Almostgotit.com

photo from The Snail’s Pace

Last weekend, four friends and I headed for the hills. With a corkscrew. 

We had a little North Carolina mountain farmhouse all to ourselves, each of us with her own upstairs bedroom tucked under the eaves.  

We had a living room with a fire already laid for us in the wood stove, a kitchen, but we didn’t do any cooking.  The kitchen was for coffee in the morning and later, for the cookies everyone brought plus a pot of spiced cider that simmered all day.

There was a dining room too, but we quickly turned it into our play room instead.

We spent the next two days Making Stuff, drinking margaritas in front of our wood stove, and tromping off at regular intervals to get our meals, prepared by *somebody else.*

Heavenly!

As we made things, we hung them up on the wall.  That meant moving Jesus’ portrait around a little, but we figured he wouldn’t mind.  In fact, he’s probably lucky not to have ended up pasted to somebody’s project.

It is always fun to see how creative my friends are.  Next,  I’ll post some close-ups of what we made …

It’s been a month since we made all these hypertufa pots, so today I unwrapped them for the first time.  They should be fully cured.  Now the plan is just to leave them out in the rain all winter to leach out the extra lime before putting plants in next spring.

Hmm.  I’ve seen some gorgeous hypertufa plantings,  but at the moment they look more like a dining set used by the Flintstones…

Nursery plants make terrific birthday presents, but generally speaking, gardening Almostgotit-style is cheap as dirt. 

For example.  My exclusive gardening buckets are recycled kitty litter and laundry detergent tubs.  My herbicide (under the mulch) is a layer of newspapers.  My  exotic fertilizer is home-made compost, ashes from our woodstove, plus a little leftover perlite from my hupertufa experiments.  And most of my plants are gifts, trades, or divisions from elsewhere in my yard. 

I’m a little bit “organic,”  but mostly I’m just a tightwad.

Also, everything I plant must thrive on neglect.  I don’t really water, fertilize, or prune things.

Here are the plants that have survived my abuse so that I could re-use them in this bed:

Bi-color Dianthus
Sun, mostly evergreen
Cold hardiness zone: 4 to 9
6 to tall 12 inches wide
I bought these years ago as little annuals, with no idea they were perennials.  They bloom sporadically from spring – fall, and are easy to divide.

Creeping Phlox
evergreen
zones 3-9
6″ in height and spread out 2′.
I bought these to spill over my rock walls.  They bloom like crazy every spring, and look great all year long.  BULLET-PROOF.  Also pretty easy to divide.

Sedum: “Matrona”
Part shade to sun
Cold hardy zones: 3-9.
Mature size: Height 24 inches, Width: 12-24 inches (30-60 cm).
Flowering period: August to September.  Pink flowers turn bronze and last all winter.
I pulled a small Matrona (looks just like the more common “Autumn Joy” sedum) out of a mixed pot someone gave me and have been dividing it, replanting it, giving it away, etc., ever since.  Four-season interest, fast-growing without being a pest: what’s not to love about Sedum Matrona?

Sedum Sarmentosum: aka ‘Trailing Stonecrop” aka “Star Sedum” aka “Graveyard Moss”
Part shade to sun
Cold hardiness zones: 4 to 8
Covered with yellow flowers in the spring
I found a tiny piece of this in my backyard and have been using it all over the place.  This will grow about anywhere a piece of it falls, drapes beautifully from planters, and can be a tiny bit pesty if you want to get rid of it.  Makes a great ground cover over one of my rotting stumps, however, rendering the thing almost elegant.  Why pay for stump removal when there’s Star Sedum?

Yellow Iris
Sun
A friend asked me to “babysit” her collection of irises in my garden during a protracted moving process, and I just stuck the corms wherever I could fit them in.  The irises spread, my friend took some back (she’s welcome to take more!), and what was left in this particular flower bed was a shorter yellow variety that just happened to be perfect. 

