So, almost two weeks later now and I was off to such a good start! Not to worry though, I've been keeping busy with the garden while the painters finished up the house. I swung by the house today and the scaffolding and masking is gone so it's safe to assume I can go back and install my HDMI cables. Some updates first:
The garden
So on the garden front a lot has happened. The beans and corn are growing nicely in the "throw-some-seed-down-and-see-what-takes" pile-O-dirt. I have added slug and snail bait around the Pile-O-Dirt because apparently we were infested. Over the course of three nights I counted almost 200 slugs either killed by me or the bait. Two-freakin-hundred.
It started when I noticed some of the lettuce and bok choy leaves on the dirt in the planters. They looked as if they'd been snipped off at the surface which is good for thinning but not so good when you've already thinned and transplanted to your final spacing. Three nights of hunting and setting bait have kept the plants slug free. For now.
The side of the house had a nice long stretch of dirt that wasn't getting use so I dug it out figuring I'd soften up the soil a bit and transplant all the germinating stuff to beds I could lay out all nice-like. Thing is, the soil is rocky from the construction (that dirt was where they dumped all the extra rock and gravel), and full of huge roots from the rubbish trees in our neighbor's yard. He let his yard grow into a jungle and then finally had to have a landscaping company come in to chop down trees and grind the stumps down. They did that about 2 years ago and today you can't tell that anything had been done at all. Although I love trees and the environment, etc. the trees are rubbish trees. Fast growing (think weedlike), nutrition sucking, sewer pipe destroying, blah blah, you get the idea. Oh, also a lot of them harbor ants. Regular black ants, but they can get annoying too. I'll try and take some pics later.
Man, the point was a job that shouldn't have taken more than a day and a half tops, has taken closer to three and I'm still not done yet.
The lettuce bed is growing nicely and soon I will have to start thinning that out. The plan for the soon to be bed on the side of the house is to screen all the dirt, make frames for the boxes to sit above the level of the sidewalk, throw the gravel down on the bottom for drainage, the screened dirt on top, then the extra rocks in between as walkways or access, and about six inches of compost in the raised frames. Once I have a drawing and some pics it will make much more sense.
The House
A bad (rainy) stretch of weather means the painting got stretched all the way to EOD yesterday which means no work since all the doors and windows were masked off. Today I figure I can finally figure out what all the extra cables are in the media wall (can't find my original diagram), drill holes for and install the 2 twelve foot HDMI cables (Blue Jeans Cable if you're interested), maybe throw up some insulation and if all goes well, hang the last full sheets of drywall on the wall.
As always, pics can be found at: http://picasaweb.google.com/theycallmetak
So on the garden front a lot has happened. The beans and corn are growing nicely in the "throw-some-seed-down-and-see-what-takes" pile-O-dirt. I have added slug and snail bait around the Pile-O-Dirt because apparently we were infested. Over the course of three nights I counted almost 200 slugs either killed by me or the bait. Two-freakin-hundred.
It started when I noticed some of the lettuce and bok choy leaves on the dirt in the planters. They looked as if they'd been snipped off at the surface which is good for thinning but not so good when you've already thinned and transplanted to your final spacing. Three nights of hunting and setting bait have kept the plants slug free. For now.
The side of the house had a nice long stretch of dirt that wasn't getting use so I dug it out figuring I'd soften up the soil a bit and transplant all the germinating stuff to beds I could lay out all nice-like. Thing is, the soil is rocky from the construction (that dirt was where they dumped all the extra rock and gravel), and full of huge roots from the rubbish trees in our neighbor's yard. He let his yard grow into a jungle and then finally had to have a landscaping company come in to chop down trees and grind the stumps down. They did that about 2 years ago and today you can't tell that anything had been done at all. Although I love trees and the environment, etc. the trees are rubbish trees. Fast growing (think weedlike), nutrition sucking, sewer pipe destroying, blah blah, you get the idea. Oh, also a lot of them harbor ants. Regular black ants, but they can get annoying too. I'll try and take some pics later.
Man, the point was a job that shouldn't have taken more than a day and a half tops, has taken closer to three and I'm still not done yet.
The lettuce bed is growing nicely and soon I will have to start thinning that out. The plan for the soon to be bed on the side of the house is to screen all the dirt, make frames for the boxes to sit above the level of the sidewalk, throw the gravel down on the bottom for drainage, the screened dirt on top, then the extra rocks in between as walkways or access, and about six inches of compost in the raised frames. Once I have a drawing and some pics it will make much more sense.
A bad (rainy) stretch of weather means the painting got stretched all the way to EOD yesterday which means no work since all the doors and windows were masked off. Today I figure I can finally figure out what all the extra cables are in the media wall (can't find my original diagram), drill holes for and install the 2 twelve foot HDMI cables (Blue Jeans Cable if you're interested), maybe throw up some insulation and if all goes well, hang the last full sheets of drywall on the wall.
As always, pics can be found at: http://picasaweb.google.com/theycallmetak
posted by Jordan at 10:48
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