My milkshake. It has something to do with yards, I think.

We did a little bit of work on the front yard last night, and I think it's starting to look really good now. Here are a few establishing shots:

Everything is greening up a lot, and the bare patches are slowly filling in. Pulling the grass out of the area around the tree in the front was tough, but it really helps make everything look nicer. We're still trying to figure out what to put in there now. The dirt on our property is amazing, and I think we can grow just about anything anywhere. We're leaning toward some kind of flowers, but our neighbor has this really dense greenery around their tree that looks very nice. What we see on sale at Lowe's will probably influence us more than anything.

Here's the before and after of the little planting area. This was a while back, mind you. I'd already pulled the one big weed weeks ago, and the grass in there had gotten significantly taller and denser.

Ugh. I'm so glad we're making this nicer. It's going to be gorgeous, it just takes a little work. Even the bare dirt looks much better than this.

Just ripe for planting, eh? I also tried to rearrange the rocks in a bit better pattern, so they weren't quite so slapdash. We're going to be replacing them with big river rocks, or maybe some of those wedge-shaped pavers. I like those because they have a nice tight joint so I think grass would be less likely to grow between them.

We also did a little surgery last night. Here's a shot from a few months ago of a dead rosebush next to the front steps.

I didn't know it was a rose bush until I tried to pull it out and discovered that it had thorns that went right through my leather gloves. Suck. Now, here's what we have:

All gone! It came out really easily, actually. Too easily. I spent a while raking all the rocks away from it so I could get in there with my shovel, and the dirt underneath it was really soupy and gross. The bush just fell out in my hand when I grabbed it. What could be causing this? This little bugger:

We have a drip system in the front yard, and this thing was going full blast 24 hours a day for the last week. I don't know if I mentioned it, but our neighbors who helped us with the sprinklers had mentioned that we had a puddle that formed on one side of our yard in the summer. They thought it was a broken sprinkler head or something, but I'm thinking it's these drip lines going all day. I had no idea how to fix it, though, so I called my dad and he walked me through it.

Here's the sprinkler control box:

This is more or less what you should see inside the little green box you have somewhere in your yard. Those three bits on the bottom are valves, and each one controls a different zone for your sprinkler system. My yard has five zones, and these three are for the front yard: one for each side of the driveway and one for the drip system. The wires going to each one are connected to your sprinkler panel (probably in your garage just on the other side of the wall from this box) and they control the water flow. The panel lets you set which zones come on for how long and when. It takes a little fiddling, but it isn't too bad. You can also open and close these valves manually. When they are manually closed, the panel can still open them per the schedule, but when they're manually open they're on all the time. To operate them you need a special tool that looks like this:

It's a little plastic deal with a hex-shaped bottom to fit over the valves. Turns out the drip system was wide open, so I shut it off. Hopefully, that'll solve the problem for good. I did a quick test to make sure the drip would still come on when it's scheduled, and it did.

We have another panel for the two back yard zones but haven't been able to find it yet. Now that I know how they work, I feel more confident with futzing with them to add another valve, or change a regular set of sprinklers to misters or a drip system (inside of our raised boxes, if I can manage it). As always, I will keep you all posted.

And finally, we have the other minor project from last night:

Yay! I put up our towel ring finally, and it looks pretty good. When I actually get around to fixing the texture on that wall I'll have to take it down again, but that isn't a big deal. I used the screw-in wall anchors we pulled out from the towel bar mounts, and they worked pretty well. When putting those in, you need to keep a lot of pressure on them, otherwise they have a tendency to mess up the surface of the wall around them. The threads are so big, they'll pull drywall out unless you're really leaning on them.

Okay, that wasn't finally. Here's finally:

My lovely wife is growing little seedlings in eggshells to prepare them for transplant. The eggshells are great because they're biodegradable and the roots can actually punch through so you just plant the whole egg in the ground when the time comes to transplant them. We have lettuce, spinach and broccoli on tap here.

Another tip we got is to use a bell jar over them to keep them nice and moist. It's like a mini greenhouse and it really seems to be doing the trick for these bad boys. They've sprouted very quickly and they all look very healthy. I'm pretty excited to transfer them out to the yard and have a real live garden later this year.

Okay that's it for real now. Thanks for reading!