the Backyard B'zmany hands make light work!

Last Sunday was the monthly meeting of the world famous Atlanta Gardening group, the BYB’z! and it was a hot one. These Southern summer meetings are always dicey. You never know how unbearable it will be, and it’s important to stay hydrated! We met at Sharon’s in the lovely city of Cass, GA, and were there to help her get her weeds under control. No, not her WEED, her weeds! Here’s what we started with:

This is the kind of thing that makes you tired.

We all face this: weeds have taken over. How is it that during the drought in Georgia which plagues us seemingly every year, when all the plants we love and have paid good money for are threatening to keel over, or have already bit the big one, the weeds thrive and survive? I guess that’s why they’re weeds. Maybe. Well, they are no match for the B’z in any case.

Oh now we feel better!

That didn’t take long at all. When four determined women are on a mission, anything or anyone had better get out of the way, and this includes chickweed and crabgrass, not to mention blackberry and greenbrier. While working to dispatch the weeds, we talked about the books we had read recently (House of Sand and Fog, Girl with the Dragon Tatoo, Teacher Man to name a few – we are all big readers) and the merits and demerits of each.

The thing about us is that we have so many things in common that we never lack for conversation. Another hot topic was things that surprised us about this group after we had been into it for awhile. One thing we never expected was how much fun it would be to work in someone else’s yard! As it turns out, it’s just as much fun as working in our own, and more, actually!

On to the next area: Along the fence, where we envision a cottage garden of lilies, daisies, black eyed Susans and the like.

Someday this will be a riot of color!

We have vision! Someday this will be gorgeous! Gardeners have faith galore, that’s for sure. Who else can take a barren piece of red clay and shale ground and create an oasis of beauty? We worked on this until lunch time, I’ll show you how it turned out in a minute.

Meanwhile, one of our favorite pastimes, besides gardening our brains out, is scrounging. No yard sale, thrift store or junk pile is safe from our creative eye. We look at things not as they are, but as how they could be. This is very useful for finding unique garden art, but sometimes isn’t so good when you’re dealing with real life. Note this fabulous use of cast offs and 99 cent bargains:

Isn't this grand?

After lunch we attacked the fence line with renewed vigor. We took the pole saw to dead branches and discussed how a row of azaleas would make a fine floral wall along the tree line. Isn’t this an improvement?

Much nicer vista now!

All of us are artistic, you really have to be to be a gardener, I think. Suzi paints, Jane quilts and paints with words, I make jewelry, and Sharon is a collage artist. We forced her to trot out her latest creations, and judge for yourselves, but we were blown away by their awesomeness! Here’s one that rocks my socks off:

Wow! Just. Wow.

And then there is this one:

Love the garden theme on this one!

We also spent a good amount of time lounging in the lovely sitting area we helped create for Sharon during our first meeting here, and discussing the possibility of an upcoming Bitchezz, oops! I mean B’z Book. That’s right, my friends, we could be on the road to a collaborative masterpiece. It’s all really hush hush, so don’t tell anyone, and seeing how many comments as we (don’t) get on this blog, I suppose there is no danger of word leaking out. Ha!

Speaking of that, we would really LOVE for you to comment on any and all of our posts. Just scroll to the bottom of any individual post and there you’ll find a little box set up JUST FOR YOU! We want to hear from you. We want to hear from your friends, your relatives, and your relative’s friends! And Lyle Lovett, we’d really like to hear from him. He’s from Texas, you know.

Next meeting will be at Nancy’s where we will be trying to make some sense of her driveway and front, as well as beating the ivy off the trees and spreading mulch. Bet you wish you could be there. Sorry. But I’ll write all about it so you’ll feel like you were there!

This month it was Suzi’s turn to harness the power of the Beez at work. We had an honorary Bee in attendance: Dana!

Dana provided all the lovely photography for this entry. She also brought some terrific food to share with us! We want Dana to come back again and again!

Our project this month was to provide some clarity for Suzi. Path-wise, that is. Sometimes we allow everyday obstacles to slow us down. We recognize them as irritants, yet somehow continue to live with them. Gardening is a lot like life.

Suzi had an area in front of her house where she frequently walked, yet she was always getting smacked around by an out-of-control weeping cherry tree and tripped up by some gardenias who were muscling their way in front of her. There was no clear path to the hose either; she had to step around various plants to get to the spigot. Adding to the general chaos, her tree-form lorapetalums were seriously out of round.

Enter the BYBz to fix things up! But first, a photo-op.

Photo op for Beez

So, here is what we started with:

Something must be done. First: Out with those gardenias. There are four in this spot. We think we’ll leave one.

