now that the Edmonton Net-Zero www.riverdalenetzero.ca/Home.html house is nearly complete, we have finally gotten into the sort of landscaping that i excel at. until last week, we were doing "hardscaping" the earthmoving, brick patio building, driveways, rock wall constructions, and tending the compacted, quack grass infested soil. there were rain barrels and irrigation systems to put in.
i enjoyed learning, but the hard labour is sometimes too much for me. i feel worn out at the end of the week. i have beefed up to unprecedented levels this summer. i have split the shoulder seams of my favourite pinstripe jacket.

the finishing touches are my favourites. i love the final grading. making everything roll and drift and meander away from the house, towards the sidewalks, around the trees and down from the patios. i love the spreading of fragrant compost and mulch. i love the way steam rises out from the pile as you pull shovelfuls off. i love the sound of shovelling compost and mulch. the compost is a light damp swish and the mulch a muted rattle thump swish.
there was a lot of planting to do. we had started with an essentially blank slate, just one Amur maple, two lilacs, one mountain ash and one larch in the far corners of the yard.
the yard was transformed into a "forest garden" the UrFa's signature style.
pear, apple, evan's and nanking cherry trees, and all the fruit producing shrubs, serviceberry (they call it saskatoon berry out here), chokeberry (Aronia), viburnum, currants, gooseberries, roses, honey berry (Lonicera kamchatka) and chokecherry.
there were herbs, flowers and grasses. we even laid out vegetable beds, and seeded a cover crop of buckwheat to prepare the soil for spring.
we sculpted berms and swales, carefully controlling the way the water flowed over the yard.
i tucked an assortment of sedum and sempervivum into the crevasses between the boulders.
each edge was raked and then finished with a perfect little ditch with the corner of the shovel.
all the mulch was fluffed, the plants all tucked in carefully, the mulch arched in little dishes around their stems. the final coat of polymeric sand was jammed into the last cracks and corners of the brickwork.
i made a big mosaic sun icon out of the old bricks that we dug up. the area was a brickyard in edmonton's youth.

the last job was the mushroom planting. my romance with the fifth kingdom continues. there was a large stump and several lovely logs from a spruce that had to be cut down to build the house. a large manitoba maple just down the street had cracked in a storm and had to be cut down. we collected the best pieces. we assembled these in the shadiest corner of the lot. we had a bag of mushroom plug spawn from fungi perfecti, fungi.com the UrFa started urgently rummaging around in the truck and the toolboxes, looking for a certain size drill bit that we naturally didn't have. we had to drill holes into the logs to hammer in the little dowel that have been inoculated with the fungi. the holes needed to be large enough to fit the plugs in, but the dowels had to fit tight for best results. if the hole was too small, the damp, slightly rotting wood plugs get stuck and then smash when we tried to hammer them in. after much debate, we settled on 11/32.
it took me a while, but i got all 100 holes drilled, hammered in the plugs and capped them with beeswax.

it was fun!
we worked from 8am until 7pm, giddy, delirious and tired. but we got it all done. it looked amazing.
we watered all the plants individually, but what it really needs is some serious rain.
the existing soil had been sun dried and compacted by the loss of cover and the construction. it was a fine silty soil, as riverdale is in the river's floodplain, so it really suffered. we scraped off about 6 - 10 inches of the worst soil and replaced it with soft undamaged soil from an excavation elsewhere in the neighbourhood. that under soil was dry dry dry. the compost and mulch we added were also dry. so was the layer of topsoil/manure/composted bedding we used to top up and improve it. the water was beading off the fine mulch thursday.
i have to return monday to water the new plants and the logs again. i hope it rains. the dry soil will soak up all the water and the plants will dry out too quickly without a good rain to really wet the earth around them.

i wish there were pictures of the landscaping up on the web. it would be nice to show off this great work!