Ruellia brittoniana: “Mexican Petunia”
Tender evergreen perennial
Sun
Hardiness zones 8-10. Marginally hardy in Zone 7 if protected and mulched. Can be invasive in very warm climates.
3 feet tall
Stems are very easy to root in moist soil. Over time the plant multiplies and the original stem becomes a colony.
These are wacky and fun.   Purple flowers look just like petunias on long stems.   I snagged them — as just a bunch of sticks last April — for free in a neighborhood plant trade, and am holding them in my whiskey barrel garden until I see them thru a second season.  They would be perfect with the yellows and pinks in this bed, though, and next spring I’ll try them.  In case they don’t winter over in my zone 6-7 yard,  I’ll save some cuttings as well. 

Almostgotit’s birthday present:  One humongous heap of steaming, stinking black mulch plus two indentured slaves with shovels for a day.

The three of us planted the things I bought WITH A COUPON the other day, plus the stuff I’d divided or moved from elsewhere (more about that in tomorrow’s post)

 Here’s the scoop on the new guys in the yard:

Encore Azalea, “Autumn Ruby”

Light shade – sun

• Mature height: 2.5 feet Spread: 3 feet
• Blooms spring AND summer, deep ruby single flowers
• Click here for more about Encore Azaleas http://www.encoreazalea.com/encore/index.cfm

Juniper, “Gold Coast

• Evergreen, yellow foliage
• Cold hardiness zones: 3-9
• Light needs: full sun
• Mature height: 3 ft tall, 4 ft wide

Physocarpus, “Summer Wine”

• Light Needs: Sun
• Cold hardiness zone: 4-9
• Height: 5-6 feet; Spread 5-6 feet
• Wine red foliage ; white-pink flowers mid-summer

Weigela, “Midnight Wine”

• Light Needs: Sun
• Cold hardiness zone: 5-9
• Height: 12-18 inches; spread 18-24 inches
• Purple foliage, bright pink flowers

Abelia, “Rose Creek”

• Evergreen: leaves become purplish in cold weather.
• Light needs: Full to partial sun
• Cold Hardiness Zone: 6-9
• Light needs: Full to partial sun
• Mature size: Low mounding shrub 2 to 3 ft. tall, 3 to 4 ft. wide.
• Flower Color: White
• Blooms: Fragrant white flowers spring through summer.

Hypertufa is an artificial stone ( Named for “tufa,” a natural, porous limestone), used to make light-weight, weather-proof garden ornaments and pots.    And you can make it your very own self! 

Hypertufa Party!!

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to try making hypertufa pots with a couple of my crazier, more experimental friends.  Fall is a good time to make hypertufa, as the pots need to cure in a couple stages before you use them.

First, I did some research for the best hypertufa recipe, the best hypertufa videos, (here’s another good hypertufa video) and I looked at lots and lots of hypertufa photos online for inspiration.   We adapted our own procedure from the version found here on The Artistic Garden.

Photos were all taken in the Almostgotit Hypertufa Factory!

Hypertufa Recipe

• 1 part Portland cement (NOT concrete or quikrete!!)
• 1½ parts peat
• 1½ parts perlite (or vermiculite – which heavier, & adds some sparkle)

HOW MUCH?  Two 90-lb bags of Portland cement, 10-15 lbs of perlite, and 2 cubic feet of peat moss made about 10 medium-sized planters (14-20″ diameter bowls)

PREP & SAFETY

•  Wear clothes you don’t mind getting dirty

It’s also recommended to launder your work clothes right after you’re done, and take off your shoes before entering house.  I didn’t get as dirty as I thought.  An apron worked well… lugging things around got my front dirty.

•  Wear a fine-particle dust mask & waterproof gloves

The dust from any ‘tufa mixture is very caustic and definitely can damage your lungs if you breathe it in. Once you’ve got everything mixed and have added the water, then you can take off your mask.

Ingredients are caustic & not skin-friendly. Wear heavy-duty rubber dishwashing or rubber work gloves when mixing dry ingredients and when handling the wet mixture. Another caution: even handling hypertufa that has cured enough to unmold but is still damp can cause skin burns.  Disposable latex gloves work great when applying and detailing hypertufa, allowing you more dexterity than the heavy gloves used for mixing.

•  Last but not least … yes you should wear safety goggles!

We didn’t.  Bad, bad, bad.

