Garden, Round... 7?

So this is apparently Year Seven in the garden, although we haven't been in the house seven years yet, since we moved in during the winter.  I didn't expand it this year, but I did buy some garden soil to mix into the extant dirt to try to improve the nutrients in it.

The setup this year has brassicas (cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, broccoli) and cucumbers on the right side of the walk; I put the fencing in for trellis shortly after I turned it over to get them out of the way, and I'm using hay for mulch again since that seems to distract the rabbits.

On the left, following my brassica/nightshade rotation, I've got tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, and peas.  (A rogue potato from last year came up, as well.

I put onions and carrots around the whole edge, although the onions are doing much better than the carrots.  Some carrots did come up, so at some point I'll hopefully get at least enough for one meal.

As usual, the peas took off first.  This is from four weeks ago, and I've picked about six quarts of pea pods since then.  They've grown about two feet taller than the  fence and are now cascading down the other side.  (If I remember (unlikely), I'll get another shot at this angle, because the zucchini plants cover the whole space in front of the peas now.)

Gratuitous shot of the overflowing blackberry bush from a few weeks ago - they're just starting to turn mauve now:

I've picked five zucchini, two cucumbers, the aforementioned 6 quarts of peas, and I pulled up four onions for dinner tonight.

Since my goal for the garden this year was to be able to make sides for dinner in-season, I think it's going pretty well.

The tomatoes are still green, but the grape tomatoes are just starting to turn.  In another couple weeks, I'll probably be inundated with them.

Upgrades

So we've lived in this house for about six and a half years, which is long enough that I know like 80% of what I want to change about it.

Number one on the practical list right now is kitchen storage.  We've got cabinets along one wall of the kitchen, and it's a decently sized kitchen, so it's not like that's nothing, but I've still got a set of shelves and a cabinet in the dining room with kitchen appliances.  The kitchen table is serving as supplemental storage, and we've got a dining room (/library/craft room), so we don't need the kitchen table for dining space.

So I'm planning an island.  I've been mapping out possible layouts, what kind of storage options we want, footprints.  Electrical is pretty much out - that would be an electrician and permits and inspections, or even just repurposing the deck line we're not using would require cutting through tile.  Overall it wouldn't be worth it for the work involved.

Once it's done, I should be able to move all the kitchen stuff from the dining room into the kitchen, repurpose the cabinet in the dining room for a bathroom closet (towels, etc.) that the bathroom currently lacks, and possible consolidate two small shelf units in the living room into the larger one... after we get rid of the couch.

I may need a flowchart.

May Showers

So I came home to this, which is the accumulated rain since yesterday:

Note that the rain gauge is only made to hold up to 5", so if we had gotten more before I emptied it this afternoon, who knows what the total could have been.  Four and three-quarters-ish inches of rain is nothing to sneeze at, though, especially if you have a pond in  your yard.  Mr. Frog is pretty happy, but the water is not often that high up on the rocks.

In general, that leads to this set-up:

That's actually rubber dryer pipe (crazy, I know, since you'd think it would melt) that the people who bought the washer and dryer that were here when we moved in didn't want.  Our pond has a double pump set-up, either because it was expanded, or to both pump and have a UV filter.  The UV filter unit has the splitter that allows us to take water off the pond rather than diverting it to the waterfall:

This set-up is useful to avoid undirected flooding; if we didn't attach the piping, the water cascades over the patio you can see in the earlier picture, towards the fence, which means it's heading straight for our neighbors' garage, as well as inundating their lawn.  Instead it follows the lowered sidewalk towards our backyard.  This section fills up quite often in a heavy rain but drains fairly quickly into the yard.  That hose you can see is for my sprinkler, which I'm really not going to need for a while.

The fish don't even notice.  Mr. Frog freaks out any time I get close to the pond, though, and has gone off into hiding somewhere in the foliage.

This shot got a bit washed out with the reflection from the water, but you can see the giant koi in the lower left.

Start of Year... 3?

This is the third summer of gardening at the house; I started off this year by buying a little greenhouse for putting seeds in.  It's a tiny thing with four shelves for seed trays or potted plants.  The day after I assembled it, it snowed.

The first warm weekend we got, I pulled out the shrub in the front flower bed and planted out all my bulbs.  I also moved the daffodils from back by the apple tree.  (They're now blooming.)  The shrub basically had to be trimmed of all its branches, and then I took out the trunk by a combination of digging with the garden fork and cutting large roots.  The trunk has already been burned; I've got quite a lot of branches still to go.

