Sidewalk - Project Summary

The New Entrance. I like to think of it as a well-done face lift, and in a few months, nobody will ever remember a time when it looked differently.

 The new entrance (just one!)

A three-picture summary of two major projects, the White Pine 'Deconstruction' and the Sidewalk Reconstruction.

May 10, 2010

May 10, 2010

October 11, 2010

The Berm. Oh dear, I made a berm. It makes me think of suburbia, er, subermia? Not in this case. The arc and slope created by this berm is part of the new site engineering. The berm will collect and direct stormwater from the roof and send it to the rain garden. This will protect the house from water seepage and will irrigate the plants that arrive in Spring.

The berm.

Seed and Straw. A cover crop has been planted to protect the exposed soil. I used a mix of agricultural plants - Wheat, Rye, Buckwheat, and Oats - because they all can be turned into the soil as 'green manure'. Over the seeds is laid a fine layer of straw to protect the seeds from dehydration and hungry birds.

 Straw mulch, watered daily.

Finally, I'd like to point out our subterranean friends, the Cicada Nymphs. I exposed several while digging the soil the grade the site.

 Cicada nymph, posing next to the hole he was in.

More info on Cicadas:

• Cicadas are among the most benign of insects. Neither the root-sucking nymphs nor the adults do any significant damage to trees or other plants.
• Though some species are called annual cicadas because they are present every year, all species take at least four years to mature in the ground.
• Nymphs grow gradually through eight stages before maturity.

[This Cicada information came from Mass Audobon.] 

The Chicago Botanic Garden mentions:

Cicadas are edible....but recent research has determined that cicadas may contain high levels of mercury...and diners are cautioned to limit their ingestion of these "delicacies" to just a few.

I guess my small urban farm kitchen can add another item to it's menu. Cicada Tempura anyone?

[By the way, during a locust invasion of biblical proportions while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in The Gambia, locals refused to eat the large, juicy locusts even when it meant literally saving their livelihood. I'll take a cue from them.]

"It's looking beautiful!"

As I was documenting the site this morning, I received my first comment from a total stranger. A woman was running with her dog and as she passed, she removed her ear-buds and shouted to me "It's looking beautiful!"

THANKS!

Also, comments and analysis on the sidewalk project forthcoming.

Sidewalk Deconstruction & Reconstruction – Day 2

The Front Yard, looking East, During & After

 10/4, 12:08pm

10/5, 1:40pm

 

10/8, 2:18pm

What the neighbor's see, Before & After

10/4, 10:40am

10/5, 11:40am

Porch view, Before & After

10/4, 2:40pm

10/5, 3:03pm

Finally, an added joy to a project is the discovery of artifacts. Here's what we found:

Our sidewalk on the left (cut and moved), pre-existing sidewalk on the right (discovered below ours).

Note the relative 'thin-ness' of the horizontal piece in the middle, the pre-existing sidewalk, thought to be 50+ years old.

These two images show leaf prints found on the underside of one excavated piece of sidewalk. In contrast to every other piece, which was covered with chunks of old concrete, this one caught my attention! It appears we have imprints of leaves from two tree types, an American Elm and some kind of Maple.

Sidewalk Deconstruction & Reconstruction – Day 1

At the crack of 7:30am this morning, the sidewalk project got underway. For many moons, I wondered whether this was going to come together. With the impending Chicago Winter and more free time of my own, the project jumped to a start once we had a new contractor for our curious project.

 Deconstructing Sidewalk

The job basically entails swapping materials from one place to another. As much as possible, materials will be reused to create a better sidewalk where there was grass, and better growing space where there was a troublesome sidewalk.

The pre-cut with a dry saw and final cut with a wet-saw

My concrete guy, who we will call Chris, said to me "Oh, this is not a concrete job, this is a landscaping job." We'll see about that. Every project comes with some surprise, good or bad. So far, we've discovered a pre-existing sidewalk used as the underlayment below the existing sidewalk. Whatever kind of job they want to call it, I'm just glad to be paying someone else to do all of the cutting, lifting, and hauling.

 Placing the new sidewalk pieces (stepping-stones)

The job:
Saw-cut the existing concrete sidewalk at the expansion joints and half-way in between.

