Fall Bloomers Spring Back

Up through the construction debris--the sawdust, the bent nails and the bits of stucco and concrete--came the fall-blooming crocuses, like some floral phoenix rising from the dust and dirt laid down by remodeling.

We’re nearly finished with a small addition, and the garden has suffered, mostly from neglect, during the last three months of construction. As if to remind us that they were still there, up came the crocuses between the front stepping stones last week.

Remodeling tends to be an all-consuming project, even when someone else is doing the work. If you’re not at Home Depot buying light fixtures or bathroom sinks, you’re lying awake at night trying to figure out what color the grout should be between the tile or whether the pocket door to the dining area should be 3 or 4 feet wide.

In the meantime, the garden coasted, until those crocuses reminded us that it was time to start paying attention again and almost time to landscape around the new construction.

The contractor has been very careful of the garden and cut only a 10-foot-wide swath for scaffolding and materials, so most of the garden is intact.

And there’s still plenty of garden. My wife and I spend a lot of time outdoors in the garden, so we didn’t fill the yard with house as is too often the case in California. I’ve seen remodels that you can barely walk around, and I ask myself, “Why live in this glorious climate if you can’t be outdoors?�

But after raising three children in a house with one bathroom and a kitchen smaller than most new closets, it was time to add on.

It would have been nice to have done this a little earlier in the game, but we really had to wait until the kids were off at college. Living through a remodel is tough enough when there are just two in the house, crammed into one small bedroom, living without a kitchen.

To make the loss of garden space less noticeable, I had let (cleverly, I think) some shrubs next to the house grow way too big. Then at the last moment, I took them out and substituted a room addition! It wasn’t exactly a seamless switch, but one week there were big, bland shrubs and the next, new rooms. We hardly noticed the change.

We added only about 250 square feet, but that is enough to nearly double the size of the kitchen and our bedroom and add a new bath. Conversely, we subtracted only about 250 square feet from the garden.

By allowing the contractor some room to work, we were left with about 10 by 40 feet to landscape, and we still had a back garden more than 60 feet deep, full of roses, Japanese anemones, coneflowers, coreopsis, heliotrope and strawflowers, late summer flowers that bloomed through the whole process.

When the work outdoors was done, I was a bit surprised at how much debris ended up on the soil. I think the contractor was a bit surprised at the pile I made one weekend, of soil left over from the foundation excavation and soil contaminated with paint and stucco.

Excess Dirt

The building crew had taken most of it away, but a lot had simply gotten spread out on top of the old garden soil, raising its level to an unacceptable height while concealing all sorts of debris that probably wouldn’t do the garden any good.

In this day of city-supplied trash cans, getting rid of excess dirt is no longer a matter of simply putting it out on the curb in boxes and bags, so you want to make sure you don’t end up with more than you need after the contractor leaves.

You also don’t want to be finding little shards of broken glass, rusty nails and sharp metal stucco lath as you dig in the garden.

To find out what all those bits of stucco and concrete would do to the garden, I called soil scientist Garn Wallace, who has tested many kinds of soil at his Wallace Laboratories in El Segundo, to see what kinds of changes I, or any other remodeler, might expect (you simply can’t get rid of it all).

I should have called him earlier, because his first piece of advice would have saved me a lot of digging and sifting. He suggested putting down plastic around the walls to catch the excess stucco and concrete. If you don’t do this, he said, remove the top two inches of soil near the building along with the debris.

Both concrete and stucco secrete chemicals that make a soil extremely alkaline at first. Stucco has a pH of 10 to 12.

Luckily, a good rainy season or lots of irrigations will leach much of this out of the soil in a year’s time, so the soil ends up with a pH of about 7.7, but for a few years, the soil right next to a new concrete foundation will be too alkaline for azaleas or camellias.

He even suggested a simple way to check the alkalinity. Pour a little battery acid or even vinegar on the soil and see if it fizzes. If it does, it’s still too alkaline.

To help the leaching process, he suggested adding some gypsum and soil amendments to speed drainage, which I have done.

I had already followed his other advice, to keep all the washings of the concrete and stucco mixers out of the garden and even to keep paint residue out. He said the pigments in paints are toxic to plants, even if the paints themselves are not.

In older homes, it’s very important to keep any chips of the old lead-based paint out of the garden.

More Shade

Because it is on the north side of the house and shades the garden in winter, we tried to keep the addition low, but its shadow still stretches across half of the garden at this time of year. This is something architects seldom consider, but gardeners should.

It’s also a very good reason to not add a second story on the north side of a house. These kinds of gardening decisions are best made early on in the planning, as it’s much easier to avoid too much shade than it is to garden in it.

We also made sure the addition wrapped in an L-shape around an existing tree, which lightly shaded a patio. It was too pretty to lose (a pink trumpet tree, Tabebuia impetiginosa, and we even made it part of the new kitchen by putting a clear skylight in, so we could look up into its flowering branches (and check the weather).

The skylight helps bring the garden indoors, another thing to consider in the planning process. Remodels don’t have to destroy a garden, and gardens shouldn’t have to play second fiddle to the house.

If you’re going to use a landscape designer, have him or her sit in on the early stages of planning.

I had hoped to have everything done by early fall so I could take my time planting at this favored time of the year. But I’ll have to hurry. It’s getting late in the season, and we’re already building the first fires in the fireplace (using all the wood we carefully saved during the construction, of course). Plants don’t grow as fast when it starts getting cold.

Waiting this late did let us take advantage of the gentle rains we’ve already had, which have made the soil easier to dig in (once it dried a little).

All our new shade-tolerant plants are sitting in their nursery containers, and maybe this weekend I can finally find the time to plant. The debris is gone, and the soil is prepared.

For me, the remodel isn’t over until plants are in the ground and happily growing.