And then I did nothing for a couple weeks; I worked last Sunday and it was cooler again.  I had Friday off for working Sunday, so I spent about three and a half hours of it outside.  Half of that was spent moving this:

The wooden compost box was too close to the blackberry bush, really, and this is a kind of dead corner, anyway; I think the previous owners threw their garden waste in the corners of the yard because both are built up.  The neighbors' pool is next to the fence to the right, as well, or I'd plant a fruit tree back here.  Moving it pretty much killed my back for a day, though.  I pulled out a ton of sticks that had gotten mixed in but weren't really decomposing at all, so it's not nearly as full as it was.  About a third of the sticks have already been burned in the chiminea.

Moving the composter meant Saturday I didn't do much of anything outside, but today I got the longer bed in the garden turned over and planted stuff.  A new raspberry bush:

Raspberry twig

Strawberries, including moving the one errant one I found by the back fence last year; these are where the wooden compost box used to be:

Strawberries

Peas, with sunflowers planted in the middle of their fencing:

Peas

Green beans and broccoli; I anticipate some of the beans will not survive.  If they do, I am really going to have to get a pressure canner this summer.

Green beans & broccoli

And, well, potatoes.  They don't make the most interesting of pictures.  When it gets a bit more consistently warmer, the cucumbers are going along the other side of the bed; I'll put the fence up for them then.

Potatoes, stealth mode

Shelves!

So most of today was spent organizing.  There's a little closet right when you come in our back door, and we hadn't really been using it; it had a few things left by the previous owners, and a large box had gotten stuffed in at some point, so it wasn't really usable.

Cleaning it out revealed that giant box, a crapload of dead mops and brooms, and the tarp for the air conditioner.  At this point the vestibule was so crowded I had to take the mops and brooms out to the garbage so I could move around enough to sweep and put the shelves together.

Closet shelves

So now the closet has shelves, with the fish food, bird seed, and air conditioner tarp.  Apparently there were coat hooks along the back of the closet, so I hung my rain coat in there, but really it's too cold on the vestibule in the winter to take your coat off out there.

Once I got the closet done, we headed out to the garage.  The previous owners had piled a bunch of stuff in the back of what's now my side, and my garden stuff had been accumulating.  We pulled everything out of the back, and my husband shop-vaced the floor so we could put the shelves up.  So now all my garden stuff is on shelves!

Shelves!

Lawn mower/wheel barrow/snow blower tetris

I can park the car with the wheel barrow in the garage now!

Once we got done with the shelves, while he was vacuuming up the rest of the accumulated dirt, I went out back to work on the vines along the fence.  What you're not seeing here is all the annoying vines that have been destroying the neighbor's wooden fence:

This is why you're not seeing them:

I discovered, as I had gotten through most of the vines, that there's a grape vine in the back right corner of the yard.  I'm not sure whose it is - ours, the side neighbor's, or the back neighbor's, but the base of the vine is thick enough it must be twenty years old.  I pruned it back some since it was growing up into the neighbor's pine tree.

Tuesday I planted another apple tree; it's a honeycrisp.

Tree!

And of course the fishes have woken up:

FISHES

Next weekend I think it will be warm enough to put some plants out.  I'll probably try to get the herbs out sooner if it doesn't rain Tuesday.

Salad Dressing

Our kitchen sink clogged spontaneously sometime about two weeks ago; it was fine, and then I went to wash the rice cooker and it just wouldn't drain.  My husband tried snaking it with the little pipe snake he'd found in the basement, poured boiling water down it, and so forth, without much effect.  So tonight my father-in-law (a plumber) came over with his truck of plumbing tools to see what was going on with it, after supper.

I had planned on making lasagna, Italian bread (in the bread machine), cake, and a salad, but when I got to the point of making the salad, I realized I hadn't gotten myself any salad dressing.  (That should tell you just how often I eat salad.  Ahem.)  I hit up my usual recipe source (Foodgawker), but I just wasn't finding anything that I wanted to try.  So after estimating oil/vinegar ratios from all the recipes I'd been looking at, I made something up.  It went something like this:

• 1/3 cup red wine vinegar
• 1/2 cup canola oil
• ~1/2 tsp. sugar
• ~1/4 tsp. salt
• ~1/2 tsp. basil
• ~1/2 tsp. oregano
• ~1/2 tsp. taragon
• ~1/4 tsp. ground mustard

It was surprisingly not bad, given that I just threw a bunch of stuff into oil and vinegar.  It ended up looking like this (prior to shaking):

The cake was a chocolate mayonnaise cake, with vanilla frosting.  I often have trouble with frosting textures, but I added more milk this time, so it wasn't as stiff as it usually is.

The bread was just the Italian herb bread in my bread machine book - normal white bread with oregano, basil, and parmesan added in.

