Virginia Sweetspire

We have many of these on three sides of the house - this week, they have been rather spectacular.

The Carolina Silver Bells featured in the center of the photo needs some pruning.  This tree has matured nicely for us and in another year or so will offer much needed afternoon shade in our bedroom.

Winter Storm Jonas

Just before noon on Friday, so someplace in the middle of the dire predictions for record snowfall here in the mountains, and we're not very impressed.

Those are my foot prints, heading out to the edge of the driveway and back. We might have had 2.5 or 3 inches of snow over night and into the early daylight hours, but - and this is pretty much right as predicted - it switched to a "wintry mix" just before 9:00 and now it's simply raining.  Between the rain and the occasional weak bits of sunshine, our streets are clearing themselves.

Right now, the scariest thing is the weight of the wet snow on the evergreens, like the juniper in the middle foreground of this photo.  You can see the black asphalt ribbon of our street on the far right.

Norris spent a long day yesterday, his first as a part-time employee of the City of Asheville FD, in the midst of emergency management preparations.  We are wondering what our friends in other parts of the area are seeing.

What We Learned About Rocks

The flagstone walk to our front door was showing serious signs of deterioration.

Here is a before picture - it does not look too awful at this resolution - 

 

... but close up the wide mortar joints were in trouble with serious cracking and loss of material. 

We were never all that happy with the mortaring, nor with the work on the front step, which had some interesting gaps on the outer edge.  The next photo shows the edge of the step overlooking the path, with a nice gap that you could lose a heel in and that was not the only one like that. The photo also illustrates another serious issue - even if the mortar could have been chipped away and repaired, our flagstones were delaminating.  The chips on the step at the lower center are the broken remains of a layer from the rock on the right, but you can see the same problem in the stone just right of middle at the top of the photo, and this deterioration was happening on a majority of the stones.

As we remember it, our builder sent us to the stone yard where we wandered around looking at stacks of rocks in cages, boulders, and stones suitable for a fireplace hearth.  We finally found someone to ask where we would find the flagstones for a path.  We were pointed to that part of the vast acreage and looked them over and picked a stack based on the color.  Little did we know, these stones were not appropriate for our purpose due to this inherent propensity to delaminate in a short period of time.


We hired local the local stone artists who had recently completed a beautiful sign for the town of Weaverville, and are working on a labyrinth for the First Baptist Church in Asheville.  We can only say good things about their work.  http://hammerheadstoneworks.com/  They do not use mortar at all, and typically do not install over a concrete base, as our walk had been done.  They figured out they could raise the level of the walk in some places and would only need to remove some of the concrete right next to the driveway, and when they actually started the demo work and did their leveling, they figured out the level of the front door and the driveway was nearly the same so they decided to eliminate the front step altogether.

The first photos will show some of the demolition and prep work.  The color difference under the overhang in the first photo is because of some rain.  The original concrete step is actually still there, under the gravel, with the rest of the area built up with more loose gravel to level it up.

 

This is the end of the sidewalk nearest the driveway.

And now a series of progress photos - three of these pallets of brightly colored Tennessee limestone were delivered (along with loads of gravel and dirt.)

 

 

 

Finally we have photos taken when they finished today about noon.

 The narrow gaps between the stones are filled with colored pebbles for effect - they serve no structural purpose.

Rainwater will wash some of them away - we were left with a bucket full of replacement pebbles.
 

Above the clouds

On his drive to Charlotte yesterday, Norris snapped a few pictures on the Blue Ridge Parkway just above our neighborhood, near the Ox Creek entrance.  Click photos for a larger view.

This one was actually at the Haw Creek overlook.

Icy morning in the mountains

Beech Community Center and ice on Little Snowball Mtn on the left and possibly Craggy on the right.

A long time - but not forever

Last week we hiked up to the top of the ridge on our property and looked for the fallen chestnut - this photo shows how it looked in November, 2009 -

But several years later, it no longer looks like an inviting bench -

 

The tree is probably not entirely dead.  This photo we took in June, 2008, showed a proliferation of shoots from the roots.  With no leaves in November, we couldn't tell what was still alive, but we saw no indications of blight on the tiny trees growing near the old trunk.

But by the time they reach reproductive age, they will have it.  The good news is the American Chestnut Foundation has been planting their 15/16 American chestnut/Asian chestnut hybrids since 2009  - you can read about it on their website or in this recent article in the Asheville Citizen-Times.

Weekend trip to Chickamauga

Last weekend, we used the occasion of a Quilt Show in Chattanooga to visit Norris' family. On Saturday morning, 7-year-old great-nephew Kason had a football game on the big field at the Gordon-Lee High School. 

The players are not very big and seemed very far away, but you can pick Kason out of the crowd because he's a head taller than the rest of his team. He's in the center of the picture above, with his toes on the 40 yard line. He played both offense and defense, and wherever he was in the line, the opposing team put two players against him. No throwing at this age: the quarterbacks just hand the ball off for running plays.

Here's another photo showing the Kason in the number 10 jersey.

We will not report the score as it was rather lopsided in favor of the visiting team. It was the first game of the season, and we'll be eager to learn how Kason does in a few more weeks.

