It's becoming a garden!

Remember my two wistful posts back in January about my then bleak and snow-covered backyard which concealed my future garden? Well look at it now! We did rent a sod cutter, and once we got the hang of it, it was pretty easy, except for turning the thing, that took two people. Sorry, no videos or pics of the actual cutting operation, couldn't find the camera at that moment and didn't want to spend time searching for it because we were on the clock, had to have the sod cutter back at the Home Depot by 3 on Saturday or they'd charge extra.

Sadly, to Junior Gardener's disgust and horror, we must have sliced at least fifty million earthworms into a hundred million that day. Running the sod cutter was easy and actually kind of fun, but the really hard (and tedious) part that took the longest was cutting the strips into managable slices (with kitchen knives), rolling them up (avoiding as best we could the half-worms and worm guts, as well as the occasional grub, catapillar, or spider), hoisting the sod rolls into the wheel barrel, carting them to the back of the yard and throwing them onto the skillfully engineered and unexpectedly ginormous sod heap ~ look kids, it's our new sledding hill! The plan is to let the sod compost itself down into rich humus by next spring. Maybe I should cover it with a tarp of some sort.

I could not wait, I just had to go get some of the raised bed frames and arrange them on the fresh ground, just to get a feel of it.

3' wide wood mulch pathways will surround the boxes.

I'm so geeked I can hardly stand it!

Now, add some black plastic edging, landscape fabric, a truckload each of wood mulch and topsoil/peat mix, (and a handful of Motrin), and voila! Le Poteger est ne!

And the really cool thing about this whole thing is--we did it ourselves. And did quite a fine job too if I do say so myself.

...boy am I tired.

60 degrees on February 10. In Michigan. WTF????

Hard to believe that just ten days ago, it was 2 degrees below zero, and I was cutting apart pallets for firewood, and we had just invested in a new portable oil heater, it had been so durn cold for so durn long. Then yesterday it was 45 degrees. Today it's supposed to approach 60. So what did I do as soon as the schoolbus turned the corner with the kids? Pruned the lilacs of course! That took all of 45 minutes.

Then I went around to the side of the house, where the people before us had planted 4 "burning bushes" along the garage. What a waste of a good south-facing 40' long brick wall which gets sun all day. It's almost criminal, planting useless crap like that in such a prime location. There ought to be a law. Those have got to come out. And soon. I have visions of cucumbers and vining tomatos, perhaps a kiwi or three, even reaching as high as that second story window...

I got the shovel and tested the soil around one of them. Not frozen, but pretty much a solid mass of roots, even 3' from the trunk. Digging them out is definitely going to be one b*tch of a job. They're about 5' tall, so I'd like to salvage them and transplant them just inside the rear fence, which would screen the neighbor's patio from direct view of our patio. Until I can enlist my son and/or brother to help yank these out, I suppose I'll busy myself cleaning the garage. Yep, spring fever is coming early this year.

New Nursery: Before and After

That's $11 for the shoplite, $14 for 2 "plant spectrum" bulbs, $2 for the little socket-plug converter thingy (so I can plug the shoplite into the ceiling fixture cause the washer and dryer take up the ONLY outlet) and $12 for the 2 flats w/domes and 8 qt. of starter mix. Of course I plan to save and re-use the little 6 packs for the next 20 years to justify the initial expense. I know this setup is not very imaginitive, but hey, it sure beats eggcartons on the windowsill. Now I just need to find the space around the house to put in about 15 more of these shoplite grow-units and I estimate I'll have almost enough space to start the seeds for all the crap I plan to grow this year.

New Kitchen Faucet

Picked it up at Ikea for $50. Isn't it beautiful? I like it because it is so tall, I can rinse out gallon milk containers with ease, wash the biggest pots without jockeying aroung the old small faucet. See how small the old one was in the pic on the right? Plus the new one has a very cool looking sideways handle. I installed it all by myself and it doesn't even leak so I am feeling pretty invincible right about now. We also had fun shopping for the necessary nipples too, mainly because once we were told by the big plumber sales guy at the plumbing supply store the actual name of the little connector thingys we needed, it was hard to keep from giggling.

Like the brush on the left? It has a suction cup on the bottom. I had to have it. Please ignore the bowl of kitchen scraps, it's been way too cold these past 3 days to take it the 7 steps out the back door to the compost pile. It doesn't stink yet so I figure oh well.