Use 3'x5' slabs (now made of two half pieces) as Dr. Seuss-ish oversized stepping-stones.

Stepping-stones will outline the newly expanded growing area, allowing the growing area to extend all the way to the wall of the house.

Growing Area will include a native plant rain garden and food-production garden.

 End of Day 1

Here are two bonus images, showing the dust cloud created by the saw-cutting. Dust cloud = Bad, Cool pictures = Good!

Facing East in the morning

 Facing West in the afternoon

See you again tomorrow!

White Pine, Laid to Rest

First, a little bit of historical information to bring us to the significance of the present moment.

On January 4, 1872, J. Sterling Morton proposed a tree-planting holiday to be called "Arbor Day" to the State Board of Agriculture in his home state of Nebraska. The first Arbor Day took place in Nebraska on April 10, 1872. Arbor Day became an official state holiday on March 12, 1874, as proclaimed by the state's Governor Robert W. Furnas, the first legally established celebration in Nebraska took place in April 1885, and then spread to other states in the 1870s, and took place in schools nationwide beginning in 1882.

The White Pine tree in my yard was probably aged about 37 years, as best I can count the rings. At that age, it would have been planted around 1973. Perhaps even on the 100th anniversary of Arbor Day, which was in April of 1972.

By the way, J. Sterling Morton had a son, Joy Morton, who was aged 17 years at the founding of Arbor Day. Following his own successful founding of the Morton Salt Company, Joy established the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois in 1921 to carry on the family motto of "Plant Trees".

Here are two pics from before the first cut and right after the crew left the site.

8:00am

 10:30am

The White Pine has come down, laid to rest at 9:55am this morning. All of the tree will be kept on-site. The wood chips will be used to nourish and protect the perennial and vegetable planting beds, and the logs from the tree's trunk will be allowed to decay on-site, in the meantime being used in the design detailing.

Woodpecker Indicator

When I say "Yellow-bellied Sapsucker" you are probably drawn to say "sufferin' succotash, that sounds like a fictitious animal if I ever heard one". Well, in this case, it may actually be a suffering White Pine. The Yellow-bellied Sapsucker (Sphyrapicus varius) is a woodpecker known for feeding on the sap of trees and on insects that get caught in the sap. Other birds exploit the holes made by sapsuckers and thus, the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker is considered a "keystone" species, one whose existence is integral to the health and stability of a community.

Recently, I noticed a woodpecker tapping into my White Pine tree. Much to my delight, it was a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, the bird I studied for a year as my senior research project in my undergraduate program. While studying the feeding pattern of this bird species, I observed and counted thousands of holes, and saw the bird only once. During that year with my research team, we discovered that, among pine trees, sapsuckers have a significant preference for black pines and will "NEVER" eat from a White Pine so long as they have other options. And they almost always do; they feed from a variety of both gymnosperms and angiosperms. The characteristic pattern of holes made by sapsuckers can be seen in some White Pines, however, and that day I discovered them on my neighbor's side of the White Pine.

Upon my excitement at seeing 'an old friend', I immediately emailed my former professor at Valparaiso University's Biology Department, Dr. Laurie Eberhardt. She reminded me of her own research conclusions on sapsucker feeding. Sapsuckers tend to feed from trees that have overall poorer health. When a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker feeds from a White Pine, it is an indication that the tree is producing an elevated amount of amino acids - which is effectively the trees immune response to sickness. The feeding by a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker in my White Pine indicates the tree is probably sick. Removing the tree will remove a food source for this interesting migratory bird species but the tree will likely need to come down anyway as its condition worsens and potentially becomes a safety hazard.

[Image courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology: All About Birds. My own images are too fuzzy.]

Concept Development - Perspective Sketch

Here are three images to give you an idea of how the layout developed.

My perspective sketch will help visualize the final design. I made it by drawing over a perspective view in SketchUp with pencil, then inking it and finally, coloring by hand with watercolor marker.

Before I created the SketchUp model, I drew a quick sketch of the interaction between the new path and the south-facing wall. While it is not to scale, it demonstrates the relationships between the new path, the espalier trees, and the rain barrels.

