When we first acquired La Casa Fickbonne, we wanted to inject it with a little taste of home—home being New England and “a little taste” being the region’s eponymous maple trees.
So within our first week of owning the house, we went in search of maple trees to plant in the hell strip in front of the house. It was September, 2014, and late in the year for planting, but we were determined to get trees in the ground as quickly as possible. Which is why, in the end, we had to settle for three measly discount Home Depot maples at $25 each.
They were the Charlie Brown Christmas trees of maple trees. Mr. Fickbonne planted them, and we dutifully watered them, knowing that not being of the highest quality, they might not last.
And over the years, they’ve had their ups and downs. During the 100-year hail storm of 2017, the maple trees suffered considerably…
… and in the end, the smallest of the trees died (it’s the one closest to the camera in the above photo). But the other two eventually recovered, and we kept nurturing the little things.
Which is why I’m proud to announce that this year, our maple trees really hit their stride. They stopped requiring regular watering, which means their roots have tapped into deep groundwater. And they’re big and bushy and wild, with trunks thicker around than my arms. In fact, they probably need some pruning! But best of all (and this is really the reason for this whole post), their fall foliage would put a New Hampshire forest to shame:
These seven-year-old beauties are THRIVING and we couldn’t be more proud.
Here’s something we’ve been keeping under wraps for a bit: this summer, we landscaped the backyard. It’s been pretty exciting and super environmentally conscious (read: crunchy hippie tree-hugging nonsense). I’ll do the big reveal of the whole yard soon enough, but in the meantime, let’s talk about grass!
We live in a desert, which means a full lawn of Kentucky blue grass is laughably absurd at best, an ethical canker sore at worst. Ever since we moved in, we’ve made absolutely zero attempt to keep any kind of lawn alive. Plus, we didn’t have grass—we had weeds. So aside from the parts of the yard dedicated to raising our vegetable garden, we ignored the weed fields and mowed them down when they got too unruly.
But what to do to get rid of the weeds without creating an unsustainable, water-thirsty lawn?
Enter Eryn Murphy from Roots to Deep Waters. Eryn is a landscape designer with a focus on sustainable gardening and native Colorado plants. We ADORE her. She’s exactly the kind of crunchy hippie with the scientific knowledge to make our yard not only sustainable, but beautiful. Plus, she shares our values: love of the Earth, love of growing our own food, love of being goofy, and love of wildlife. Again, I’ll give you the full picture on Eryn’s work with us later, but for now let’s focus on the grass.
Eryn put together a mix of four native grasses for us: Prairie Junegrass, Rocky Mountain Fescue, Arizona Fescue, and Sandberg Bluegrass. The result, we hope, will be the kind of high mountain meadow you pass while hiking in the Rockies. It’ll be a little multi-colored trending toward green, it’ll only require mowing once a year (GLORY BE HALLELUJA), and it’ll be hardy enough for dogs and people to walk on. It should average about 1.5 inches tall. Best of all, after it’s established it will only require occasional watering. As long as we’re getting normal amounts of rain (which… won’t happen because climate change), we won’t have to water it hardly at all. And when we do need to water, we can use our rain barrels.
First things first: we had to kill the weeds. Because our yard is home to bees, chickens, and vegetables, we really didn’t want to use any kind of hazardous chemicals to kill off the weed fields. So we used a natural process called solarization.
Solarization works thusly:
You water the hell out of the ground, getting it thoroughly soaked.
You spread white or clear (NOT BLACK) plastic tarps over the area, holding them down with landscaping stakes, bricks, whatever.
You wait two months, ideally during the hottest part of the year.
The tarps let in sunlight but trap water and heat. Basically, you’re baking the plants beneath the tarps and depriving them of oxygen and room to grow. It’s like a sauna. When you pull up the tarps, all the weeds should be dead. Here’s a peek under one of the tarps about 6 weeks in:
And here’s what the tarps looked like spread out on the lawn:
After pulling the tarps up, we had about 70% success on the weeds. Some were still hanging in there. So we pulled some, and left some because we ain’t fancy. Here’s how it looked under the tarps:
Next, we rented a roto-tiller from Home Depot to till the ground. Why? Because I’ve decided that I’m too old and tired to till by hand anymore. At least not over that much area. It was a pain to start (and required much cursing from Mr. Fickbonne), but it did turn a 5-hour job into a 30-minute job.
