.”

The University of Arizona has an informative article on conquering home yard caliche. In it they describe it as, “a layer of soil in which the soil particles have been cemented together by lime (calcium carbonate, CaCO3). Caliche is usually found as a light-colored layer in the soil or as white or cream-colored concretions (lumps) mixed with the soil.”

Yep. That sounds just like the awful stuff that I have been fighting all week to keep out of my garden.

When damp, the texture is like brown sugar.

When you walk on it, caliche flattens and hardens like cement. Can you make out the footprints?

When it dries out, caliche forms clods as hard as rocks.

Monday and Tuesday of this week are dedicated to hauling off all the caliche and rocks that the trenching unearthed. Ivan has to bring in his Bobcat and it requires two loads to the dump. (I put a call out to the neighborhood to see if anyone wanted free fill dirt but didn’t have any takers.)

Rain falls hard after midnight and continues until about 4AM. So Wednesday it is too muddy to work in the trenches. (Great weather for clearing out the spring flowers in the meadow which I did all day.)

Thursday and Friday are dedicated to bending the rebar. Ivan modifies the shape of the pond (so that it no longer runs completely under the deck). This is more what I had in mind anyway; however, I’m concerned that it is too shallow. So we dig it out a bit more…we dump the extra dirt in the now available spot that will be under the deck and the rocks in what is now a non-supporting footing.

I’m surprised that the guys show up Saturday morning. (We aren’t up and dressed.) They have to finish because the concrete pourers are scheduled for Tuesday. I detect a note of urgency whenever I speak to Ivan. I sense that making an effort to preserve the garden by doing all the digging and hauling by hand took much longer than he anticipated in his scheduling. I do appreciate it and am trying to stay out of the way. (Although eyebrows were raised when I suggested that the pond should be deeper. I worked alongside them digging out rocks and raking dirt as fast as we could to get it the way I wanted it.)

2007-05-20. The deeper pond and the pile of dirt we dug out of it. The pond slopes at the far end to make it easier to drain and clean.

The guys on his crew are incredible; I can’t remember when I met such cheerful and hard-working guys. They don’t seem fazed by any change and go after their work with gusto. It’s catching!

At 6:45 we were awakened by a screeching truck. I thought we’d missed the garbage collectors again but it turned out to be the pump truck for the concrete pourers. The cement mixer arrived shortly afterward. Then Ivan and crew came rushing on the scene.

Concrete begins pouring into the forms.

By 8:35 the concrete was pouring out into the mold, all wet and sloshy. The noise was extraordinary but it was all over in about an hour and a half.

Then Ivan and crew had the task of meticulously tamping and smoothing the cement flat. This took them the rest of the day.

Ivan doesn’t just sit at his design table and leave the hard work to others. He’s, obviously a kindred spirit, one of those people who isn’t afraid to jump right in and get his hands dirty.

The concrete foundation was poured on May 22 and for almost three weeks nothing much has happened onsite while the concrete was setting up. Offsite the special joints were being welded. There was a flurry of activity last Saturday when the concrete block wall was erected. Then on Monday after they’d put a coat of stucco on it, the workmen had to cover it with tarps and leave in a hurry because a big storm hit north Austin. Apparently it poured and hailed up north, but down here south of the river it remained sunny and we didn’t get a drop of rain. However, the pond still has a lot of water in it from the rain the night before and on Memorial Day.

Today work recommenced. More stucco was applied. And the support columns are going up. From the kitchen it looks like some Greek ruin…well, a modern rendition of a Greek ruin.

I find it a bit wearing to try to garden around the piles of boards and wire and rebar and lumps of cement and cinder blocks. It’s hard to be very enthusiastic about gardening this week anyway as summer is really weighing on us. We decided it was finally time to turn on the AC last night and…it’s broken. It was 80 in the house this morning before 8AM. So my enthusiasm for everything right now is rather low.

When the garden house is finished I’ll just lie out in the screened porch on days like this. Really! That’s my plan. Lay about and drink iced drinks. Austin is the slacker capital of the world and it’s time I participated in maintaining our reputation a bit.

During my three weeks in England, I was just as anxious as some of you to know what progress was being made on the garden house. We had expected it to be finished before we went on vacation. When it wasn’t, we were assured that it would be finished before our return. However, rain delays have slowed progress; it’s been raining since we began the project. It rained the whole time we were gone. And it’s forecast to rain this week.

We had a bit of a snafu the week before we left so I left house and garden with an uneasy mind made more anxious. The framing for the screened walls turned out differently than we expected and we had to stop work and come up with an alternate solution. All worked out in the end but the misdirection left me with the apprehension that I wouldn’t be able to catch any last minute design changes if I was thousands of miles away. Ivan is a bit less forthcoming in communicating changes in his implementation strategy than I’m comfortable with.

As it turns out it rained quite a bit while I was away and very little was done in my absence. Before JQS went off on his road trip, he reported nothing had changed that he could see. On the day before AJM was to return, I got an email from Ivan saying that they had tripped the circuit breaker doing the welding and since the subpanel is inside, work had stopped.

AJM sorted that out on his return. So during my last week in England, most of the roof got framed. I was only slightly disappointed not to have the house all finished when I returned. I much prefer to keep an eye on the progress. You can call me a control freak (many have). But this is a damn expensive project (for the likes of us) and I want it to turn out the way I want it to turn out.

The rain’s continued off and on all week and the work as been just as intermittent. Yesterday was a pretty good day and the framing was completed and part of the metal roof panels installed. In contrast, today it began raining at 6:15 am and then at 10:15 it began raining hard!

When the building part of this project is done, I’ll be able to put in the french drains, a retaining wall, a rainwater collection system, and finally some plants. These are all things I wish were done before all this rain but it just didn’t work out that way. I feel miserable seeing all the rain wasted.

I know that this excess rain been bad for some people but I love it. I always wanted to live somewhere where the summer temperatures top out in the 80s instead of the 100s. Tonight we had to turn off the whole-house fan because the inside temperature had dropped to 75 and I was getting goose bumps.

Tired of the rain? Not when I look at photos from last year’s drought.

2006-08-26. Drought or flood–that’s Texas. I’ll take the flood.

With the garden house project at a standstill this week, I decided to clean up the meadow garden which, thanks to Austin’s unusually heavy rains this year, is mostly weeds and rotted bearded iris. Even the paths are overgrown and covered in cement dust and other construction detritus.

The area around the garden house is the most dispiriting.

This is where I laid down most of the Christmas tree mulch last January. And where I plan to put all my tropical plants. During excavation for the garden house foundation, mounds of caliche were piled up there and, with workmen walking over it constantly, has been packed down anywhere from six inches to a foot deep.

Caliche, as I’ve said, is almost as impervious as concrete. The rain runs right off it, exacerbating our drainage problems. (Since my return from England, our garage has flooded in every heavy rain.) Luckily it come up in big chunks.

As you might suspect, caliche is a poor planting medium. All of it will have to be removed before I can plant the terraced bog garden.

My day’s work.

If you are planning any project which requires excavation, be certain to specify who is responsible for hauling away the dirt!