Flat Top Goes Solar

Isn't she beautiful? Not the wisteria bud in the foreground, but the solar panel! For the past five days, we've been tapping the sun for our power, and it seems to be working out great. Amazing, huh?

So far, this 265-watt baby, perched atop our well house, has been keeping our batteries charged quite nicely. Of course, we've just had five glorious days of sunshine. (We'll see what rainy days and gloomy winter bring. It's a work in progress, as always.) We still have to run a generator when we take showers (the well pump, 375 feet underground, requires more juice than the batteries can provide), but now we only have to run that generator for those 20-30 minutes -- however long it takes us both to shower.

While Mason's been busy on the solar installation, I've been working in the garden. I've added a few new shrubs -- camelias, mountain laurels and others -- and have been babying the new swath of lawn on the north side of the cabin. Here's a glimpse of some of it ...

Sum and Substance hosta

Check out that leaf size!

The new north lawn, with Nick hiding in the trees. See all that dirt I need to plant still?

Columbine that I planted from seed during our first summer here.

Heucherella "Stoplight" (From the Barn Nursery)

Happy Earth Day to Us

I'm more than a week late posting our big Flat Top news: On Earth Day we ordered our solar panel system. Trust me, this is very exciting! As soon as it's set up, the only time we'll have to run a generator is to refill the water tank. Stay tuned for photos and tales of our adventures getting the thing installed and wired properly. Or more accurately, Mason's adventures.

Meanwhile, signs of spring continue to pop up around here. These dwarf irises, above, grow wild around here near the creeks -- and some somehow found their way into one of my flower beds. My cheap little Home Depot azaleas (purchased long before my new gig at The Barn Nursery) continue to hang on, and the grass I seeded about two weeks ago is finally peeking up out of the soil.

Congo azalea

Encore azalea

Not sure what these are. Clipped them from a tree alongside our dirt road.

Working Girl

I've gotta tell ya: Working four days a week has really cut into my prime-time spring gardening time. But I'm still really loving the job, so I shouldn't complain. And seeing as how my friends in Minnesota just spent today shoveling 6 inches of snow, I'm damn thankful.

I'm also thankful that the Barn Nursery has some pretty cool people working there. After a bit of badgering, the dude in charge of perennials, Craig, had Mason and me over to check out his yard. People, it was truly magical.  It was a wild mix of whimsy and wonder, just packed full of the most fantastic selection of trees, shrubs and perennials. We had a lovely evening of beer on tap, shrimp off the grill -- and as a bonus, a bounty of viburnum saplings and other plants that quickly found a home in my burgeoning garden. Below is one of the many viburnums he gave me, this one a precious "shasta" from horticulture guru Don Egolf. Trust me, you should be impressed. This baby is going to be stunning in a few years!!

In other news, Mason's been laboring intensely on splitting the logs from a massive oak we felled weeks ago to make room for solar panels. The wood's grain looks like shredded wheat inside, greatly complicating his efforts. Just ask Colleen -- she helped split some while she was here two weeks ago.

And I spent the past two days roto-tilling one-and-a-half yards of compost into a stretch of dirt that will become our last little patch of grass up here on Flat Top.  As long as tonight's storms don't wash away all my efforts, I should be able to get the seeds planted tomorrow ... after work.

Guns and Gardens: Flat Top Edition

Our friend and former Star Tribune co-worker Colleen came to visit us for a long weekend. After four days here, she's convinced we could open a boutique B&B/adventure destination here called Hillbilly Holiday, which would feature survival hikes through the woods, target shooting, tree-trunk rolling and her personal favorite: log splitting.  And after all that calorie-burning, there's the hammock, Mason's fabulous homebrews and my penchant for cooking too much food. Finish the evening off with a bonfire (which we did) and we may just have a money-maker!!

Alas, we did our best to show her a good time, and we also abused her just a bit with lots of firewood splitting (she has a blister to prove it) and an afternoon of shrub planting. (See those cute yellow Kaleidoscope Abelias we planted alongside the new gathering area? That table is a new feature of the area, too; I salvaged it from a Minnesota neighbor's trash years ago and finally got around to painting and varnishing it last week.)

Today was our last day together, so we did a little tour of downtown Chattanooga, enjoyed good food and cocktails at the Boathouse on the river, then came home to a little target practice. Only Mason excelled at clay target shooting, but Colleen is a pretty mean shot with a pistol. Me? Realllllly not my thing. At all.

