With a Little Help from our Friends...

August 2009: We're still very busy planting. We were fortunate enough recently to have our friend Glenn and his daughter, Caitlin, offer their help. Even our dog, Mackenzie, wants in on the fun!

Shelby and Caitlin put the Adirondack chairs together for our brick patio after Shelby had filled in all the spaces between the bricks with dirt/clay.

Glenn has a funny hat but we'll certainly let him come over and help again!

Plant list to follow soon. We're still waiting on the nursery to deliver more plants that have been out of stock. Right now we're busy preparing the walkways for the river gravel which was delivered recently...stay tuned...

Irrigation!

 August 2009:  Here is Mike putting in the drip-line irrigation. A fun and exciting activity, especially in 100 degree weather!

The native and/or drought-resistant plants shown here are: daylilies clethra beauty berry sweet shrub piedmont azalea

Walkway is Finished!

 August 2009:  With a little help once again from our friend Glenn and his daughter Caitlin, we started on the walkway around to the back of the house. The first step was clearing the path, then digging the trenches for the brick edging, then laying the landscape fabric (made from recycled plastic bottles), and then finally spreading the river gravel.

Quite a chore, but doesn't it look nice!

More Native Plants!

August 2009: After two months of looking at the mulched construction waste in our yard, we decided that a covering of local pine straw would look best. Although we are glad we did keep a lot of construction waste out of the local landfills and we know the mulched leftovers will eventually provide food for the dirt, we are definitely happier with the look of the pine straw.

The native and/or drought tolerant plants seen in these pictures are: Virginia Sweet Spire (native means regional by the way) Daylilies Butterfly Blue Scabiosa

Serviceberry Tree Golden St. John's Wort Oakleaf Hydrangea Sago Palm Spiderwort Switchgrass

Blanket Flower Arizona Sun Coneflower Inkberry Holly Carolina Allspice Shasta Daisy Black-eyed Susan American Elm Flowering Crabapple Tree Husker Red Illicium Spirea

Beauty Berry Black-eyed Susan Coreopsis Redbud Tree Sweetshrub Carolina Allspice

Rain Garden

September 2009: We are hitting the home stretch on our green home project and have finally finished the rain garden. For those of you who don't remember, a rain garden is an ecologically sound way of dispersing excess rainwater on your property. In our case, the excess rainwater comes from our underground rainwater collection tank that is fed from all of our roof gutters. It only takes two inches of rain to fill our thousand-gallon tank so we must be prepared for it to send water through the overflow tube into our backyard.

The area it overflows to is the rain garden, which must contain plants that can handle both floods and droughts. The building of the rain garden was a multi-step process: 1. Dig a three-foot deep pear-shaped hole, 8' wide by 12' long. 2. Make sure the hole is contoured to slope away from the house. 3. Re-fill the hole with a 1.5' layer of river gravel followed by native soil conditioned with manure and mulch. 4. Plant the plants and lay a ground-cover of mulch.

The plants you see here are up to that task: Blue Flag Iris Soft Rush Southern Shield Fern Milkweed

We're almost done with all the landscaping. As you can see in these pictures, we have started on Maggie's raised beds vegetable garden. Stay-tuned...

Great Publicity for "Going Green"!

October 2019: While we were traveling the past two weeks, The State newspaper's Kristy Rupon and photographer Erik Campos did a wonderful article on our new home. In case you missed it, here is the online version which includes more photos than the actual paper did. Enjoy! http://www.thestate.com/local/story/960600.html We're hoping this will help increase interest in green building in our state...Thanks Kristy and Erik! Our next step is the visit from the termite man: Tim from Gregory Pest Control. He came out and inspected the house recently and will soon be installing the environmentally-friendly Sentricon bait system.

We'll keep you posted.

Termite Control

October 2019: When we planned our new home we also knew we needed termite protection once it was built. Our builder researched "green" methods and found only one that fit the bill: Sentricon. Gregory Pest Control in Columbia recently cam out and installed the system.

The Sentricon^® Termite Colony Elimination System was introduced in 1995. Rather than saturating the soil with liquid chemical solution, it uses termite bait, manipulating termite biology and behavior to destroy the termite colony.

It is the only termite control product ever to earn the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award, one of the federal government’s top environmental honors.

• The Sentricon System uses only a few grams of active ingredient on each property, compared to the hundreds of gallons of chemical solution used in a traditional liquid chemical treatment.

• The active ingredient in their termite bait is targeted specifically at the molting process in the termite’s life cycle, a process not present in mammals.

• The bait is strategically placed in Sentricon stations around the perimeter of the house.

• The premier bait used in the Sentricon System was the first termite treatment active ingredient accepted for registration by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the strict requirements of the Reduced Risk Pesticide Initiative. This distinction is based on its low impact on human health, low toxicity to nontarget organisms (birds, fish and plants) and low potential for groundwater contamination when compared to other commercially available termite treatments.

• The beauty of the Sentricon System is that the termite bait works just slowly enough to be spread throughout the colony before termites catch on.

• Several times per year, Gregory Pest Control will come out to monitor the Sentricon System for termites, bait to eliminate termite colonies and then monitor again for any new termite colonies that might invade the area. Each bait tube has a bar code to make keeping track of the termite activity easy.
• Gregory Pest control also crawled into our comfortable air conditioned and padded crawl space and sprayed the underside of our house with Tim-Bor, a borate. Borate treated wood is on the rise as a safe and long-lasting method to protect homes from wood destroying organisms. Borates prevent fungal decay and are deadly to termites, carpenter ants and roaches - but safe for people, pets and the environment. Borates interfere with termites' metabolic pathways when ingested through feeding or grooming, effectively killing them. Surviving termites avoid the protected wood products.

So we are locked and ready against termites...