There was other business to attend to, but we met up with most of the family on Sunday at the pizza place. Cailey and Kheley posed for a photo with their Uncle Tevin.

Norris and DeWayne spent most of the time we were there talking about radios.

 

 DeWayne had to place four phones on the table in addition to that yellow and black radio before ordering. Happily, they were all quiet so he could enjoy his meal.  But they were still talking radios all the way back to our cars.  Here Norris shows DeWayne and Marvin one of the finest of the new ones in use in our county.

After lunch, we stopped at Marvin and Marla's to admire their new deck and porch-under-construction - already useable, providing shade and place for lots of seating.

The floor and roofing are all done, just rails and screens, and maybe a finish to the ceiling of this very large new space to enjoy and entertain outside.

When we got home, we noticed our meadow of Coreopsis and Cosmos had pretty much given way to a Yellow Zinnia show - this is the view from our deck

 Here's a closeup as the sun finally reaches the lower half of the field. You can see there are a few stray orange and pink zinnias in the mix along with the maroon centers of the Plains Coreopsis, but overall it's an impressive show of yellow and green.

New Monument in Asheville

When we arrived at Shindig last night, we saw this granite monument, at the top of a flight of stairs between the city and county buildings on Pack Square.

Cheryl had just read The Man Who Flew the Memphis Belle a few weeks ago, so she was familiar with the scene portrayed on the monument. In a stop at his Asheville home during the crew's cross-country bond selling tour, Colonel Morgan accepted a dare to fly his B-17 between the buildings where the monument is now located.  Here they are, seen from the other side.during the show. It seems to us like a daring thing to do.

 

Our Shindig announcer mentioned there was another B-17 veteran in the audience - and it happened he was sitting just two chairs over from us, so Cheryl went to meet him during a pause in the performance.  He is 89 years old and flew 33 missions in Europe, arriving there after D-Day. Our photo of him didn't turn out so here's a closeup of the inscription on the monument to Col. Morgan instead - 

 

And unrelated, but not meriting a post of their own, we took a few photos of our "wildflower meadow" this morning after we walked. We chose all yellow flowers for our reseeding - Zinnias, Cosmos, and Plains Coreopsis (which does have a maroon center.)

As of today, we have only one zinnia blossom, but there are a lot of zinnia plants out there. We got this seed out so late we didn't know if we'd have any flowers at all this season.

Drainage overhaul - part 3

For this final installment, we move under the deck.  During the deluge, the retention pond, with the drain blocked by rocks and forest debris, filled up and overflowed. This being a mountain, the water continued to flow long after the rain stopped, which is when Norris and Cheryl were unclogging the drain and removing the dam from under the bridge. The overflow outlet functioned as designed; however, the amount of water that obeyed the Law of Gravity and flowed along that route did some serious erosion damage under the deck -

 

The rhubarb in the foreground formerly sat on a smooth bed of mulch, and those gutter drain tubes were both well buried.

The destructive power of the water continued down to the stepping stones that connect the front door to the curved sets of stairs that lead down and across the property to the driveway. This photo does not adequately show the scale of the landslide, but it's the best we have - 

There's not much dirt under the front corner of that large slab of rock, and the top wood step is suspended over the edge of the hole. More erosion took away any soil and rock that was not held by those clethra visible on the left.

The solution was first of all to locate the large drain pipe that comes out of the large concrete drain now surrounded by the retention pond.  That was a lot more work than any of us imagined. When we went through all our house construction photos, we discovered that the drain had been installed just after the foundation was poured, before the kitchen was framed. There was so much more activity  after that, we did not realize how deep the crew would have to dig to find that pipe.

 

Here's another shot of that hole, in case you can't see the black pipe.

 

The above photos were taken on May 18th. Digging continued to create channels for new connecting underground drainage pipes, shown here on the 25th. All the digging was done by hand. (The cracked drain to the right was replaced).

We can't remember what the size of that pipe is, but here's a photo of the same-size new section waiting to be buried.

This photo was taken from the deck looking down as the landscaping crew got ready for the installation of a new "y" pipe.

In sequence:

 

They had pleasant weather for this job. Meanwhile, the wildflower meadow's dead remains were mowed down and carted away.  Just standing on that slope is hard work, but the young man is not resting, he's trying to repair the trimmer.

New wildflower seeds -- just three varieties of flowers -- will be scattered over this slope in another week. We hope having a limited variety of desired plants will help us to identify and control the weeds.  (This may be a hopeless undertaking for us.)

This next series of photos was taken after the mulching was completed. This slab covers the open end of that huge pipe. The whole trench is lined in rock.

This is the area that has the new "y" pipe installation. The mulch blowers also covered up a good part of the stone path.

Here's another before shot of that area of washout under the deck taken back in April just after the rain -

 And here it is after the mulching this week. Norris had to go back out with the leaf blower to get all that mulch off the rhubarb leaves. The mulch was not supposed to cover up all the new river rock lining the trench, but we have no fear that it will wash out should we have another overflow problem like this one.

This photo shows the yard where the drainage pipes from the downspouts and that big drain we have just been looking at all come out. We have some iris and day lilies planted around the openings so they aren't gaping holes in the landscape.

 

The same area viewed from above.

 We hope that's it for drainage remediations.