Growing Pains

Actually, there's no pain involved. The growing is happening and it's awesome. Here're our little sprouts:

These are our onions, grown from tiny bulbs given to us by the Webbers. They're already getting so big! Winifred has also gained access to the raised bed and established her dominance over the "Carrots" sign. I can't say I'm entirely surprised.

These are the barest beginnings of our tiny lettuce plants. They're scattered and densely packed right now, but as they get a little bigger, we'll thin them out.

This is the first sprout from one of our watermelon seeds. We planted three, and I really hope they turn out. Watermelon would be awesome to have at some late summer backyard picnics.

I also decided to thin the weeds in the back a little. In case you thought maybe I didn't have a lot of weeds back there, here's a picture.

How many weeds is that? All the weeds.

This is now fewer weeds. I actually got rid of all of them, but the light was failing so i snapped a pic before the job was done.

Here you can see the hose laid out in the yard, marking where the new line of lawn will go. We're cutting out a lot of it, but there will still be a whole lot left.

That's it for now! I'll get more pics of our little plants for you guys this weekend. I think we have a couple more poking through already. Woot! Thanks for reading.

Plans Within Plans

We got a little more done in the yard, including planting our seeds in our garden. I didn't take pictures because it still just looks like a big pile of dirt. We also had my mom and dad come over and help us start on a plan for the yard. We're taking out a lot of grass, but I'm surprised by how much is still going to be left over. We have a good-sized yard. We're going to add a lot of flowers and shrubs and at least a few trees, I think. We're also planning on leaving space to build another garden bed, if we so choose.

Also, I got the sprinklers turned back on finally. I had cracked the valve last year by improperly winterizing, and my dad helped me replace it. We think we may actually need to replace the whole thing, since there's a bit of dripping going on right now. We'll see, though. It's a relatively minor problem, given that the sprinklers sprinkle and the drippers drip.

Finally, we've also decided that we're going to hire out the remainder of the master bathroom. We simply don't have the time or the expertise to finish it ourselves in anything like the timeframe we want, and it's holding up everything else in the house. We're going to have to find electricians and drywall guys and tile guys and who knows what all other kinds of guys. There will be a lot of guys. But we'll find them and we'll get everything all the way taken care of. I'll certainly keep you posted as that progresses.

Other than that, not much has been going on. We have some plants in the yard doing well, some not so much. We'll have to see what we like enough to keep and what we get rid of. I'll take pictures this weekend and let everyone know what's going on. Thanks for reading!

Digging up Dirt

A little bit of dirt goes a long way, unless you're trying to fill a giant raised garden bed. Then you need a lot of dirt. Let me demonstrate.

This is the shiny new dirt we purchased. It's all organic, and is all from Colorado, so I'm hoping everything works well together.

This (the dirt in the background, not the draw knife) is the dirt we had left from the hole.

I put a layer a few inches deep right over top of the gravel. That was my buffer so I could mix it up without mixing the gravel into the soil.

This is 3 bags (1.5 cu ft each) of the soil.

This is a bag of the compost (the extra-dark stuff) with more of the fill dirt on top of it. I was really hoping that mixing the soil with the compost with the fill dirt would end up giving me a solid soil base for growing veggies. I have no scientific reason to believe this, but it sort of makes sense.

This is all the different soil mixed up together and spread evenly. This looks good to me. I think I can work with this. Still not enough, though.

I put in the remainder of the bagged soil and added the remainder of the fill dirt. Now I need to mix.

Hoeing ain't easy.

After a lot of work moving dirt back and forth, I got it mixed up well enough that I felt comfortable leaving it alone for the time being. It looks like pretty good dirt, I have to say. It's still a little clumpy, but I'm thinking I'll rake it out a bit more before we plant.

We (meaning my lovely wife) also put together these beautiful hanging baskets. They're small, but they add some color to the yard and make it look a lot more lived-in. I really like them, and I think we'll end up getting more.

We also picked up a couple of super-mini orange trees and got little planters for them. I really hope they do well!

I think they look great sitting on the corners of the garden bed like that, too.

So there you go. Our back yard is still really weedy and not very well taken care of, but we're making progress, and that has to count for something. Thanks for reading!

Riding the Pine

Not just yet, but we're closer. Here's what we have after working on Monday night:

We were originally having issues deciding how we were going to get these things to fit. If we locked them down before they were all cut, we had less flexibility to move them to make them easier to fit, but if we didn't we were trying to match floating boards with floating boards. We ended up splitting the difference and just attaching each bench top with two wood screws so they'll still be easy enough to remove before we finalize.

Working our way around. We're still just cutting these and tacking them down as we go. This is about where we stopped. We got the last piece cut, but it needs a little adjustment to fit properly. We'll get that done here very shortly. Then we'll also put down some glue on these bad boys and really screw them down so they don't go anywhere. Then at some point in the future, we're going to put tile on them. Woot!

Also, I don't know if you remember me saying anything about this in the past, but our sprinkler system is short one valve in the control box in the front. We always thought there would be one in the back yard, but had no idea where it would be. Well we found it:

Just sitting in them iddle of a big patch of rocks. I stepped on it and noticed the sound was off, so I dug it up a little and voila! Good to know where it is, at least.

Thanks for reading!

Raised just a little bit more

Well my dad came over this weekend and we raised our beds just a bit more. Still not all the way done as the weather kinda scared us away, but much closer still. You'll see it all, through the magic of digital photography.

Getting ready to go. Got the new timbers, just need to stack them up on there and hope it all works out so we don't have any giant gaps anywhere.

