Thank you very mulch

Today was a long, but good, work day. I installed edging, which has needed to be done for a while now. I also ordered six yards of mulch, and got about half of it put down. It is amazing how much better things look. I'd been looking for the right edging to put along the sidewalk and ended up using cedar shingles/tiles (they probably have a better name...). Below on the left are two landscape timbers I tried last weekend. The sidewalk has bumps on the sides of it, so I couldn't snug the timber against the sidewalk and it looked bad.

On the right are 4 x 4 timbers that Mr W and I placed a couple of weeks ago. These make a right turn and head down the alley. It was an easy project, as I just scraped the soil a bit, placed the timber, and we pounded in 1' pieces of rebar to hold it in place.

Left side edging done. As these things go, it wasn't as challenging as I thought it would be. We had two days of rain (which happens a handful of times a year), and the soil was easy to work.

I'm a little embarrassed to show the degree to which the weeds had gotten away from me here.

I pulled some of the weeds, and cut the trench.

Lots of newspaper for weed control.

Yeah, there's no comparison, is there?

I then put mulch over the existing mulch on the tree lawn, which was a big improvement. Hopefully I put down enough to discourage weeds. I also trimmed the suckers on the two Serviceberry trees. Time well spent. I hate it when it feels to me like I'm not keeping up with this part of owning a home and being part of a neighborhood. Voila!!

As I worked, Mr W's math teacher happened to walk by. I didn't know she lived in the neighborhood, and I introduced myself and we chatted for a bit. Remember when you thought the teachers ceased to exist outside of school? 

In other news, I met one of my new neighbors! The husband of a youngish couple. I didn't see any evidence of kids. For some reason, they haven't taken down the For Sale sign yet.  But their stuff is inside. Odd.

Growing stuff

I'm happy to be attending a seed-starting class tomorrow at our local horticulture gardens. In these tough times, I'm thankful the city has kept the place open. Afterwards a friend and I are going seed and dirt shopping, and I hope to get everything I need to start my veggies. Taking a cue from Jordan, who is taking a systematic approach to seed starting and plant planting, I'm going to devote some time to making some notes on when I should be planting based on when I want things to be ready. I'm usually a throw-it-in-the-ground-let's-see-what-happens kind of gardener, so this would be a change.

Once again, I'm behind on prep, so I won't be planting any cool weather things this year. Instead, I'll be concentrating on building the beds, getting my compost ready, buying a load of soil and laying down mulch. Bye bye grass, my goal is to have a small bit of lawn for show, and that's it. I have decided to go ahead with the deck project, and that will hopefully happen sometime this spring.

At the same time, I'm still on the fence about joining a CSA. I don't want to have to drum up someone to split a share with, and I'd like to work some in exchange for a discount on my share so I can learn a thing or two about the process. The thought has crossed my mind that I could conceivably both have a vegetable garden and be part of a CSA, and then preserve the excess. Canning scares me, though, and I could see myself composting extra vegetables instead when I got busy.

I think it's important to get to know some of the people doing this sort of work locally. I still toy with the idea of being a small farmer (no animals, but produce and maybe cut flowers), although I don't really know what's involved, so it's a romantic notion of escapism. Still, the idea of growing things for myself and others is very enticing. Somewhere in there is a workable scenario.

This is partly Ginger's fault. Ginger and I share a cube at work and lately she's been telling me about her dream, which is to own and operate a guest ranch. Why not? Real estate is still relatively cheap, and she's knows someone who is interested in providing financing.

Such dreams. Well, it looks like there are people out there who are doing this locally, and even an organization the NoCo Food Incubator that has a lot of info on local, sustainable agriculture. It sure is fun to think about.

Home Maintenance

Until I got divorced, it never really occurred to me that I'd own a home by myself. When it happened, we had been living in that particular house for under a year, so I had no sentimental reasons to stay there. The thought of moving into an apartment seemed like it would be cheating my kid out of something, and I sure didn't want to share a wall with anyone.

I gravitated to a particular part of town, the old part of town called, not surprisingly, Old Town. I bought a hundred year old cottage that had been fixed and flipped a few years before. I knew I had made the right choice when there were vegetables on my doorstep the day I moved in. I've paid for a reasonable amount of maintenance and repairs in almost 4 years that I've been here, and overall, it's been a great house.