The sink apparently had just slowly gotten clogged over the years, and the professional pipe snake handled it just fine - they snaked all 14 feet to the sewer line, and it works again!

Exercise (or, What I did on my Friday off)

I haven't had regular exercise since high school.  Well, college, if you count all the walking to and from class.  It wasn't till after I graduated from library school that I started gaining weight, really, but that also coincided with the magical metabolic shift that tends to happen in the mid-20s, so causality isn't entirely certain.

Anywho, the past several years of trying to find exercise options have boiled down to if we can't do it at home, we're not going to do it regularly enough to matter.  So our Christmas present to us this year:

My husband found it on Craigslist for about 1/8 of the list price; we just had to get it home.  Our friend Geoff, who has a truck, provided the vehicle, as well as help getting it into the truck, securing it, and then off the truck onto the front porch.  (Thanks again, Geoff!)  It was late and we were tired, and it was kinda wet from the rain, so we left it on the porch overnight to dry off.

So my project today:  Get elliptical machine off front porch and into living room.

The elliptical is 6 feet tall, 6.5 feet long, 27 inches wide, and weighs about 250 pounds.

First thing I learned:  The elliptical wouldn't fit through the front door the way we'd seated it (back end first).  So I took some more stuff off the porch (which is being used for temporary storage) so I had enough room to turn it around.

Great!  I turned it around.  I can't get the wheels up over the 2 inch lip of the door sill.  Those two blocks of wood on the table in the picture were my solution; I tilted it enough to get each under the front end, which let me just push the front piece over the sill.

Second thing I learned:  The elliptical wouldn't fit through the front door this way, either.  With the handles and the end pieces on, I just didn't have enough room to maneuver it around the corner of the front bedroom.  This turn:

That front piece with the wheels, though?  It's just bolted on with two bolts.  Ratchet to the rescue!  So I put a rag under the front end not to scratch up the floor, unbolted the front end, and basically just pushed the now-narrower elliptical in.  Great!

I can't lift it enough to put the front piece back on.  Ahem.

So obviously I needed to lever the front end up enough to do so.  Blocks of wood again!  One block to hold up the back end to put a block under the front was not entirely stable; I only knocked it off once, which took a little paint off the trim and slightly bent one of the metal tracks for the glides.  It still works, and no holes in the wall, so it's all good.

But one block of wood wasn't thick enough to lift the front enough to reattach the front piece, and I didn't have any thicker wood.  I wasn't sure going out and getting more blocks of wood would be stable enough to be safe; enter the 1918 Encyclopedia Americana.  Three volumes was enough to reattach the front piece, and then it was just a matter of wheeling it into place and putting back all the stuff I'd moved off the porch to maneuver it.

Voila!  Now how did I manage to spend more or less two hours manhandling the thing without throwing out my back?  I have no idea.

Rabbit fence

I probably could have gotten more digging in this weekend, but I started too late on Saturday. I also had to make a couple trips to Home Depot, first to get a wheelbarrow and a spading fork, and then to pick up more fence posts. But I got the rabbit fence done!

Day 1 (Saturday) ended here:



Day 2 (Sunday) finished it off.



The whole project, really, if you count only the time putting in the rabbit fence, took about four and a half hours. The initial design plan had only eight fence posts, but I really needed twelve.

It is, I think, approximately 22' x 15'.

The basic design involves 4' steel fence posts and 3' plastic chicken netting. The post holes are 2' deep, and the trench between is 1' deep, so your netting ends up buried about a foot to keep the critters from just digging under. It took a little while for me to get a good visual idea of what about a 1' deep trench looks like; most of the first side is too shallow, so the bottom of the netting is curled.

I did the whole thing with just a spade and a rake; the bottom of the post holes are lined with gravel. Next step:



Yep, that's about 650 lbs. of manure. I've mentioned French intensive gardening before; double-digging is up next for me. I bought the book I keep checking out from the library, so hopefully that will show up this week. I think between those three pictures, you've seen all the garden equipment I own except the hose and the seed trays.

There are, besides the garden, several flower beds around the house. I've got a bunch of random seeds I've bought the past few years, but what I found that I really want to try growing is blue lupine. It's a perennial, so hopefully I wouldn't have to keep planting it, and it's the food for an endangered butterfly. I don't know if my planting them in our flower beds will help the butterfly, but they're pretty, too. And hey, if I get to see an endangered butterfly, that's also cool.

I've got 3/5 of the back yard still behind the garage to decide what to do with. The previous owners had a good chunk of that in garden, too, but doing the French intensive method, I don't think my back will forgive me more than the side already in the rabbit fence. Maybe I'll just put it in grass, and we can actually put the lawnmower my mom wants to get us to use.