To assist, I have my new toy. It's awesome. I don't think it was designed with work this heavy in mind (driving 10" screws into 6x6 chunks of cedar) but it performed admirably. I like the size and weight of it for sure.

One more layer in place. Still needs to be screwed down, though.

Stupid natural materials, being all organic and not square. Looks like this is a job for a truly ancient tool that I really have no good reason to own. Thankfully, my loving wife got it for me as a gift a few years ago. I have found many occasions to use it when nothing else will quite do the job.

This is a draw knife. I don't remember if I've used it on the blog before, but it is a heck of a handy tool for shaping wood in a quick way. Also invaluable for making longbows, if you're into that.

Scrape scrape. Had to get that end cut down enough for the next layer to sit properly. We'll certainly have small gaps, but we can't have giant ones.

Much better.

We also noticed that some of the screws were hitting their collar and stopping, so we decided to use an auger bit to countersink them just a touch.

So there we go. All four courses, including the one that is now completely buried. Did I mention that each of these timbers is like $40? They weren't labeled when I went to get the first batch so I didn't quite realize just how expensive they are. Next time, we're using 4x4 cedar, which is $10 per timber. Seriously. These look nice, but they don't look that nice. I would have to use another 2-3 courses to get the right height, but even then we'd end up with a whole lot less money in the project, not to mention how much easier they would be to cut and everything.

And now we get to work on the bench top. This isn't going to be easy, unfortunately. We're trying to match wood with wood when we know none of it is straight, level or square, simply by its very nature.

Made a guide for the circular saw. This really helped get straighter cuts. I can follow a line with the best of them, but the circular saw is a mighty beast to have to keep on a straight line diagonally across a 2x10 board.

We got one corner done and had to stop with the wind picking up and clouds rolling in. We've got too many power tools out there to deal with much rain.

I'll post more progress as soon as I can. Thanks for reading!

Quick Fixes

Didn't do much this weekend, as we were super busy with our social schedule. I did however, manage to thatch the front yard and pull a lot of dead leaves and grass out of the irises in the back. I don't know how bulbs normally work, but I think there's something wrong with these. they're not individual plants growing out of one bulb each, there's this hideous, mutated mass of bulb with a ton of plants growing out of it. It's huge and gross-looking. I want to dig it up and break it up and replant them or something. I know literally nothing about bulb plants so I'm going to have to figure out what to do with them to keep that from happening in the future. A giant mass of bulb isn't ideal for any area of my yard.

I did do a minor repair in the front yard. Here's the situation:

This downspout thingy consistently comes undone and flops all over the place, especially in high winds.

Solution: Rivets. I had to punch the holes a little larger to get these rivets through, but i didn't get pictures of that.

If you haven't used one of these rivet guns, you're missing out. They insanely handy. They let you attach two pieces of metal semi-permanently (can be drilled out) even if you only have access to one side. That's something you don't normally get from any other fastener I've tried. Not expensive, either.

And there we go. One of these bad boys in each side and I'm all set. no more pulling free. Eventually, we'll be digging under the sidewalk and running a drain directly from the downspout under there and then into the lawn so we don't have to step over this thing all the time. That's a bigger project for another day, though.

Thanks for reading!

Beds, and the raising thereof

Well, you've seen me dig a trench and put gravel in it, now you get to see my dad and I pin those wooden timbers to the ground!

We got the timbers at least roughly level, then pulled them up one by one and drilled holes in them with a 1/2" spade bit. We started with my dad's new tiny cordless drill and it has a lot going for it. It weighs like 2 pounds, doesn't have the giant dongle battery on the bottom, and actually managed to grind through one full hole and about half of another before we had to change the battery. I think for any kind of simple around the house projects, it would be an awesome workhorse of a drill, especially for the size. This was a heck of a lot to ask of any drill, I think. For reference, here's the drill: Bosch Drill My giant cordless drill I've had for years couldn't even finish off the half hole we had left. We ended up going to the corded Black and Decker we've had for years to finish them up. Battery power can't really compare to coal-fired power plant in the end.

Drilled three holes in each timber and pinned them at both ends and the middle. We used 24" pieces of 1/2" rebar, and pounded them in to the bottom of the board over here, so we didn't have to do quite as much pounding on the gravel.

All of the pins in place and ready to be driven down into the ground.

A little hammer work and voila!

This part wasn't on the plans, but we figured a little belt and suspenders never hurt anyone. We're driving some of the 10-inch timber screws through here to tie the corners together. Everything will be screwed together 6 ways from Sunday anyway, but why not throw in a few more, eh?

Here we're starting to put on the second course. It took a lot of switching and rotating to find the best fit. We had issues with the board fitting at least partially because we took Lowe's at their word when they said the timbers were 8 feet long, and didn't actually confirm that all of them really were. They're so big and there were so few of them, we just grabbed the ones that looked best on the surface without checking them for being straight and all like we would with a 2x4 or something. So anyway, we're doing the best we can with what we have.

Two 10" timber screws in the corner and one inthe middle of each board should tie these all together pretty well. And because we're Reeces, we also put an addition screw in the other end of each board.

Now that the second course is on and locked down, we put in the base layer of gravel for drainage. Once the next two courses are done and on top of this, we'll fill the whole thing with a mix of compost and pet moss and who knows what all else. Should be sweet!

And this is where it is right now. We'll be working on it again soon, hopefully. Right now, it's just settling in and looking darn good, I think.

Thanks for reading!