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Wednesday, November 18, 2015

I'm trying

After we moved in, it took me a few weeks to get my bird feeders set up. After that, it took a few more before the birds started coming regularly. Now, if I put food out, there's someone here to eat it. The problem is, it's very hard for me to a get a good picture.

one downy on the suet, one on the pole
I've got one suet feeder on the deck, and I put peanuts on the deck railings. Unfortunately, since the deck is on the north side of the house, it's usually dark.

flicker
And the blue jays move so fast, they're almost impossible for me to catch.


I caught this one mid-hop.


My other feeders are set up in an area west of the deck and outside my office window. I can see them well, but I'm looking down on them. The problem with pictures? The windows have full screens, so none of the pictures are clear.

downy and dove

At the old house, I had half screens, which I always pushed up, so I could take pictures like this from the safety of my dining room.


Not so at the new house. There will be nothing like these this winter.



But, hey, at least I have squirrels.


Sunday, November 15, 2015

My fall harvest

Considering the fact that I left my garden behind when I moved, I certainly didn't think I'd have a harvest to write about this fall, but it's all perspective. While I may not have had tomatoes or squash to pick, I was lucky enough to be able to harvest some leaves yesterday.

I never thought too much about a leaf blower until I met the locust tree in our backyard. Its million tiny leaves aren't exactly easy to rake. As luck would have it, my mom recently discovered that a leaf blower she thought didn't work, actually did. Since she'd already bought a replacement, she gave me the old one.

In addition to the locust, our neighbor's have a ginkgo tree that hangs into our yard. It turned yellow a few days ago...


and then dropped most of its leaves.

before

Yesterday afternoon, armed with my new leaf blower, I went to work. I forgot to take pictures under the locust tree, but I sucked up a lot of leaves and twigs there and then moved on to the ginkgo leaves.

during
after
I didn't try too hard to suck up all the ginkgo leaves because there are also seeds all over the ground, and I didn't want to suck them up, too. If you've never been around a ginkgo tree, and I hadn't until we moved here, let me tell you about the smell. Vomit. That's what the ginkgo smells like. I think it's the seeds, and it got worse the riper they got. Beautiful tree, but I'm glad it's not closer to my house.

Anyway, between the locust and the ginkgo, I got four bags of leaves, which are now safely tucked away, starting their transformation to leaf mold.


They're hiding under my deck, since I don't have any other corners to stash them in.


Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Skeleton of a garden

I finally made some progress toward my future vegetable garden.

Before moving, I had already decided that I wanted to change my vegetable garden to raised beds. Raised beds have some advantages over a traditional garden, and I think they will be more efficient and easier for me to maintain.

In the interest of not spending scads of money, I bought untreated lumber, which I've used for beds before. This time, however, I treated the wood with Eco Wood Treatment. It'll be a few years before I have any idea if the treatment really works, but it cost less than $20 and I had more than enough for my four raised beds.

First, I painted the treatment on all the pieces,


and left them to dry for a little while.


Then, D and I were a box-building team. Line them up...


screw them together...


make sure they're fairly square...


and lay them out.


That was as far as we got the first weekend.

When I got back to work on them the next weekend, I could see that the wood was starting to turn gray.


The treatment will supposedly turn the boxes all dark gray eventually.

As I did when I created the big garden at the old house, I'm doing a lasagne-type thing for these beds. First, I laid down cardboard under all of the beds. I extended it about two feet on all sides because I'm planning to mulch all of that area as a path.


The advantage of having moved recently, and bought a new dining room set, was that I had plenty of cardboard. To be sure that the cardboard doesn't end up blowing around this winter, I laid out pavers (which we'd torn out of the patio and will otherwise be discarded).


Next, I raked under the locust tree, the only mature tree we've got, and threw those leaves and twigs in the beds.


Then, I threw in some wood chips that I'd gotten from a local tree service.


They're coarse and gnarly, but they will weigh down the cardboard, and be a nice base for the rest of the filling next spring.

We had some retaining wall work done recently and had a little fill dirt left over, so I divided that between the beds, too.


I was a little nervous about that, because I have no idea where the dirt came from, but it had some grass clumps in it, and I saw some earthworms, so I figured it couldn't be completely toxic. I guess we'll see next spring. Gulp.

As with most projects, this one required a new tool.


I'm pretty excited about my brand new wheelbarrow. It's going to get quite a workout next spring, when I finish filling the beds with my raised bed mix.

It's finally starting to look a little bit like a garden.