These pencil colored images were drawn to visualize possible layouts for the new sidewalk. I considered cutting the White Pine into discs to lay down as stepping blocks. Taking into consideration  water collection areas, and the fact that the rear entrance probably needs a more substantial pathway than one made of wood, I made the decision to reuse the existing concrete as the material for the new path.

Shadow Analysis in SketchUp

Performing a Sun/Shadow Analysis can be incredibly helpful during the design process. It's helpful to architects who want to assess solar input to a building for passive or active solar collection. For landscape architects, it has always been ingrained in the materials of our field.

The sun gives life to our plants, the building blocks of our trade, along with the soil and water they bed in. The sun-shadow cycle is to plants as the blankets-on/blankets-off cycle is to people, it determines their waking hours and resting hours.

Sunlight has other effects on plants as well; it's what dries the morning dew. By removing moisture, the sunlight can prevent certain plant diseases, while an increase in shade or quantity of water will make plants more susceptible to plants diseases and fungal infections that thrive in moist environments.

My sun-shadow study had surprising results for me. I learned that the White Pine on the south-west corner of our lot casts more shade than I suspected on our largest garden bed. By using the date and time functions in SketchUp, I was able to see at what time of day our garden bed is in the shadow of the White Pine. This set of images shows the shadows in our yard from the very beginning of our growing season to the end.

If the sunniest hours of the day are from 12-noon to 4pm, this garden bed is progressively covered by the White Pine during these hours. Removing it could increase access to sunlight by several hours each day. I have been hesitant to remove the White Pine for reasons of cost and privacy however, this analysis has proved to be a strong argument for 'repurposing' our pine wood!

The Undead of Winter: Tree Pruning

Chicago Winters are the time of dormancy for plants. For gardeners and landscapers, it is a time to rest and plan. But if you have fruit trees, the dead of Winter is the ideal time to prune.

You will want to wait to prune until after the trees are fully dormant, which can be as early as late January or as late as March. Definitely, prune before the buds begin to swell in the Spring.

Winter pruning is ideal because it reduces the risk of infection. Come Spring, when plant pests and diseases are active, your Winter cuts will be sufficiently healed.

Water Sprouts:
Our trees don't have a problem with Suckers or Whorls, but they make up for it with Water Sprouts. All three of these are undesirable types of growth that will not improve fruit production. Why have fruit trees if you don't intend to harvest some nice fruit, eh? In the above image, I am removing one of many of these thin upright branches growing near the central trunk of the tree.

Air Circulation:
This image sequence shows you Before, During, and After shots when pruning the Water Sprouts from our Apple Tree. Compare them to see how much we were able to open up the core area of the tree. For trees to be able to produce healthy fruit, they need good air circulation.

I was told by a friend to approach tree pruning with the goal to allow birds to fly through the core and canopy. With that, it's important when pruning in the Winter to keep in mind how the tree will look in Spring after the leaves emerge and take up more space.

Harvest, and Safety:
We learned last Summer that, if we were going to make it easier on ourselves to care for fruit trees, it was time to take a No-Holds-Barred approach to pruning. As I said before, since we're growing these trees for their fruit, then I intend to harvest the entire tree (with a small donation to the wildlife in my yard). As you can see in the above sequence, we sawed off a large branch that was (1.) completely out of reach for harvesting and (2). careening rather dangerously over the public alley.

Fruit Tree Pests:
Another major change to our fruit tree care this year will be education and action against the pests that make our harvest and fruit consumption cumbersome. In the past, I've done my best to keep even one day ahead of the insects that have such an amorous affection for our trees. Here's what I learned so far:

I suspect we have one or both of two common larvae tunneling through our fruit. 

Apple Maggots:
What you see: worms
Tree: Apples and Cherries
What to do: hang a Sticky Trap (a red ball or yellow triangle) in Late June through harvest. 2 traps per tree. Remove any fallen fruit immediately.

Codling Moth:
What you see: tunnels
Tree: Apples
What to do: spray Dormant Oil on leaves prior to leaf budding in late Winter or early Spring.

I'm also learning how to use Horticulture Oil, and nylon footies (yes, the kind you use at the shoe store) to protect fruit.

Good Sources for More Information:
Chicago Botanic Garden: monthly gardening checklist
North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service: not our climate but they have Excellent illustrations of fruit tree training and pruning techniques.