Creating A Winter Retreat With Canvas Walls & Winter Gardening Tips For Beginners

Creating a winter retreat/oasis with canvas walls and Winter gardening tips for beginners. A few seasons back, I worked with a canvas company to design and manufacture custom canvas walls to enclose one of my backyard pergolas. I’ve since made a few modifications (to both the pergola itself and the canvas walls) to ensure that we have a warm comfy space to enjoy with friends and family over the cold Portland months. I’ll show you how I’ve designed the walls to make them super easy to install (and take down), and discuss some other modifications that can be done when designing and installing canvas walls to make a 4 season oasis a really enjoyable, year-round, backyard retreat. In addition I will explain why it’s ok to cutting back an abutilon in winter.

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Abutilon

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Beckel Canvas Products
11266 SE 21st Ave, Milwaukie, OR 97222
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BACKYARD PERGOLA MAKEOVER | PORTLAND OREGON | LET’S GO ANTIQUE SHOPPING

Improvements To Winterizing My Pergola Oasis: https://youtu.be/7uI9VSIiC0g

Hosta Cleanup and Garden:

DIY Pergola Or Patio Oasis Ideas / Tips + Overwintering Plants:

How I Winterize and Turn My Pergola Into A Winter Tent Oasis:

Pergola Chiminea Experience, Tips and Suggestions | Portland, Oregon:

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► About Jscursions:
Jscursions was created to inspire others to be active and creative by providing Basic How-To Videos that include: Gardening (in the ground, containers and even on a roof-top), DIY Projects, Plant Names, Herbs, Landscaping, Winterizing Plants, Year-round Oasis Under A Pergola/Patio, and hopefully provide answers along the way. All of this, of course, while she continues to learn and share her mistakes.

Disclaimer: Jscursions is not a licensed herbalist and therefore cannot take any responsibility for any adverse effects. Always seek advice from a professional before using a plant medicinally.

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Welcome back and happy New Year oh my gosh cheers to the new year and today is the first day of the year and it is absolutely gorgeous outside I mean it the sun is out and it’s beautiful and it’s a great time for me to actually stop dragging my heels and start

Enclosing and Tiding up my small Pergo over here now I do this every year so you can always go check out those videos I will pin them up as much as I can up here now I’ve been asked many many times how do you pin those canvas walls up so

I’m going to kind of show you in more close-up detail how I do that so if you’re thinking of putting a perula and enclosing it uh you’ll kind of have an idea now one of the questions was asked about how I do it on metal well I don’t

Have metal but I can give you some ideas on that I also trimmed my be lawn over here so I’m going to show you how I did that and why I’m doing it in winter is it the right time to do that or not I will

Address those so with that you guys if you’re new to my channel welcome thank you so much for joining me and you guys I’m just going to jump in there and get started CU I have a lot to do now you may be wondering why on Earth

Are you uh pruning back this beyon in the middle of winter now definitely I would not be trimming this plant if it was out in the elements in my yard exposed to all the elements but because this is under a uh covered area plus I also enclose this in the winter months

This will never go dormant and this will continue to grow and Thrive for that reason this is why I’m taking a chance now can I kill it yeah I can kill it but again you know I can kill anything at any given time that I prune it um I

Don’t know if you guys recall on one of my previous videos how I trimmed my hot lip sopia and I did it in around the same time of the year and it hasn’t hurt them yet so as a gardener I find that uh trimming things and Taking Chances is

One way to learn what you should never do but again because this is in in a more protected area I find it that it’s safe enough for me to do this plus our temperatures have not Fallen below 40 deg this far and our more harsher winter

Months are kind of more more like in the mid of mid to late February that’s when we really will get much colder weather right now I figure we still have some uh 50 weather so it’s going to heal any of the wounds uh it’s in an enclosed area I

Will be adding the canvas walls on both sides because of that I feel that you know what we’ll experiment and see what happens come springtime that’s my reasoning for this plus I learn a lot I learn a lot from from uh doing things you know and stretching the

Limits you know sometimes you have to just kind of um really test your your ability as a gardener and see what actually works and what doesn’t and uh I find that a lot of the things that I do has never hurt anything and uh yeah and

That’s I just go by what I feel is right and a big part of it is the position of where the plant is in your yard or inside a enclosed area now doesn’t that look so much nicer now I will be taking all the covers off cleaning them up and putting them

Back cu come springtime I won’t have to do this Just It’s starting to get chilly okay so while I’m waiting for my coverage to dry I’m going to go ahead and put the canvas walls up and then I’ll show you really close up as to how I hook them up there now I had somebody mention that this is

Kind of dangerous it is is dangerous I don’t have it set up properly but trust me I take safety very serious and so I actually have that propped up to where it’s nice and solid so let me show you really quick up there and show you how I hook that

Up so do you see this hooks right here and I choose gold against the uh Cedar Wood because you can’t see it visually unless you’re really looking for them so how I hook it in there basically there’s the hook and then I just hook it in

There just like that that’s all I do and you don’t need a whole lot of hooks to hook it up cuz it’s not going to go anywhere now when I did my canvas walls I actually had them sew this uh they’re just kind of like a silk

String and they just sewed it like this so what I do with this silk is that I pull it on one side and I grab the other one so it’s nice and taut and I just wrap it around and you can do it more than one depends on how long you make

Them and then I just tie them what a little bow so it’s the next day you guys and um wasn’t able to completely complete what I was doing last night and now the rain is back so it was a good thing that I complet completely uh enclosed it let me

Back up because I didn’t completely um enclose it I partially enclosed it and I’ll kind of touch up on that a little bit but I uh like the fact that it is completely cleaned out which I absolutely uh love every time I close it up because it just gives me a whole