After tilling, I spread compost over the area. I’d been hoarding compost most of the summer, and used it all to restore the microbiome in the solarized areas. Hopefully it’ll keep things nice and fertile. And this is where I give a shout-out to our friend Meg, who donates her household compost to my little compost factory every couple of weeks! If you would also like to donate to the Casa Fickbonne compost heap, just leave a smelly bucket on the porch and I’ll give you some veggies and eggs in return.
After that, it was a matter of scattering and watering grass seeds! I carefully combined all four species and divided it into four containers in equal amounts that could be spread on the four subsections of the backyard. I didn’t want to run out without finishing the job!
Then I made an attempt at scattering the seeds evenly by hand, and watered them to within an inch of their lives.
Look at our beautiful tilled, fertilized, seeded yard!
I’ll need to scatter more topsoil or compost over them, but it’s been a busy week and this was a lot of time and effort. Because we’re scattering seeds instead of planting grass plugs, we’ll likely have a 70% germination rate at first. That’s ok by us, because by doing all the work ourselves and using seeds instead of plugs or turf… we also saved a ton of money. A turfing project that would’ve cost thousands to install and thousands more in water bills only cost us some sweat equity and $145 of seeds and materials.
More updates on the landscaping soon! In the meantime, keep your fingers crossed that our grass seeds take root!
Loyal readers of Casa Fickbonne know that our house was built in 1921. This year is its centennial! We’re very proud of the old girl, and trying to be forgiving of things like the breakdown of 100-year-old plumbing.
Back in the 1920s, it was common for kitchen sinks to drain into a grease trap. I guess this was an early and ill-thought-out solution for what to do with grease. And it turns out that after a century… grease traps tend to be a problem. Specifically, ours had hardened to the point that it was impassable to water. Like Jurassic Park amber, it had become a hardened chunk of history, rather than a functional bit of plumbing.
It’s not fun to have one’s kitchen sink constantly backing up with rancid water. And it’s especially not fun to try Drano-ing and snaking it away to no avail. We knew something was wrong, so it was time to call in the professionals.
We turned to our friends from Tipping Hat Plumbing, Heating, and Electrical (you’ll remember them as the gents who installed our new furnace). They diagnosed the problem (ancient grease trap hardened to amber, conveniently buried under our cement patio outside) and came up with a solution. They also mentioned that I could have punctured a lead joint if I kept trying to snake it myself, so… I guess it’s good I stopped when I did!
The solution: closing off the grease trap forever and rerouting the kitchen plumbing to the main line.
This meant jackhammering up the basement floor to lay a new pipe from the kitchen line to the main line. They’re only about 12 feet apart. But let me tell you: there’s nothing like jackhammers to make you feel like your home is being improved.
Because the guy we bought the house from had gutted the basement, only to reframe it and run some new electricals in a less-than-professional manner, the basement remains mostly unfinished. But we have big plans for the space. So in a way, it’s good that the grease trap became a problem before we were ready to, say, actually lay flooring in the basement. And at the moment, our darling roommate Chad (who lives in the basement bedroom) is visiting his girlfriend in Michigan.
So that meant the only person to be driven mad by a full day of jackhammering concrete was yours truly. At first it wasn’t so bad. Then it felt like the jackhammering was happening directly in my skull. Fun! Took me back to my college days when the city of Boston decided the best time to do construction on the street outside my apartment was from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m.
When they were done laying the pipes, they covered it all back up with new concrete. Which… kind of stands out like a sore thumb. But that’s ok, because as previously mentioned, we plan to lay down self-leveling epoxy as our flooring solution when we finish finishing the basement. So it’ll all get covered up.
Tipping Hat is a business of course, and they’re invested in keeping us as clients. So while they were down there they diagnosed a number of other code violations and disasters waiting to happen. We plan to remedy these one by one over time to make sure the Casa Fickbonne sticks around for another 100 years, horse hair plaster and all.
Anyway, at the end of all this we have new and improved plumbing and our kitchen sink is draining like a champ. I hope that the alien archaeologists who some day excavate Denver will be both thrilled and puzzled by our ancient grease trap buried and forgotten under the patio.
Casa Fickbonne 