Landscaping and the Front Walkway!

Sheesh, been a while... but we've been tirelessly (and tired-ly) working toward the goal of having the house ready to list end of August/September. I'll save all my emotionally conflicted ramblings about this for some other time and instead catalog all the new stuff.

Anyway, off topic to start with, my brother David and SIL Kendra visited in the beginning of May for a week. By the numbers: at least 8 hours of The Office and 3 Bourne movies watched, 3 trips to Buttercloud, 2 In N Out, 2 beers and 2 desserts at Schoolhaus Brewhaus, 1 enormous breakfast at Morning Glory, 1 Bella pizza, 1 trip to Crater Lake (pretty snowy, which made us happy, though the lake is not as blue on cloudy days) and 1 exceptional bottle of Gnarlyhead ancient vine zinfandel paired with steaks.

It was a fun time. Then Memorial Day Weekend, I gardened. I haven't really stopped gardening, actually. The back 40 was tilled, weeded and landscape-fabric-ed.

 And now looks like this, with things more grown in. We need to lay just a bit more pea gravel (in the foreground) to meet the driveway on the right, and then this will be pretty much finished. This year, I'm growing:

• pumpkins
• cateloupe
• cucumbers
• tomatoes (obviously)
• dahlias
• 5 kinds of squash
• onions
• potatoes (the organic ones sprout super fast in the pantry)

I just picked my first yellow squash today and have eaten a few yellow cherry tomatoes already. 

Sorry about the funky lighting on this, but this is how the back looks now (minus canoe, which we sold and replaced with kayaks). Few rough edges still, but looks really good mostly.

Finally, I got to fill these giant pots for either side of the garage. I bought them three years ago and they've been shuffled around the garage ever since. They're 23 inches wide, for scale. I made little carts for them to wheel around on and strung up sprinklers around the garage door so they're watered automatically. Insert heart eyes here. Sprinkler drip lines and whatnot were a SERIOUS PAIN to install but I'm looking forward to sipping my beer and watching all my plants get watered.

 Not bad, huh?

We need to mulch most of the beds next to the pool still. I planted blackeyed susans of various types to fill in where it's still blank. Hopefully the bed in the background finishes filling in. It's a bit spotty still, but eventually the plants will entirely fill the whole bed.

The best flower in the garden right now is this hot pink dahlia. When the sun hits the petals, they almost glitter. 

And out front, we have two trees full of peaches and (super excitingly) my Macintosh apple finally has apples. I have been waiting for six years to enjoy fruit off that tree. Two of the peach branches broke from all the fruit and an unfortunate miscommunication about pruning this spring, but we'll still have way more than we can eat. 

And lastly, here's a before (over eight years ago, when we were just looking at the house)...

And an after, now that we have our shutters up and Todd finished the brick walkway, which turned into a much bigger project than he expected. It makes me smile every time I drive past the house because it looks so dang cute. We're going to put window boxes up under the two big windows and fill them with begonias or something. It's going to be unbelievably charming.

Oh, wait...one more. I just loved how the kitchen looked one morning a few weeks ago with a kind of crazy bouquet of flowers and the filtered light. Hard to believe it was so dreadful three years ago.

Concrete Projects and This Year's Container Gardening

I pinned a picture of a concrete bowl full of succulents years ago and then on our California trip a few weeks ago remembered it was a project I wanted to try. So I read some tutorials online, bought a bag of concrete from Home Depot and some bowls from the dollar store and went to work last weekend.

I broke my first bowl almost immediately because I didn't let it cure, but it wasn't that good to begin with. The second one, I allowed to cure in a garbage bag for almost a week. It was a major exercise in patience. I also broke a vase right away too. Turns out the molds are a lot easier to remove once the piece is dry, instead of trying (unsuccessfully) to pry it out while the whole thing is wet. The great part here is concrete is dirt cheap and easy to experiment with.

So that's what I ended up with, using the bowl in the picture below and another bowl inside of it (not pictured). The waterbottle was the inside mold of my broken vase project.

And here's my little succulent garden. I'm really, really hoping I can keep it alive, because succulents aren't exactly cheap. Also, I love how it came together and would like to enjoy it all summer.