Fresh new look and it just feels clean when I go in there now and just being able to sit in something that’s nice and clean is always nice and it looks inviting and so that’s really a good reason to have an outdoor winter Oasis and I just absolutely love it so this is

What it looks like from the outside it looks really aesthetically pleasing now I did go overboard on the gromets over here I probably should have spaced them out like every other one but it’s better better to have more than not enough in my opinion and so for that

Reason I I’m fine with it now I did add grommets down below and that was basically to stake it down if I needed to and so I again use uh 10 stakes and uh that works perfectly fine for me now my only regret is that I didn’t measure

This apparently right so I didn’t take it all the way to the end but it still feels it really well it’s nice and tght now I was asked can you do this on metal well yes you can do this ribbons on metal you can do it

On wood you can do it on anything as long as it’s a post I would just suggest that if you’re going to have these uh silk ribbons put on to make sure that they’re really long it’s better to have them too long they’re not enough um the

Other option that you can do with both wood and metal is that you can do like boat snaps and so they have like a snap just like you wood on on you know pair jeans and you screw in the bottom part to the wood or the metal and then you

Add the top snap and then you can just snap it but what I don’t like about it is that once I take down these canvas walls you’re going to see you know these buttons all the way down down and to me that’s not aesthetically pleasing now if

You get um grommet or uh grommets or boat snaps and you have like say a black pergula or a steel perula that’s dark try to match that color and then it won’t be quite as visible but on wood on Cedar Wood um I just didn’t think that I

Would like that so I decided to go against that and these uh ribbons actually work fantastic so I have no regrets with uh doing that I would go with the umbrella material because it holds up fantastic I’ve had these for several years I’ve got a few Fray ends

At the bottom very minimal and they go up so easy so you can’t go wrong with canvas walls and uh and definitely add some windows because if you’re going to winterize any place in your pergula you want some light to filter in and allow that because it’s great for sto uh

Sewing seeds it’s great for over winterizing plants it’s great for so many reasons and also like I mentioned is that when you’re looking out you’re able to see your yard and see what’s happening out there so for that reason I absolutely love it and having plants inside your perula is beautiful

Thing to have because it’s kind of bringing the outdoors in so that’s my take on that let me know what you would do different if you were to build canvas walls and what would your design be like and what would you change from mine okay so let’s go around and check out the

Other side so in this canvas wall I wasn’t able to film because my camera died and I wasn’t aware of it at the moment but what I did here is that one thing that I do every year on this side because it is there’s really no overhang I mean there’s just a little

Lip up here but if the wind was to blow and the rain was to hit against that wood it might drip inside so just for added measure I just do packaging tape basically over along there and it’s very minimally uh visible but as you can see all the hooks you

Can’t really even tell that there’s hooks up uh unless you’re really looking so that makes it really nice so now let’s go in and then we’ll talk about this Windows so the nice thing about this canvas wall is that I put the zipper on both sides so that you’re able to close it in and not reaching outside I’m a little short so now on this side here you can’t actually stake it down like you can on that side

Because you don’t have the GI for opening and closing and just setting it apart it makes it more difficult so this part is fine it’s got protection from the house so you know if there’s any gust of wi and stuff be protected because of the house my only advice when

Making cars make sure that whatever Windows you put in that you do it when you first order it because anytime after that it’s considered rework and so you’re basically paying for almost doing it again one of my biggest regret and I learned this from last year when our

Temperature dipped down below uh you know 30 is that placing these plastic windows here here and as Grand as I made them this then gets colder which really affected my be lawn didn’t shed its leaves but it really got below the temperature that it was happy at so my regret is that I

Didn’t add some curtains over here that I could just roll up or roll down to give that added protection also be able to monitor what’s going on in here and it just kind of opened everything up into more of a really nice um area where

I can be able to look out to see what’s going on but let’s talk about my viewon because like I mentioned you know as a gardener you know you really kind of want to test yourself I mean if you don’t test yourself and you don’t fail you don’t know whether you know things

Are going to work out or not worst thing that I could have done to this plant right now by trimming it in the winter is that I may have affected the blooms for this year’s uh blooming cycle outside of that it’s not hurting the plant it’s not hurting the foliage as

Long as it’s in an enclosed area now if this was outside there’s no way in hell I would be trimming it in winter but given that I usually typically do it in Fall because it’s right before I close enclose this and it gives it a lot of healing time but again our temperatures

Haven’t dropped uh below uh 30° so uh we haven’t even gotten a very hard Frost yeah so for that reason I felt that it was safe enough and again the worst that can happen is that I might not get as many blooms but that’s about it so test

Yourself because as a gardener when you’re learning and you’re and you’re buying plants you know the only fa there is in my opinion is if you let it die because you neglect it to take care of it but always test yourself because that’s how you learn you know it’s

Sometimes it’s just trial and error so anyway but that’s enough about plants so the one thing that I added here which I think really kind of took this to the next level I mean there’s a lot of things that I can do in here to make it

It even more Cozier more elegant but we’re talking about an outdoor space so you make it whatever you feel is comfortable and to me this looks really comfortable but the one thing that’s easy to change out is either coverings pillows or even a rug and I absolutely

Love that black and white rug and it looks so much nicer and classier than it did with the previous rug that I had let me know what you think in the comments below so the one thing that I didn’t do was put the plastic tarp on this side or

On this side and the reason for it like I mentioned earlier our temperatures have been above freezing and so for that reason I decided not to put them up at least for now for the time being I don’t know we’ll see what happens if it starts uh you know sprink clean snow and

Glowing snow in here I may enclose it but you know we’ll see we’ll see what happens so with that you guys I really hope you enjoyed this and um thank you so much for watching I love you and I’ll see you guys on the next one