The cool thing about the way we BYBz work together is that we each find our own job once the plan is laid out for us. We all seem to gravitate toward different things, so there’s never any bickering over who gets to dig out the gardenias and who gets to prune the lotapetalums. We pick a job and do it without a whole lot of discussion. Just one of the very many reasons we rock!

We get right to work, and we frequently have to be coerced into stopping to eat lunch. One of the rules we made when our group was first formed was that the only thing the hostess had to provide was water. We were to bring our own lunch and so not burden the hostess with feeding us. However, that’s one rule we all seem to love to break, as feeding each other is lots of fun, too! This time lunch was especially yummy, as Dana contributed a wonderful bruschetta-like treat, and Suzi contributed greens for a salad from her garden. Fresh peaches from South Georgia made their way to the table, too. Yum!

After our lunch break, it was back to work. We had cleared out the gardenias and settled them in their new homes, along with some hellebores (common name Lenten Rose) and iris, pruned the cherry tree back, and now it was time to create a pathway.

Then we re-purposed some stepping stones from another part of the yard.

The stones are set, and ground cover will be grown around them. Doesn’t this look better? It feels like a real path now, and the flower garden seems like more of a garden somehow.

It was a productive and fun time, as usual, and we never cease to be amazed at what only four women can accomplish in one day. It certainly never seems like work! Don’t you wish YOU could be an honorary Bee for a day? Well, maybe you can. Just ask!

This month’s meeting was exciting and challenging, as none of us have ever built a pond start to finish before, but hey, how hard could it be, right? Well, surprisingly – not that hard!! Many hands do indeed make light work.

This little pond was going where a birdbath had been previously; a spot which had been surrounded by mondo grass, mostly because Nancy had run out of places to put the stuff, so why not around the birdbath? Rocks had been gathered earlier, and trucked via Honda Pilot to the site. A pond liner, pump and hose were purchased at Home Depot. The desire was for a smallish pond with a small waterfall.

Here is where we started

Our first task was to dig out the mondo and wild violets, and then make a bigger hole. Suzi’s handy Honda tiller was called into service, and did a magnificent job. Much easier than digging a hole by hand!

Behold the hole!

Then we broke out the pond liner, and we all had a good, hearty laugh as we read that the expected time for completion of the project was two hours. Ha! There were four of us working on it, and we spent at least six on it start to finish. So I suppose if you had 12 people working on it you could do it in all two hours, provided you didn’t step all over each other in the process!

The liner is in!

Getting the liner just right took quite a bit of time, as there is more of a slope in the area than we realized, and so one of the sides had to be built up to keep the water level even all the way across. We didn’t want water spilling out one side while the other side had liner showing. In fact, we wanted NO liner showing at all.  So we brought in more dirt and back-filled until we got the level we needed. Then began the fun and challenging part – placing the rocks.

Rockin'!

Rock placement makes all the difference in the look of a pond or waterfall. It needs to look as natural as possible, and as little like a rock pile as possible. No liner should show at all, which means slightly overhanging the rocks to conceal it.

In natural waterfalls, the large rocks are left at the top, and the smaller rocks get carried to the bottom, so what we wanted was a change in size from the back to the front, with the larger rocks in back, spilling to smaller rocks in front. The above picture shows where we were when we broke for lunch, which consisted of delightful sandwiches made of maple bacon, avacado and tomato on a whole wheat pita bread bun. Yum!

After a refreshing lunch, we returned with vigor to the job at hand. Finding the right stone to go in the right place at the right angle is more art than science, and lucky for us we are all very artistically inclined! Still it took many false starts and trials and errors to get it all just right.

This shows the almost-final placement of the rocks. Still too many large ones in front.

Looking more like a pond, eh? The excess liner has been cut away, and the pump and hose have been set. Still, it needs something more….

Adding plants helps soften the hard edges.

Dirt covers the liner, and adding plants and pots integrates the pond into the surrounding landscape. There is a ledge inside the pond which will eventually hold some water plants, which will do even more to blend the pond into its surroundings.

The finished product

Adding mulch around the plants gives the finishing touch to the project. We are all well pleased. See the startling change in the photo below!

What a difference a day makes!

Oh, there were doubters among us. Some who thought we couldn’t do it in one day, some who thought we didn’t have enough rocks, some who thought our expertise might be lacking, but by the end of the day we were all believers. We were amazed that we had done it, and done it so beautifully!

This was without a doubt one of the most satisfying projects we have ever tackled and conquered, and I suspect that there may be a small pond in the future of all the BYBz. This would have been hard, if not impossible, for one of us to accomplish on our own, but with the help and encouragement of all of us together, it was relatively easy and even fun! I have never been happier or prouder to be part of such a great group of friends/gardeners/women. Thanks, BYBz! Who knows what we’ll be up to next month in Suzi’s yard – stay tuned and you’ll find out!