I'm looking forward to continuing to refine my concrete skills. For the successful bowl, I removed all the rocks from the concrete using a strainer, so it was easier to mold. I'll be doing that in the future, and I'm also going to see if there's a rock-less premade mix. I'm betting there is. 

Here's part of this year's container gardens, featuring celosia, ageratum and a sweet potato vine (and my all-time favorite pot I've ever bought, the blue-willow-style one).

Lastly, I couldn't not share this sunset over my new lagoon pool. And check out our craigslisted offset umbrella! 

Hardware and cherries

Trash dresser's cousin got hardware installed last weekend, and I love it.

 It's kind of a blocky, modernish shape. Dark finish. The best part is opening and closing drawers and how much easier it is with a handle. Also, lesson learned, when you're filling holes in furniture, use wood filler and not caulk. Four coats of caulk in and the holes from the previous hardware were still visible. Wood filler dealt with them in one swipe.

Todd's dad came and tilled the weed forest garden a couple weeks ago too. We planted annual rye grass in the non-bedded section and won't be growing much this year, other than a few determined dahlias that sprouted again after two years of not being dug up and split. Five tomato plants are in the bed and two basils are in the back entry waiting to be planted. 

 You remember our plumbing project? And how I said our pipes were made of concrete? Welp, that's one of the pipes. You know what pipes aren't supposed to have? HOLES. That is like Swiss cheese pipe. Glad this project is drawing to a close.

 This is from Friday night at the farm/winery just up the street from our house. 7 minute walk, perhaps. I will be probably blabbing more about them in the coming weeks. Perfect place to spend a Friday evening.

 Our first round of fruit ripened earlier this week: the cherries. It was a lot of work keeping the birds out of my cherry trees this year, but mission accomplished. We netted the trees and then I put some stuffed animals out (rabbit, lobster and bear) to deter would-be thieving birds from making off with the goods.

 Of which there were many. Last year I saw the green cherries, and then a few weeks later went out to check on them and there was no trace of any cherries at all. I was later told that birds will clear the tree within a day if certain measures aren't taken to fend them off. This year, said measures were taken and we filled two huge mixing bowls with our spoils, and they are yummy.

 Sadly, we lost one of the apple trees (Todd's Red Delicious) from last year. Kind of weird because they should have been established, but anyway... My Macintosh has a pretty lot of apples on it, which is the first year we'll be getting fruit from it. Only one of the peaches has peachlets on it right now, but one tree full of peaches is better than zero trees full of peaches, so I'll take it.

Smoky Peaches and Clover

I don't think I've ever been so thankful to see bluish skies as I was on Friday morning. We've had a horrible stretch of smoky weather; I guess it was only since last Sunday night, but it seems like months. The sky was overcast with smoke and it was suffocating outside. It's been pretty hazy the last couple of days, but nothing like it was. When you could see it, the sun was a vague, reddish glow in the sky, even in the middle of the day.

Given the weather, we got pretty much nothing done all week outside. We didn't go outside, period. But there were still things going on outside, even though I wasn't about to go and check them out up close. Things like this...

 And this, which I did a few weeks ago when one of the peach trees bent over under the weight of all the fruit.

 We are going to need a peach management plan, and soon.

Nothing's ripe yet, but I don't think it can be more than a couple of weeks away before we find ourselves buried in peaches. Yum.

This was happening in the garden. I went out to snip a few for my office early one morning when I was feeling depressed about the smoke.

 These too. I have some sitting in one of Mom's old pitchers on the kitchen table...

 Here:

Post-Bartlett, this is what the backyard looks like. Barren. Also dead, except for some weeds that are impressively resisting my repeated Round-up attacks. That big pile of brown is mulch from the ground-out cedar stump. 

 My blackeyed susans are blooming beautifully. Someday this whole bed will be full of them, once they've naturalized.

Today, I worked my way through some zucchinis from the garden and using my favorite zucchini bread recipe made 12 zucchini muffins (eight of which are still intact. They're about three bites each and so yummy),

eight mini zucchini loaves and two normal loaves. I used almost 10 cups of grated zucchini. It was a lot. I'd intended to use some chocolate chips in a few of them, but they'd mysteriously gone missing. Next time.