I imagine it's been the cool spring that has prompted me to pursue a list of projects to make my yard more habitable and the outside of the house look nicer. By the end of the summer (I'm giving myself lots of time) I hope to have installed a paver patio, install mulch and edging about 3' out from my fence line, recycle Mr W's old sandbox into a raised bed, and paint the trim on this old house.

And may I take this opportunity to say: IT ALWAYS TAKES LONGER THAN IT'S SUPPOSED TO!!! Most of it is that I don't have the right tools a lot of the time, and a trip to Home Depot fixes that. Like yesterday, I was trying to prep the trim around my back door to paint it. I had the hose and a scrub brush, and got down to bottom, where it became clear that the paint down there was coming off, down to the wood, and the caulk between the wood and the house came off, so, just like that, I have another something to do before I can proceed.

I also tend to be on the timid side when it comes to fixing some things myself. I don't want to get to a point where I've made something worse by poking around, and it's hard to know that until after the fact sometimes.

I could have predicted that it would go like this, home maintenance projects always do, but geez, it really impedes on feeling like I've accomplished anything. It's partly the money, but I've noticed too, that I wanted to scale all of these projects to be things that I could do myself. I wanted them to mostly be things that I could work on when I could and they'd wait for me when I couldn't. I'll take pictures and we'll see how the summer unfolds...

Insert Happy Dance here

To counter any post-Christmas let-down, the gardening catalogs are on their way!! I love this part of the process, going over the beautiful pictures, bookmarking certain things it would be nice to have, and generally enjoying a display of color that ain't going on outside. The picture is from one of my favorites, White Flower Farm.

Aaaaahhhh Saturday

I have a long list of things I'd like to get done today. The weather is going to be nice, so my plan is to:

1. Organize my garage - there's one narrow path through the clutter and it's annoying me

2. Cut the grass - *rolls eyes* I dislike this job, but it needs to be done

3. Rearrange the painted rocks - picture of whimsical and clever yard art forthcoming

4. Begin Fall cleanup of garden - it's time to prune the 10' rose bush - yikes!!

5. Clean out my car - will assign window cleaning to Mr W, who is angling for an extra $5 to tack on to his allowance money to buy another Lego toy. I hope to get some work out of him...

I guess that's it. It's a beautiful day in CO today, and I'm glad to be here to enjoy it.

In other news,

CB is in Australia for the next three weeks, leading a bird watching tour across half of the country. The time change presents a challenge for communicating. It's 8 hours earlier, on the next day over there. So I can get up at 5 am and talk to him before he goes to bed, or he can call me at work when he gets up in the morning.

We've done a lot of chatting on Skype, which lets you call a place through your computer for very cheap rates. If he's got a good connection then we'll video chat, but if not, then I can call his hotel with my computer (yes, the technology was news to me too) and talk to him that way.

The tour has a pelagic (ocean bird) trip before the rest of the tour starts, and he reported that he got a good look at one of these, a Blue Shark:

Yardwork image

Shark image

How does my garden grow

The mulch project drags on. If you've not been privy to this saga, I have a tree lawn that is hard to water and cut, so I wanted to cover it with something to make it look nicer. I stopped watering it some time last summer , and it has looked like hell for weeks (but the weeds were doing well).

Tom (or Saint Tom, as I will refer to the gardening services guy because he worked a miracle with his rototiller) turned up the soil on the tree lawn first thing Monday morning. Then on Tuesday the nice people from the landscape supply company unloaded the three cubic yards of mulch in the street in front of my house.

Come Tuesday afternoon, I'm ready to start raking dirt into its final formation, and moving mulch. Then the rain came. I know it's just a coincidence, but for the two days we've had torrential downpours in the afternoon. Wow, lots of rain.

So my mulch pile waits. I'm happy it didn't wash away with the rain, but now it will be a few days before I can work on this. It's just so funny how this project has taken a lot of mental energy, and then, once everything's in place, I have to wait on rain.

It's OK, though, it will look nice. In other news, get a load of my Black Eyed Susans! If you garden, get yerself some of these babies, because they look like this for weeks. It's the most amazing thing; they don't seem to be dying off. That's them in the picture above. You can also see the mulch pile, drying out from the first rain.