Additional hints:

• If you’re mixing up a large quantity of one of these hypertufa recipes, divide the mixture into smaller batches to make it easier to blend.
• Measure the dry ingredients into a large container such as a wheelbarrow. Use a shovel, concrete trowel, garden hand trowel or similar for mixing.  WE GAVE UP AND USED OUR HANDS.  EASIER!
• Make sure all ingredients are thoroughly blended before adding water. Mix and blend more than you think you need to!
• Add The Water Slowly … You Can Always Add More  WORDS TO LIVE BY.
• Next, take a 10 minute break from the whole mixing process. Let the water “soak in” a bit.  This is a good time to serve coffee and chocolate (take your yucky gloves and shoes off, first!)
• Test your mixture for the proper consistency (cottage cheese consistency) by taking a handful of mix. Squeeze it into a ball that will hold together when you open your hand. A little bit of water can slightly ooze between your fingers.  Remember that this mixture must be able to cling to your mold and stay put and not start sagging. 
• How do you know what is enough or not enough water?  The APPROXIMATE amount of water needed MAY or MAY NOT be 1 to 1-1/2 parts water (in relation to the dry ingredients “parts”).  Be on the safe side, slowly add your water to your thoroughly-blended dry mix. Add water until you have a damp mixture. One that is not crumbly but also not oozing with water.

 MAKING A HYPERTUFA BOWL

• We found it easiest to cover the exterior of a bowl. Line or cover your wood, plastic, or metal bowl with a large plastic garbage bag.
• For a portable work surface, put another plastic bag over a piece of scrap plywood (this bag can later be turned inside-out to cover your finished bowl while it’s drying!
• Turn your plastic-covered bowl upside down on your plastic-covered work surface so you’re able to cover the bottom of the bowl with hypertufa. Begin building the mixture around the base of the mold, gradually building up the sides and over the top. Pat and press, pat and press the mixture as you work along. The desired thickness of ‘tufa is about 1½ inches for SMALL containers. 
• Make sure the top and edges are as thick as the sides. You don’t want weak areas in your bowl due to the hypertufa not being applied thickly enough.
• Keep the base of the bowl as flat and smooth as you can.  This means the top of your project, which will become the bottom when it’s flipped over.
• Use a bamboo barbeque skewer, or similar thin object, marked at 1-1/2 inches, to poke through the ‘tufa, allowing you to check the thickness of the walls as you are applying it. This will help insure that you are keeping your entire project 1-1/2″ thick.  It is harder to predict the wall’s thickness than you might think!
• When you’re finished, if you desire a smoother look to your hypertufa trough, smooth the surfaces with semi-wet fingers.  Patting the surface also works well to compact the hypertufa and force water up to smooth the surface.  Turning the worksurface bag inside out so it goes around the bowl instead at this point is helpful, too — you can use the bag to pull up and shape the bowl from the outside before sealing the bowl up inside of it. 
• Create drainage holes: using short lengths of ½” – 1″ dia. dowels, poke the dowels through the ‘tufa until they touch the base of your mold. The larger the trough, the more drainage holes I’d suggest you include. If you don’t have dowels, use whatever you have on hand that can create holes — no one is going to see them anyway when your trough is planted.  They don’t have to be perfectly shaped.  

CURING YOUR HYPERTUFA

Stage 1 (2 to 4 Days)

• It’s helpful to build your pot on a moveable work surface (see above) so you can move it to the drying area without disturbing it too much.
• Carefully place your object into a large black plastic trash bag (or similar) and seal it up tightly. (If your object is too heavy to lift, then do your best to cover with black plastic. Keep in mind you are trying to retain moisture to help the object dry slowly.)
• Many ‘tufa makers will thoroughly mist the object with water before sealing up the bag. As I’ve said elsewhere on these pages, there is no exact science to anything regarding hypertufa. That includes the “best way” to cure it.
• Seal the bag as air tight as possible. We used our bags to finalize the shape of our bowls, and liked the stone-like lines the plastic made when pressed against the hypertufa.  You can inflate the bag a little to keep it off the surface while drying, if you prefer.
• Carry your pot to a spot you are able to leave it undisturbed during the curing.
• After approximately 24 hours you will want to test your new, and still curing, hypertufa object. Carefully open the bag (or uncover) and see if your fingernail can scratch off any ‘tufa. If you can, seal it back up and wait another 12-36 hours. When you can’t really scratch any off (without some difficulty), you’re ready to unmold your object. Your object is still a bit fragile! Remove from the mold carefully.
• If you want to add texture to the object’s surface, you need to do that now before you move on to the next step.
• Caution: when handling damp pieces you should wear your gloves!  Gingerly place your object back into the plastic bag and seal tightly. You can now keep your object at room temperature.

