Clapboard or shingle: which works better?
Colin White
Martha’s Vineyard Construction, West Tisbury
The short answer is that shingles work the best.
There’s nothing wrong with clapboards. Downtown Edgartown is clapboards and paint. The problem is the paint. Moisture migrates through the house, from the warmth and humidity, to condense on the cold surface in the wintertime. You’ve seen clapboards that blister and have to be painted every year
or two. That’s moisture trapped behind the paint. Blisters are full of water. Paint is blistering and moisture needs to be taken out.
When I ran into this problem, I kept using better and better paint, trying to solve it. That made it worse. The better the paint, the more it traps. The solution is to have a ventilated space behind the clapboards.
Clapboards, unpainted, don’t weather as well as shingles. They are made of red cedar or mahogany, and look darker, which is not the Island look. If they’re painted, the clapboards themselves can last forever. It’s the paint that’s a nuisance.
What sort of grass stays greenest during a drought?
Jeff Verner
Verner Fine Gardens Inc., Edgartown
Fescue holds up, as it has more drought tolerance. Bluegrass fescue can tolerate our winters, and it looks good in the spring and the fall. In the drought of summer, fescues tend to keep a deeper color. That’s where the original idea of blends came about, to have a nice-looking lawn for three seasons.
A lot of fescues are in clump form; you [used to] need more seed to make it look like a solid stand. Now they have developed fescues that are capable of rhizome production, so they behave like typical bluegrass and perennial rye grass. The more you cut it, the more it grows, so it colonizes better.
Twenty or thirty years ago, you didn’t want to use perennial rye grass in a nice-looking lawn because it has really coarse blades. The higher-price grasses tend to be the most thinly bladed. They have nice color and are more disease-resistant overall.
Perennial rye is cheaper. Due to experimentation, they offer some pretty nice perennial rye blends these days – drought-tolerant and they hold up under a lot of foot traffic. In the finer looking lawns that people like on the Vineyard, fescue is going to be the most drought-tolerant.
Indoors and out, what paints are best in a salt-air climate?
Bill Bailey
Bryant and Bailey Restorations, Edgartown
Your best paint job is your last one. Oil paint or latex? It depends on how it’s prepped. If you do all the prep work, then I would go with oil primer and latex surface. Latex contracts and expands because it’s plastic. Oil paint is a harder surface. Latex didn’t used to be as good.
It also depends on how it was prepped before. If you get it done right, you don’t have to worry. That’s why you get in trouble with estimates. A lot of people don’t realize that a lot of the work is in prep.
When we started twenty-six years ago, we were one of only five or six painters. Mr. Dennis Gibson is an Edgartown painter. I had the pleasure of working
after him – he’s semi-retired. You go behind a house he’s done, you know it’s done right. So I look good. It’s the last-paint-job concept.
What’s the easiest vegetable to grow and eat within the space of a summer?
Andrew Woodruff
Whippoorwill Farm, West Tisbury
I’m struggling between two. One is the green bean known as E-Z Pick that comes from Johnny’s Select Seeds in Winslow, Maine. It’s incredibly rich and delicious and holds its flavor even as the bean matures. It was new this year and probably the most exciting new vegetable.
Beans are pretty hard to mess up. Basically, plant them four to five inches apart, maybe two feet between rows, and about an inch deep. They’re a very vigorous plant.
It takes fifty-three days from when you plant to harvest. Plant after the last frost, which is the first of June to be safe, and you can be eating them in mid-to-late July. This year with a warm fall, we were harvesting beans into October. It’s dependent on where you live on the Island, because different parts are warmer. Vineyard Haven is warmer than West Tisbury.
Salad greens are my other choice. We usually grow six to eight kinds, plus a couple of varieties of lettuce mixed in. They grow in about thirty days, so if you want to do multiple plantings, it gives you an opportunity to take advantage of multiple crops. Mesclun greens or baby greens are popular these days. They’re fun to grow, grow fast, but often need protection from insects. Sow them very lightly in the soil, about a quarter of an inch deep.
What should you do if you find powder-post beetles in the attic?
John Early
John G. Early Contractor and Builder, Vineyard Haven
When they’re in there working, you can hear them. A little creaking. I lived in an old house once that had an active infestation of powder-post beetles and some of the framing was exposed and there were little piles of sawdust.
First thing I would do is call up a professional. Get a licensed insect-pest controller. We have a couple of knowledgeable ones on-Island. Most builders take out a pocketknife and start poking to see how much deterioration there is. [You must fumigate] the house with insecticide, building a tent around the house. That usually takes a couple of days.
Depending on what you find, you may have to do some serious, remedial structural work. Sometimes you replace beam for beam. Damage usually goes beyond timbers; sheathing and boards can be infected. Often the insects keep themselves inside the timber and you can find more than half the cross-section of a timber is gone. Insect damage can be a Pandora’s box. Most of the old houses have some kind of history of insect infestation.
We generally use pressure-treated sills, and they are a deterrent to powder-post beetles. Sometimes we put metal termite shields between concrete and wood. You have to satisfy the building inspector, and put more structure back in the affected area. The inspection and enforcement of building codes is more rigorous and complete than it was several decades ago.