I'll post more pictures soon, when the light is better. I'm happy with my garden this year. One of the things I really like about gardening is how it changes over time. Sure, the garden seems to peak in terms of how much stuff is flowering, but stuff comes and goes and I love investigating to see how things are doing. I put in a bunch of perennials, but am leaving space for annuals that catch my interest.

And the pumpkin. I think it's cool how bees will sleep (that's what it looks like, anyway) in the flowers, which are probably 6"x6" (plenty of room). We've got one fruit that's really taking off, and Mr W and I look at it in the morning before we get in the car. The thing is growing 1/2" in diameter a day, it seems. For all the photosynthesis going on in that monster of a plant, I guess it's not too much of a surprise.

Runs in the family

My dad spreads the word. Each time my brothers or I send him an email letting him know how we're doing my dad forwards it to the other siblings. I think it's his way of keeping everyone up to speed on what's going on with an economy of effort.

My younger brother sent Dad an update the other day, in which he talked about his gardening plans. Moving plants, creating a couple of new beds, and making sure everything is on a timer so he doesn't have to remember to water.

I hadn't realized that everybody in my family gardens. My dad plants the same stuff every year: marigolds, red geranium, petunias, zinnias. My older brother has a vegetable garden that is more or less a kitchen garden for him to have fresh ingredients to cook with during the summer. The younger brother is doing flowers and impressively sized kid-friendly stuff: corn, watermelon, pumpkins. I plant a mishmash of drought tolerant perennials punctuated by whatever new and different annuals strike my fancy. We'll probably plant broccoli, carrots and maybe pumpkins this year too.

I've always wanted to have a bunch of red raspberry bushes, but have never had enough space. Ditto peach and apple trees and grape arbors. Maybe someday. I like what I have going so far, and as long as I don't have to remember to water it (thank you whoever invented the watering timer), it has a good chance of surviving!

image: http://www.sabp-web.co.uk/

Then and Now

Yesterday, the front end of my car was going wub-wub-wub-wub, as though one of my tires was losing air. I filled it, then went out to start my car this morning to find it almost flat.

Jump back in time a couple of years ago, when I would think from time to time, "I've never changed a flat tire, I should learn how". I did get that first flat tire (thankfully this one was in my driveway too), and it was symbolic of my new independence and woeful lack of skills in some areas.

With my trusty helper Mr W, I got the lug nuts off the tire, thinking, "hey, I can put on the spare, what's so hard about that?" Trouble was, with my old car, I couldn't get the tire itself off. Even after following my mechanic's advice to "kick the shit out of it", it wouldn't budge. I was almost frantic, was I going to have to get towed out of my own driveway for a flat tire? Luckily, common sense prevailed, I pumped up the tire as much as I could with our dinky little bike tire pump, and drove to the tire place. Total time from discovery to getting to the tire place: about 2 hours.

Now go forward in time to this morning, when I go out to start my car and discover a flat tire. I sigh, go back inside, tell Mr W we need to deal with a flat tire, and finish my cereal. He asks, "can I jack the car up?" You bet. So instead of even trying to get the tire off, we jack up the car, fill the tire, I drop Mr W at school and drive to the tire place. Total time from discovery to getting to the tire place: about 20 minutes. Not to mention no noticable increase in blood pressure. Good doggie.

image from http://webpages.charter.net/todryk/todryk/flat_tire.html

A good Saturday

It's been a busy day. We had an early soccer game (they got pasted 5-1, but remained in good spririts) at 8:30 and went to the library for a Webkinz party they were having. For those of you not familiar with the Webkinz world, it's a scheme where kids get a small stuffed animal that comes with a code. They enter the code at the website and *presto* their pet is there in cyberspace, and the kid can earn kinz-cash to buy food for their pets, furniture and other stuff for their pet's room, play games. It's pretty harmless, and like a lot of faddish things, Mr W's interest peaked early and waned, but he heard about the party and wanted to go. It was lame, and we left after about 10 minutes. Oh well.