Curing: Stage 2 (1 week – 1 month or more)

• Continue to keep it moist, misting occasionally if needed. Allow it to cure for at least another week but the longer it can slowly cure in a moist environment, the better.
• At this point, most ‘tufa makers will keep the object bagged up for a month or more. (I’ve seen it written that a one month cure time can result in 25% stronger ‘tufa).
• Your new garden art object can be removed and left until it is completely dried … you’ll know if it sounds hollow when tapped.

Curing: Stage 2 (1 week – 1 month or more)

• Continue to keep it moist, misting occasionally if needed. Allow it to cure for at least another week but the longer it can slowly cure in a moist environment, the better.
• At this point, most ‘tufa makers will keep the object bagged up for a month or more. (a one month cure time can result in 25% stronger ‘tufa).
• Your new garden art object can be removed and left until it is completely dried … you’ll know if it sounds hollow when tapped.

Curing: Final step: getting rid of excess lime from the Portland Cement

• Cured hypertufa is very alkaline due to the Portland cement. If you have ever seen a white powdery residue on new cement, that is the free lime leaching out.  Most agree that the lime is toxic to most plants and therefore needs to be leached from the object if you are going to use it as a planter.
• EITHER:  soak ‘tufa planter in a larger container of fresh water, changing water every day for 3 days. (Note: The lime can still burn your skin so wear your gloves.)
• Or If the planter is too large to fit into another container, hose it down once or twice a day for 3-5 days.
• Or best of all, use my approach and leave the planter outside for a few months, allowing the lime to leach out naturally by being rained upon .   After all, there’s still plenty of time before I’ll need them in the spring.

Update, Dec 1: To see what the finished pots look like, click here!

Cross-posted at BlogHer.com

Almostgotit is going to get booted off BlogHer if she doesn’t shape up.  She understands this.

Thing is, how many posts can a person write about her kid getting hit by a car while getting off a school bus?  And how reporters and kid safety organizations suddenly want to make the Almostgotits their poster family for bus safety, and how can the Almostgotits say no when people HAVE to listen to them? 

Because, you know, OUR KID got HIT.  By a CAR.  While GETTING OFF A SCHOOL BUS.

Oh, blogging.  It’s always about obsessing over something, or promoting a book you wrote, or telling your whole boring life story which inevitably involves other people who may not want to get mentioned in your blog even if they deserve it, like the creepy Jason Mosier from Knoxville who stays up all night posting comments about children being hit by cars as they get off school busses and how natural selection should be allowed to take its course…

Not that I would ever mention that.

Anyway, my apologies to all my friends in blogdom who haven’t heard from me in a while… not so much on this blog, but on your own.  Cause I know how much it matters, Being Heard. 

Meanwhile, we’ve started woodstove season.  Pulled out the crockpot for warm, autumnal meals.  Become fascinated with stacking rock walls around new garden beds, and making hypertufa planters for next spring’s garden.  Been trying out a new volunteer gig, so long as the unemployment rate is 10.2% and still rising.  And on that subject, been clearing the air with some new ears about some old business. 

Had a birthday, too: 29 AGAIN!

My 13-yr-old daughter assures me that there’s a strong association between an increasing number of birthdays and longevity, though, so at least there’s that!

Photo by Wendy Smith

Nice coverage in the paper of my daughter’s bus accident.  Nicely done, and thank you, Wendy!

http://www.shoppernewsnow.com/news/110209BeardenA.pdf

Created on http://www.make-me-mini.com/

For me, it was mostly a blur.  For the 13 year old, it was mostly about Facebook.