Lastly, there is clover. In my garden. Or on the edge of it. I decided I just didn't really feel like waging war on it today, and it's ended up making a rather cute little bouquet for the kitchen windowsill. It's nice when things work out. 

Notes From the Garden

First real garden pickins of the year. Basil and the first cucumber. 

There are a handful of tomatoes that will be ripening this week: a few cherries, Santiam and an Early Girl. I'm pretty sure the Santiam is going to beat out the EG. Peppers are coming along and dahlias will be in full bloom soon. 

Just as the dark was falling, I put nine little black-eyed susan starts in the ground in the bed in front of the pool. I hacked at the now-unruly honeysuckle vines this afternoon. They're going to need more work and a bigger trellis to take over, but things are under control for the moment. 

We got a ton done yesterday. Mowing the lawn is an hour+ investment, and I'm not sure me zigzagging around only mowing down weeds really saved me much time. The grass is dead now. I refuse to water until we have a sprinkler system and nice lawn. Todd dismantled my black widow wood pile and relocated it to the back of the garden along the neighbors' fence. The wood's been seasoning for three years and I am SUPER EXCITED to dig into my stash of extra-dry oak, cedar and magnolia. 

I spent two hours ripping bermudagrass out of the edge of the garden. I probably shouldn't have bothered, but I just hate it so much. Most of it is gone now and I'll poison whatever's left. No mercy. That stuff is tenacious.

Last night we sipped pear cider from Growler King with Tim while he worked on laying out the kitchen, mudroom and half bath. I'm not sure I've looked forward so much to any other project in this house being done. Oh, it will be a glorious day. And on that note, the activities of the last two days have caught up to me and it's time for bed.

Spotted in the garden...

First tomato of the year! Winner: santiam.

Productive garden + new apartment

It's been six weeks (and change) since we moved. We're happily settled into our closet (as I somewhat affectionately refer to our apartment) and brought the last carload when we came back on Monday. It contained, among other things... and also these...

which are the chairs and table that I decided to strip and stain shortly before we moved. Did I neglect to mention this project? Oops.

Though I'm fairly used to things going wrong at this point, pretty much everything possible went wrong with this project. In addition to my stripper chemical not working very well and it (of course) taking longer than I expected, the stain didn't take very nicely to the wood (probably due to the remaining bit of finish I couldn't remove -- refer to picture of chairs above) AND we got stuck in Texas for three extra days, which deleted my margin to finish the project.

So when we went back a month ago, I finished staining and put a first coat of polyurethane on things. (With the dry time, that was all I had time for.) This time, two more coats, then we brought it back. It's sitting on our deck to let things dry thoroughly, and so it doesn't gas us while we're sleeping.

It doesn't look as good as I'd hoped, but I don't think the average person would think it looks horrible. Except for that one chair. I'll put that in the corner where you can't see it. Also...I only did three chairs. I got so fed up that I decided to just skip the fourth. It's in the attic, halfway unfinished...whatever. Stupid project.

We finished a few other things around the house...painting the window that's been primed pink for a year, caulking some seams, painting around the front door...just little stuff. I have a few pictures (mainly flowers) to post...
Dwarf dahlias (above) and morning glories (below)
Giant sunflower + seeds
And here's Todd, holding the first apple from our tiny tree. This is his Red Delicious. I planted a Macintosh.

I also wanted to show you our new apartment. People have been asking, and this is definitely easier than emailing pictures.

So...you come up these stairs
and then turn left. In front of you is the bathroom and on the left of the little hallway is the laundry "room."

If you don't go that way, you make a u-turn and this is what it looks like...From the kitchen looking back the other way...
(That's our little bar counter in the left corner.)

Sorry that's so dark...
This is from the top of the stairs again. We have a nice little deck with a sliding glass door.
Lastly... my "office" which is a definite downgrade from my previous setup, but not that bad...
The pantry, which I LOVE...I've never had a pantry before. It's great to have a place to put stuff. (And stockpile.)
And the kitchen. Nice high windows face northeast and let in light all day. We also have nice views out the slider and to the southeast (respectively):