Posts Tagged garden

Gardening

It’s been a few years since I’ve had any vegetables in my raised beds, so today I went out and spent a bunch of money. Here’s the layout:

I’m sticking with tomatoes, peppers, and garlic in the main bed. I want stuff that will grow without too much intervention, like thinning or pruning, and that I know I will eat.

Then I built a mini-greenhouse out of garden stakes, zip ties, 3-mil sheeting, and 1x2s:

Since I’m cooking so much more than I used to, I want herbs that won’t go bad in the refrigerator between uses, so I’m going to try a windowsill herb garden. Left to right I have oregano, rosemary, thyme, and basil:

Last, I cleared out part of the bed over by the work shed and planted strawberries. I may clear out the rest of the bed and plant either raspberries or more strawberries.


And now to go inside and sit in my comfy chair before I get too much fresh air poisoning.

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Lilac Down!

Jen stopped by the other day and pointed out that one of the lilacs against the retaining wall at the front of the property had fallen over.

Turns out all the main trunks of the middle lilac were completely rotten and mostly hollow.

I’m starting to wonder if maybe lilacs just aren’t supposed to get to tree size, since the lilac in the side yard that was twenty feet tall with a 10″ trunk was also rotten and hollow before I cut it down. In any case, I pulled out the rest of that lilac, and what’s left is a whole bunch of 1/4″ shoots coming up from the ground next to the stump, so I guess those are fine.

Honestly, I’m starting to wonder if maybe I just shouldn’t pull them all out and replace them with something that’s going to do a better job of screening and will look nicer. They’re not particularly pretty even when they’re in bloom, and they’re kind of thin and unruly, and evidently if they continue on they’ll rot and fall over anyway. I suppose I could fertilize them and see if they perked up and came in better, but I suspect I’d just end up fertilizing the morning glory and blackberries that keep trying to take over that bed.

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Yard Work

So long time no post from me and all that. Yeah yeah yeah, I know.

The bathroom is still tantalizingly incomplete. I bought window and door casings from Second Use and cut them to size, but now they’re sitting in my basement unsanded, unprimed, unpainted, and uninstalled. And of course I still haven’t done anything about the tub/shower valve escutcheon, although I did fix the broken screw in the shower arm drop-ear, so it’s solid again.

The main point of this update is the most recent bit of yard work Jen and I did last weekend. It’s been unseasonally good weather the last week or so (it stopped today, naturally), so first Jen got out and raked up all the leaves, sticks, and dead morning glory from the side yard.

As it turns out, there’s actually a brick patio underneath all of it, not just a bit.

Typically for this house and yard, whichever previous owner installed it installed it wrong — there’s no base of gravel and compacted sand, no! They just laid down bricks over black plastic directly onto the dirt, so of course it’s all wavy and uneven. Sigh.

But: since I’m pretty sure the bricks are pavers and not wall bricks, we’ll be able to save them and use them for our own patio to be overlaid over the existing concrete patio directly behind the house. Someday. Yay!

As you can see by the photos, there’s also a pond — we knew it was there but didn’t realize it was about 30 inches deep. Apparently there was supposed to be an upper pond with a stream and a waterfall leading to the lower pond. I’m sure a shrubbery was involved somehow. In any case, it’s going to be siphoned out and removed and eventually appear on a Craigslist advertisement.

So: last weekend we acquired a lawn mower from a friend’s shed where it had been sitting idle for at least three years. A $50 trip to a local lawnmower repair guy later, I was able to mow the entire front lawn for the first time in five months. As you can see, the entry looks a lot nicer when it doesn’t look like a jungle:

The mower doesn’t have drive wheels like the mowers I used to use as a teenager, but at least our yard is almost entirely flat.

I would have continued mowing and done the back yard, but since there were huge piles of yard waste covering parts of it I figured I’d take care of those first. The largest pile under the trees was mostly leaves and sticks and not so much morning glory. I filled up the 40-gallon yard waste bin plus nine big Home Depot bags:

You can see more or less where the pile was — everything in the area from the leftmost tree to the fence to the concrete driveway was a foot and a half or more deep in crap:

Meanwhile, Jen completed (or nearly so) work on the front garden beds, which are going to look very nice when they’re planted with flowers in the spring:

Sadly, the end of the great yard cleaning is still pretty far off. Not only do the piles of dead morning glory in the first picture remain, but in the raised area at the southeast corner is this:

We’re kinda scared to poke about in this treacherous pile of junk, construction debris, tree branches, weeds, and rocks to even determine how bad it is. And there’s another similar pile on the other side of the garden shed. When the clerk at Home Depot saw me buying twenty yard waste bags, he commented, “Those are pretty big, you know.” To which I could only reply, “Oh, believe me, I’ll be back for more…”

Finally, since it was such a nice day and both Jen and I were working outside, we brought Thekla out to play, which led to lots of hysterical crying. Turns out she’s terrified of grass.

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Introductory post from the wife

Bryan has encouraged me multiple times to update the blog. Unfortunately up to this point any post that I would have made would have been complaints about how much I hated the purchase process interjected with random cursing. Now that paperwork has been signed I feel more comfortable outlining my immediate goals with the house.

While Bryan is tearing down and ripping out the bathroom for it’s remodel before we move into the house, I will be tearing out the carpeting from downstairs that the previous owner kindly let their cats pee all over. Having four cats of our own we don’t really want ours getting a whiff of the previous damage so they can pick up the bad habit. It does break my heart to tear out the carpet because it seems to be one of the few things that the previous tenants actually did fairly well. They actually used a really good padding and it appears properly laid. Sadly it is soaked to the core in urine.

My other goal is to get all the rooms primed. Seeing as we are replacing all the wood paneling in the house it seems silly to paint it the actual color I really want only to tear it out in a couple months. But some of the colors are simply atrocious. I figure it’s better to live with primer white till then than say…

This is the baby’s room:

And the current color of the master bedroom:

Not good.

Then the major project that I have decided is mine and mine alone, the yard. It appears someone in the past had some grandiose ideas. There is a pond, and some build up for what appeared to be a water fall, and even a composting bin. Of course looking at the yard you would have never known because it’s all hidden under half of a yard of morning glory. I have found my arch-nemesis. Morning glory is the devil. It has eaten up almost fifty percent of the yard and I can’t have that.. (said wearing my steely-eyed Clint Eastwood face)  I have also planned a consultation with our friend’s gardener because there are flowers interspersed amongst the weeds and when I am cleaning out the horrifically overgrown flowerbeds next to the house I don’t want to pull out something I am going to have to pay to have later. It’s all just such a jumbled mess I have know clue what’s what. I have recently grown to love having my own vegetable garden and plan to put one at the house to in raised beds.

My back hurts already.

Now we just finalize packing up the old house for the move. We are almost finished, only a few bits and pieces to finish..

packedbb2

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