I got a lot done in my garden today! It's so satifying to rake out the old leaves dead plants and reveal a garden that's rarin' to go for spring. I put in a garden on the alley side of my house last year and have been working on that. I got some edging put in, and it looks really nice. Best part of it was that I had four big bags of dead leaves and instead of saving them for my weekly trash, or attempting to compost them in my puny yard, I was able to take them to the leaf drop off place. For a paltry $3.50, I dumped my leaves on their pile and they'll make compost out of it. Sweet.

Also, my bronze iris are coming up and have doubled over the last year. Iris are one of those plants that do really well here in CO. And these are iris with a story. One year for mother's day when I was a teenager, we bought my mom an iris rhizome for Mother's Day. After she died, when dad sold the house, I dug up some of it and have toted it around to every place I've lived for the last 14 years. It never fails to remind me of her. The iris that came with my house, I kid you not, smell like grape kool-aid. Funky.

image from www.jupiterimages.com

More springy thingies

I continue to ramp up for spring. Being a part-time single mom, full time worker and a home owner (don't forget working weekends to get time off to see the sweetie), I'm busy, like everyone else, it seems. I think that's part of the reason why I usually feel like the exterior of my property is lacking in some way. The outside is boring, the gardens are unkempt. I live in a part of town where people (college student renters excepted) really do give a hoot about what their house and yard look like.

Now, I'm not a yard person, really. I keep some grass because of Sally and Mr W, and I guess because it feels like I'm supposed to. I water it just enough to keep it on the edge of death - not a drop more. My tree lawn has been a thorn in my side since I moved in. It's uneven, so it's hard to mow with my little reel mower, and it's a pain to water it, so it has turned to weeds. It's also a significant part of the property, which is wide and shallow; it measures 10' x 50'.

So here is my to do list:

Tree lawn: kill weeds/grass, enclose with RR ties, cover with mulch

Regular lawn: Plant something in front of fence so I don't have to mow there (sense a trend?)

Gardens: Move/divide plants so I can see what's in there!

Exterior: Paint front door and trim I want some WOW to my very boring white and white-trimmed house. Plum and rust? Moss and Slate? Hmmm, what do you think?

I guess that's the priority list for the moment. I'm looking forward to looking at my house and yard and not cringing slightly!

image http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://thisoldhouse.typepad.com/oldhousemyhouse/images/imgp1583.jpg&imgrefurl=http://oldhousemyhouse.thisoldhouse.com/2006/12/color_schemeing.html&h=281&w=375&sz=97&hl=en&start=15&um=1&tbnid=ju_0NYJkJDXdiM:&tbnh=91&tbnw=122&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dcolor%2Bbungalow%2Bplum%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26rls%3Dcom.microsoft:*%26sa%3DG

Jeepers

Jeepers, Creepers, Peepers!

I have signed Mr. W and myself up to be frog survey volunteers for the city's program to find out more about local amphibians. I don't actually know if they get Spring Peepers around here, but we will know all that stuff soon.

When I read about it in the paper, I had visions of me and Mr. W out at dusk on spring evenings, with our flashlights and clipboards, listening and deciding what frog species we were hearing and gathering data like real scientists.

Admittedly, this exercise is not just to increase our knowledge of local herps. I see in him a real propensity toward those computer games, and I want to bring some balance to the force, as it were. I think it's good to get kids outside to see how cool nature is (as cool as computer games, in a different way, though, IMO).

Spring-based Optimism

OK, I admit it. I'm a sucker for the gardening catalogs that come around at this time of the year. It's timed so well. After the holidays, I'm so over having to travel and do what other people want me to do (no, it's not that bad) that planning next year's garden seems like such a grand, selfish, home-and-therefore-me type of gesture.

And I'm not a committed gardener, by any means. I'm more of the sort that puts forth an effort at the beginning of the season and then sits back to see what happens. I don't tweak and do lots of dead-heading, although I will weed (if for nothing else than to save me the trouble of getting the damn things out when they get big and unruly). No, I like to walk out in the mornings when I take the dog out first thing and see what's changed since the last time I've looked. That's one of the best things about gardening for me, to see this progression of flower to seed, to experience smell and color like nothing else in nature.

So I will gleefully look through the catalogs and plan and scheme about plant selection and placement. I will make a mental list that contains enough plants to cover a garden five times the one I've got, and end up buying different stuff at my local garden center anyway. It's all about hope, I guess. Hope for the next season.