Hey congrats.....bet you are excited...looks great
dee in cedar city-who is learning to deal w/ this clay & rock

Hey! Sorry I hadn't checked in here for almost a week. That's looking VERY cool, Bindersbee! Will you create a sitting area under it? What are you planning to grown on it?

This year, I'm growing some Lab-lab bean vines (they get cool purple stems and pods) on my arbor. They're still only a few inches tall, in pots on my deck, but I hope they start growing fast so I can get them out there.

We're going to do a sandstone patio under the pergola. It's 14 x 14' so pretty large. We'll use the larger stones and then create a path to the side of the house. I have some swings and such to hang from the pergola, a shade cover that will install underneath the upper cross pieces and it's plumbed for misters to suspend from the structure to cool us off while we're all sitting under it. I already have a large concrete patio for dining and BBQing so we planned for this space to be more of a relaxed secondary seating area. The low dry-stack wall is also at seating height.

I'm thinking of putting in a Weeping Blue Atlas Cedar behind the pergola and '5 Butt Rock' (as we named it since the whole family can sit on that large, flat boulder) along the fenceline. They grow rather irregular but can be trained and I'd like to hide as much of my neighbor's ugly chain link fence as possible!

The sandstone patio is the last of the big cha-ching projects for the backyard. Whew! This is the 3rd year we've been working on the backyard.

Side note- did you go to the Sunrise Breakfast? I ended up being unable to attend. It was my twin's birthday and the last day of the school year. Crazy chaos.

Hey Bindersbee,

Your plans sound great for the pergola. Being a designer, you have so many more plant ideas to choose from than most of us would think of. That Blue Atlas Cedar sounds cool. How about some thyme growing between the sandstone paver stones? That would smell nice, too, when stepped on.

I did go to the sunrise breakfast. You may recall it was a VERY stormy day! The thunder roared a little while they were speaking, and they had to have the sides closed on the bigtop tent, so we really didn't see much garden during the event. They pretty much canceled the garden tours, because it was raining buckets (but they said anyone who *really* wanted to tour it might be able to find a volunteer to guide them with an umbrella).

Anyway, it was a bit of a fundraising pitch, with a fancy brochure offering up benches and such that you could buy (for thousands of dollars) and get your name on as a donation. I think that's the work of my friend Cindy Kindred who does communications consulting for them. Hopefully, there were enough rich people there to have some impact! The only thing I really enjoyed about it was the nice people at my table, who included a couple that does flowerbed design work and invited me to come to their home and see their gardens.

I looked for you (which was hard not knowing what you look like!) but I kept an eye out for your name tag.

BTW, my wife and I have twins as well -- cute identical girls who just turned nine last month.