So, yeah

We bought a house. (My brain is still going !!!, 10 days later.)

We are mostly moved; the piano and the last bits come over tomorrow.

We are not unpacked; boxes are our current decor.

The cats, while initially terrified, have mostly settled in; they are both fascinated by the kitchen door, through which they are not allowed.

I've discovered that we have enough bookshelves to completely line the dining room. This does not mean that we have enough bookshelves for all the books. >.>

Sometime after Christmas, we will have a dishwasher, and a rehabbed shower.

Moving two weeks before Christmas, by the way, is insane. I don't recommend it. Buying a house at the time we did, though? Probably our best bet.

We haven't moved... yet

Still waiting on all the paperwork stuff, argh. I want to close before Dad gets here so he has something to do besides sit in the apartment with boxes and watch tv.

Anyway, despite all the terror of, "Oh, my God, we're buying a house," and that change-aversion part of me that's all, "But we've lived here ten years," there are more than a few things I'm looking forward to.

• Never again having to scrape frost off my car in the morning. We'll have a garage.
• Storage space. Closets can again be for clothes, and all the computer parts/stuff from my childhood/random boxes can go in the attic. Woo, attic.
• Never again having to vacuum. Well, nothing big. The whole place is hardwood and tile. Dustmops are so much easier on the back.
• Being able to plant stuff without worrying about the lawn service killing it. I'm good enough at killing plants on my own; I don't need help doing it.
• Getting the books out of the bedroom. I had one 6' bookcase when I moved up here. I have 4 now, plus the one my husband had. I need about 4 more. After a while they start to loom, and become inaccessible with all the stuff in front of them. Dining room? No, no... Library.
• The cats will never see the upholstery again. There's a door on the kitchen that will confine them to the back half of the house. (Hopefully this will also provide some relief for the cat-allergic friends and family.)
• Apple tree. OMG, apple tree.
• Windows that actually let in light! I can retire the plant light to starting seeds in the spring and let my geranium and unidentified plant from work have real light.
• There will actually be a guest room, so Mom & Dad will have the option to stay with us when they visit.
• Sidewalks! It will be so much easier to start walking/running when it will be possible to just go out the front door and do so, rather than driving to a path. (Not that I'm terribly confident in my exercise discipline, but still.)
• No more carrying groceries up a story's worth of stairs.

The negatives, of course, are things like, say, paying property taxes, and probably higher gas & electric bills for heating & cooling a larger space than our apartment. And all the eventual home maintenance costs. But compared to living with paint colors you're not entirely fond of, carpet I'm fairly sure is as old as me, and so forth, it's a pretty good trade off.

Hurry up, paperwork! Darn it.

Purging

No, no. Not that kind of purging.

We're in the process of packing, in an apartment with ten years of accumulated crap. You would think that stuff would take up less space in neat boxes, but no, apparently not.

I'm starting to understand the value of annual purges, though. A going through and getting rid of saved boxes, time-sensitive papers that are no longer needed, computer parts that aren't worth holding onto any longer.

I'm not particularly good at letting go of stuff - I have boxes of stuff from my childhood that I should probably go through and get rid of stuff again, but really don't have time to right now, especially since it's already packed.

I long for filing cabinets, drawer units, shelves. At some point I think I want to line our eventual dining room with bookshelves. Not the particle board ones that we've got, but decent hardwood ones, probably 8" rather than 12" deep, probably 7 to 9 shelves to a section, perhaps with a unit in one corner for oversized volumes.

Some corner of my mind is worried that we're going to move into this house and discover that we don't actually have enough space for all our crap. Logically this is impossible, with a full attic and basement, but given just how crowded the apartment is right now? Yeah.

I have never been so terrified in my life

We made an offer on a house. I haven't really been thinking coherently since Sunday. (I think most of what's going through my head is summed up by "!!!".)

Hopefully the seller will negotiate with us and not just reject it out of hand. Interest rates are amazing right now, and I really don't want to miss this window for buying.

The house: 3 bedroom, hardwood floors (redone last month), full unfinished (but floored) attic, full (partly finished) basement, gas/hot-air heat, air conditioning (holy crap, yes, a/c), 2 car detached garage, newer kitchen cabinets, newer roof, and an apple tree in the back yard by the garden. I mean, damn, it has pretty much everything we'd want (2 car garage, a/c, garden space, 3 bedrooms, storage space).

I'm terrified both by the idea of managing to get it and by the idea of not. One does not want to be too hopeful, since there are any number of things that could go wrong with it, but at the same time, one does not want to stick one's head in the sand and then have to scramble to get stuff down. Is it better to have wasted effort from unnecessary prep work, or to risk having to hurry? And of course, if it doesn't work out, we have to find another one.