Hellebore Porn

I've been converted into a hellebore fan after reading Margaret Roach's first book (about checking out from her high-powered job with Martha Stewart and blissing out on gardening) and her blog, awaytogarden.com. I bought this hellebore, above, after reading that book when I first arrived on the mountain, and I'm ready to buy about 50, oh maybe 100, more. Hellebores are evergreens, love shade and shoot up these gorgeous flowers in late winter and early spring. Mine's been blooming for at least a month now. Stunning.

I still haven't made my first purchase at the Barn (my new employer), but it will definitely happen next week. I've finished shaping up that new backyard gathering area here, so now I need a little landscaping to set it all off. I'm thinking blueberry bushes, combined with some evergreen shrubs. It's always a challenge to find the right mix that doesn't look too suburban for the middle of the forest.

Today Mason celebrated the return of his main chainsaw (after a replacement part finally arrived). He took down three small maples (each about 40 feet tall) and a small oak (about 40 feet, too) to make room for downing a 70-foot oak that's got to come down for the solar panel project. He wore himself out, taking the small ones out by the roots (plus taking down a pair of dead "sourwood" trees that we have to split tomorrow for firewood, as spring is refusing to arrive), so the massive oak may not come down for a few days.

Meanwhile, can I bitch about the weather? On Tuesday, I worked 8 hours. Outside. In 40-degree weather. (That morning an inch of snow covered our yard.) It almost made my newspaper days look pleasant (almost, if I wasn't hearing about how miserable my former co-workers are ...). And the average temp here for that day? Supposed to be 67. Ugh. This prolonged winter is KILLING US!

And yes, we once again have run out of firewood and have been scavenging to keep ourselves warm at night until the real spring arrives. Mason's already built a bigger firewood storage area for next year, so maybe we'll finally get it right for our fourth winter in the woods.

Up tomorrow: A trailer load of free mulch in Soddy Daisy to tidy up some other deserving areas.

It Had To Happen

No, no, this isn't our back yard. (Yet.) Ha! I wish. This is an early spring photo from the shrub section of the Barn Nursery, my new employer. Yup, I'm a working girl again. I scored a job at the best nursery in town, only for spring, but I may possibly be able to stay on longer.  So far, I'm loving it. I get to help customers pick out plants, and even do some landscape design when a customer wants it; there's also lots of watering and deadheading, not to mention heavy lifting and constant walking around the acre's worth of plants. I work in the perennial, tree and shrub area -- pure heaven!!

Now after two years of "vacation," it's been an adjustment. (For example, I have to set an alarm clock now for the first time after decades of night-shift work. AND ... we had to buy a battery-operated alarm clock, as we don't run our precious electricity 24/7, and the cell phone alarms are unreliable, as the clock function jumps back and forth between Central and Eastern time. Our lives are tough.)

But the extra cash will come in handy for that guest cabin, not to mention my gardening addiction. It's been an adjustment for Mason, too, who has strict instructions on NO CHAINSAW work while I'm not around.

Stay tuned for the photos of the plants I blow my first paycheck on.

The Back Yard: From Embarrassment to Tiki Bar

Mark it: It took eight days of bonfires -- and 10 giant contractor bags full of trash -- and our backyard embarrassment is gone. See above? That's the ash pile from the last night of burning, and beyond that, where you see the freshly roto-tilled swath of forest floor? That's where the 12-foot-high brush pile used to be. Some damn fine dirt under that brush pile, by the way; I already stole some for the garden.

No snakes were encountered. The only injury was to Mason's hair, eyebrows and eyelashes; my Pyro Man sometimes gets a bit too close to the fire. The hair was due for a trim anyway, but we had to cut it a bit shorter than usual to tend to the yellow, crispy ends.

In between our burning chores, I worked on our new backyard gathering area. Mason calls it the future tiki bar, but it's got a way to go still. Here's the preview:

In the rear left, you'll see our new firewood pile (Attention NYT readers: we're wild and crazy Tennesseans, so it's stacked bark up AND down). That's fresh firewood for next season, from trees we've taken down to clear room for the upcoming solar panels. Meanwhile, our firewood stockpile for this season might last us another five or six cold nights, so, yes, we might be back to scavenging until spring is in full swing.

And one final note. Spring is starting to sprout here on Flat Top. Redbud trees are already blooming in town, but here, we're just starting to see daffodils sprout and little green buds on shrubs. All that gray you see in the top photo? Give us four more weeks, and the same shot will be awash in green! Our giant maples are already budding out, and check out my cute little lungwort in the front bed: