Summer Garden 2013

This spring I felt a little bit of the Keeping up with the Jones in our front yard. While we were by no means crazy overgrown, our front yard was looking a little more au naturale that I would have liked. I have a plan that once a year I'll plant some more permanent perennials and then fill in the rest with pretty annuals. In my mind this means that each year the amount of weeding and planting should get less and less. Of course, when I let the weeds run rampant for a few years, it just means that it takes that much longer to weed later. Sigh...
After a neighbor commented on the slightly-ness of our front yard (not in a mean way I assure you) I felt it was time to start cracking, I mean weeding!
Unfortunately I don't have any good before pictures but just imagine lots of weeds, dandelions, and 2-3ft tall grasses.
And now? Well there are still some weeds but it definitely looks a bit purtier:



A multicolor biddleia that I planted in the spring. I wasn't sure if it would flower this year but it seems to be doing just fine!




The petunias took a hard hit this year as our snail population was a voracious out of control horde. Once weeding commenced our street looking like quite the snail battlefield. I bet I could have gotten a pretty penny from a French restaurant. Escargot anyone?




These petunias near the front door faired better as they were planted post snail massacre. However the one iris bud that emerged was a tasty tasty treat for something.




The lavender flourished and an agapanthus was rescued from a hostile grass takeover.

Backyard patio x3

So hopefully this will be the third and final rendition of a small patio/ Kiwi washing pad. Initially when we moved in I puzzled the stones together on top of the soil.

So nicely puzzled together...

Then we wanted to make them more level, so up came the stones to be re-puzzled together for a more even effect. Of course the stones didn't go together the same for whatever reason... Some ground cover was planted with the hopes that it would grow between the stones and that was to be it's final rendition.

What was supposed to be the final configuration...

However, whenever we washed Kiwi, the water puddled and didn't drain and that was unsatisfactory. So third, and what will hopefully be the last, try to make this functional and beautiful began.
First, we pulled up the existing stones and then dug down about a foot. Next we filled most of the pit with coarse stones to help with drainage, then a layer of fine crushed gravel, then our stones.

Third time's a charm

While I enjoyed puzzling the stones together the first two times, the
third time involved a lot of cursing and general unpleasantness. We filled in the areas between the stones with the fine gravel for stability. It doesn't quite drain as well as we would like (our theory being that our layer of crushed gravel is a bit too thick), but it's much better than before. Pretty oxalis have been planted along the back in the hopes of keeping the weeds at bay.

Final installation!

Hopefully in the next couple of weeks we will have attached a hose reel for our unruly water hose. I'm not sure when the fencing will come down to keep Kiwi off of the lawn. I'd like to give the roots the best chance for survival so the fencing may be up until next summer...

House Project #9: That Patch of Grass

Pre-lawn

Well this winter we finally got around to starting our lawn project. We knew we needed to figure out some way to level the ground as our back yard slopes towards the house. Since we were already working on using the existing underground watering system to put in an above ground drip system we also spent some time thinking about how to get sprinklers for the lawn installed. Eventually we came up with the plan to basically build a low raised bed for the lawn and have sprinklers come up out of the border.

Trenches dug with beams in place

Our lawn space isn't that big so we decided to go with 6" x 8" x 12' pressure treated beams to use as our border, but first we had to dig trenches to lay the water PVC pipe for the sprinklers and allow for leveling of the beams. Once the trenches were dug it was time to start piecing everything together. Luckily for us our brother-in-law is pretty handy at this sort of thing and it only took us a day to install the pipes, cut, level and brace the beams and install the sprinklers. Then we needed to refill the trenches and wait for most of the rains to end before planting the seeds.

Prepping for seeds!

Planting the seeds required digging up all the dirt again to help aerate the soil. Then it was time to mix in some lime to help with the soil pH. Our soil is pretty acidic from the giant redwood tree in the back, so we will most likely need to do a second round or more to get the pH to be more neutral in the future. Then it was time to spread the seeds (a nice mix of drought resistant), add some fertilizer, layer some top soil, add some fencing for protection, water and wait!
A month and a half later we have :

Our small patch of grass!

 Now we're just letting all those little roots take hold and trying to keep Kiwi from digging around. But this project has been so far successful and we are getting ready to start thinking about the next thing for the backyard!

Joys of home ownership

A few months ago our dryer started to not, well, dry as well as it should. A few weeks after that it stopped drying altogether. Of course, being the bright, intelligent adults that we are it took us about 5 times trying to dry the same load of clothes to figure out our drying was busted. Our washer/dryer set are pretty old (do they even make Whirlpool anymore?), so I considered just getting a shiny new set. Yes! In pretty colors! Fortunately, my much more (at least in this instance) practical (read-electronically inclined) husband started interwebbing it and figured out that most likely we just needed to replace one small part on the dryer and viola! Heated dryer instead of gas run clothes tumbler. Off to the hardware store he went, picked up the less than $20 part and thanks to You Tube installed said part in an afternoon. Dashed were my dreams of a technicolor laundry room, but hey, our clothes are now dried in one session and money saved for more important items still to be determined, so all in all a successful jaunt down the never ending path of owning a home.

On another plus side: We got to try out our new shopvac!

I apparently love redoing closets. Who knew!?

So of course now that my closet is finished, for the most part, I needed to begin to tackle the next big indoor project.
Another closet! Whaaat?! Seriously this project should not have taken as long as it has. I pretty sure I pulled everything out of said closet back in December. The plan was to give it a new paint job, install some more shelving and maybe some cubbies to make it more organized, and then put everything back. It's been a couple of months and I still haven't finished the painting part. And even worse, I'm the only one that can tell that I've actually painted the ceiling and 3 out of the 4 walls. *sigh*
In the meantime the second bedroom looks like a disaster zone. Yay!

Hopefully soon the painting part will be complete and I'll have snazzy pictures to show. Until then please don't try and imagine the amount of crap we've managed to hoard and are expecting to put back in this closet...it isn't pretty.

Garden bounty

We have great plans for a veggie garden. We do! We really do! Unfortunately we are so very methodical (slow) in doing garden stuff that we don't have a lot to show for it at the moment. However, this past summer we did plant some tomatoes:




Look at that bounty! We didn't get a ton (we only had two plants) but hey, we could grow something other than weeds!
Also last summer we tried making our first batch of limoncello:




It's a wee bit potent, but it sure looks pretty. I'm hoping it will have mellowed out some more by the time summer comes around (cause everybody knows that summer = limoncello time!)
We have another batch brewing but we've managed to forget about it (ie. I've ignored it and Ben has forgotten about it) so it will be interesting to see how it compares when we finally filter it.
And finally, this winter we were given two snow pea plants, that have done quite well thus far.
Lesson learned: next winter if we plant 10 more plants we actually have enough to share!
Also, that's two, yep two! edible plants we have managed to grow and not kill. I would call that a rousing success.