Saturday I had hoped to drag my out of town guest on the Columbia City Garden tour, but she was too busy going to weddings.  Apparently EVERYBODY was too busy doing other stuff, so I ended up going myself, which was not too bad.  I got a late start, and only had 2 hours to do the whole thing, which wasn't too bad...I made it to 17 of 18 houses, walking about 2 miles total, I think.  It was a really nice reason to be out for a walk on a gorgeous day, and an excellent excuse to check out the back yards of strangers, which is just fun.  I saw a lot of great plants, and got all kinds of ideas for my own yard.  Unfortunately, I think to really do my yard right I will have to take out tons of grass, and create beds along the most of the fence lines.  This could take years.  But that was a cool thing about the walk, is the folks sharing were really happy to talk about how long it took them to get there, and while some were amazingly fast and organized, others just did a bit each year.

Things I saw I would really like to have at my place someday:

1)  purple gazing ball - so pretty!
2)  more orange flowers
3)  bee houses
4)  chickens!
5)  little pond with fish
6)  tiny French(?) strawberries
7)  more raised vegetable beds

If you like gardening, I totally recommend checking out one of these tours sometime.

Tons of pictures at my flickr site, for those of you in the know.  If you can identify some of the plants, that would be great.  I'm hopeless at remembering names of stuff.

I've been very concerned about the willow in my front yard.  When I bought the house, it was wee and quite cute.  (And wow...look how green the lawn once was!)  At the time, I hoped it would get big enough that I couldn't see the old guy across the street peering at me from his windows.  Now you can't even see his house!  lara7 calls it the Womping Willow.  It is creeping over the walk in a bad way.  I'm more worried about it reaching the lines above (which it appears to have this summer).

But there is some good news.  A few months ago my friend Paul sent me a link to the city's Sewer Card lookup.  This is brilliant.  It shows you where the sewer line runs (The red lines...I added the tree and blacked out the numbers).  I was totally worried that the willow was digging down into my sewer line.  My neighbor (same guy) had warned me the sewer ran under the next door driveway.  And it is totally true!  A pain if it ever needs to be dug up, but very unlikely to be impacted by tree roots.  Hooray!

Next step - contact PlantAmnest  for advice.