What do you do when reporting to the scene of your own child’s accident?  I did it.  I barely registered these peripherals:  A firetruck.  A police car.  An ambulance. A school bus FULL of alert, chattering faces, all looking out at us.  More firemen than could possibly have fit in the truck.  A red car  which was clearly the culprit.  The dear bus driver.  The neighbors who had knocked on my door.  The sudden and miraculous appearance of a friend from across town, offering me a ride to the hospital following the ambulance. 

My daughter wanted to use my phone at the hospital to Facebook her friends about the accident, and I didn’t let her, as we needed to be  attentive and helpful  to the people who were still attending to her.  

But perhaps even more, I felt that Facebooking from the hospital  was unseemly in a way I couldn’t quite explain to myself.  Was it Inappropriate attention-seeking, when she hadn’t really been “harmed?”  (but of course she’d been harmed.  Someone HIT HER BODY.  With a CAR.) 

We came home and she immediately headed for the computer, and I heard myself telling her not to “over-communicate.”  Then I realized I was censoring her, and for no good reason. 

“Why not?” asked the wiser woman inside of me. 

Why not let her reach out to her friends, immersing herself in a reassuring buzz of  “Plz tell me what happnd!” and “I am so GLAD ur okay!”   Why not let her tell her story over and over, processing it by sharing it?  Why not allow her to redeem her own story by taking the lead in telling it?

So I changed my mind.  “Communicate AWAY!” I said.  “ALL you want to!” 

And she did.  She tapped away for a couple hours on Facebook, where the news was already spreading through Middle School Land.  Several new “friend requests”  appeared from breathless thrill seekers who wanted to be closer to the action.  Chat messages bipped like popcorn from friends and people she hardly knew. 
 
Was it unseemly?  I decided not.  My daughter was motoring along on her own power, getting what she needed, and learning she could at the same time.  Why did she deserve it any less just because she hadn’t actually broken any bones? 

And, as I reminded myself, there WAS hurt here.  My little girl’s trust had been violated, her PERSON had been violated in a way she didn’t expect or deserve, by someone who had physically struck her with a lethal ton of steel. She had been exposed to a bus full of her adolescent peers who had eagerly watched her for 30 minutes in the immediate aftermath of the accident, some even snapping pictures of her with their cell phones.  So why shouldn’t she re-fashion herself as a bit of a heroine?  Why shouldn’t she even have, YES, a bit of a bask in her 15 minutes of fame? (She confessed, a couple of times, to wishing she had at least a splint…)
 
School the day after was much more of the same for her.  Everyone was talking about the kid who had been run over… by a car? a bus?  The nurse called her out of class.  The principal called her out of class. It could have been awful, but my daughter chose not to let it be.  And how proud my daughter’s friends were to know her, getting their OWN share of attention by bearing the much-coveted details. 

On the bus home the day after, there was silence as my daughter walked down the aisle to her seat.  The bus driver stood and gave a lecture to the kids about safety, calling my daughter  ”one lucky chick” and describing how he’d almost had a heart attack watching her get hit the day before, and almost hadn’t come to work this day. 
 
And when her bus stop came, there was silence again as my daughter got off the bus.  She carefully crossed the street, turned, and waved.  And the entire bus burst into cheers! 

Cue the theme from “The Natural,” and Hurray for The Kid who Lived to Ride the Bus Another Day!

I am on my soapbox today, and today I am entitled.  

My daughter was hit by a car yesterday just as she was getting off the school bus.  May you never get a phone call like that at your house.

She is fine, thank God, but  I hope you will hear three things that this Mom has to say today:

(1) Drivers must yield (which means STOP!) when a school bus is also stopped.

(2) Children need to be very careful when they exit a school bus, even if the bus has employed its stop signs and flashing lights.  It’s important to keep re-enforcing these 1^st grade rules, because even an 8^th grader will be distracted by a bus driver’s frantically honking his horn at an oncoming driver.

(3) The degree of impairment caused by talking on a cell phone while driving, (even when using headsets) has been proven in several major studies to be the same as driving drunk.  Driving with cell phones is not yet illegal in our city as it is in more and more others, but we don’t need to wait for a law. It is VERY IMPORTANT to limit this very popular distraction. 

Thank you very much for listening. 

- Almostgotit