Spring Garden

Due to some landscaping reorganization and projects (the never ending masonry wall), our garden moved this year from its typical location to another one between the garage and the addition to our house.  This area is west facing, so it gets a LOT of afternoon sun, which may be good for tomatoes, and should extend the growing season into November.  Hopefully we will have a better growing year than last year.

A disadvantage of this location is that it has not been growing plants very long, so it had about 2 inches of top soil and pretty much pure clay below that.  I forked it over a few times, and added some lawn clippings, which should help a bit, and every plant will go in to either compost soil or river bottom soil from my parents' house, which ever bag is closer to hand at the time.

Here you can see young Master House and myself relaxing after planting.  (Please excuse the hat hair, tangled mess in the left foreground is the compost pile, and as always, click to enbiggen)

Seed row planted this weekend, which you can see below:

 From left to right we have: Dill, Basil, Cilantro, Radishes, Thyme, Lettuce, and a whole bunch of red onion sets that I let sit in the garage too long.  We will see what (if anything) comes up.

Onion sets:

We also have an array of seeds growing inside the house, which should give us our tomatoes, tomatillos and so on. (including sweet potato)  We have typically had about 60% of our seedlings die when we transplant.  Not sure if it is due to transplant shock, or too much sun or what.

In other home news, we finally broke down and got an electric lawn mower... more on that later.

Recycling

An unfortunate feature of having a house with a crawl space and county ordinances restricting the height of fences is that a fence is never tall enough to block the view of the neighbors.  Since we have little desire to increase our level of familiarity with the neighbors too far, we have been looking at ways to reduce visibility.

Planting trees in line with the neighbors' windows was the first step, and following a lucky find at Costco of all places, we now have three pink Jasmine plants in between them. Since Jasmine is a climber, the plants needed a trellis, and we quickly realized that we had something that might work; left over wrought iron fence pieces.

As you might recall, when we moved into the house over two years ago, the side yard had an iron fence, but we replaced that with a redwood one (with great labor).  The cut out pieces have been sitting on the side of our house ever since, waiting for an opportunity like this one.

Here is the result:

Since this picture was taken, we added cement blocks to the bottom of the fence to make it a bit taller and more sturdy, and took out the stick in the middle of the plant to let it spread out a bit more.  I expect that by this time next year, the whole of the iron fence will be covered with plant, and hopefully the neighbors will be that much harder to see.

On a side note, I cut down the last pieces of the fence this weekend, and let me tell you, there is nothing so fun as taking a Sawzall to metal fences.  Cut it like butter.

Grilled Nachos

As a late fathers' day present, I got a new charcoal grill, upgrading from my 11 year old portable grill that I got as a birthday present after graduating college, to a gas ignited charcoal grill with about four times the space, as well as some other nifty features. [mainly not having to crouch down to use it]  I will try to post a review of the grill later, after I have had some more time to get used to it.

Every new grill needs new recipes, and after cooking the obligatory barbecue foods like steaks, chicken legs, corn, and kabobs, we decided to try something more ambitious.  We also had 2lbs of chips left over from a party.  Result?

Enter Grilled Nachos.

This basically used the grill as an outdoor oven, although I did grill the steak ahead of time.  I got the temperature up around 250 degrees Fahrenheit and kept it there for about 20 minutes, with the nachos on a cookie sheet wrapped in foil to protect it from baked on cheese and grill flareups (of which there were none).  Aside from the steak, I also grilled some tomatoes and tomatillos from our garden (featured in the last post) and some onion, all of which were added to the nachos.

Here is the final result:

Very tasty!

First harvest of the season

First harvest of the season.  In august.  The end of august. Whaa Whaa...

The Twelve Things We Found

We are getting ready to sell our unwanted shed, and, not wanting to do anything simply, we decided to "clear it out" last night. By "clearing it out" I mean that we spent hours taking out the old floor and uncovered a great unholy lot of things, dead and alive, in the progress. Mr. House donned his best gloves and dust mask and ripped out the plywood floor, not finishing until well after the sun went down. I was lucky enough to avoid the task by taking care of the young Master House instead. We would come out to check on the progress and Mr. House would just hold up fingers to me, keeping a running count off all he encountered.

This little game inspired me to write a song.

Ahem . . .

(To the tune of "The Twelve Days of Christmas")

The First thing we found

When we were cleaning out the shed

Was a live rat looking at me*

The Second thing we found

When we were cleaning out the shed

Two Shelobs

And a live rat looking at me

The Third thing we found

When we were cleaning out the shed

Three rat nests

Two Shelobs

And a live rat looking at me

The Fourth thing we found

When we were cleaning out the shed

Four wasp nests

Three rat nests

Two Shelobs

And a live rat looking at me

The Fifth thing we found

When we were cleaning out the shed

FIVE RAT MUMMIES!

Four wasp nests

Three rat nests

Two Shelobs

And a live rat looking at me

The Sixth thing we found

When we were cleaning out the shed

Six feet of web

FIVE RAT MUMMIES!

Four wasp nests

Three rat nests

Two Shelobs

And a live rat looking at me

The Seventh thing we found

When we were cleaning out the shed

Seven rusty nails

Six feet of web

FIVE RAT MUMMIES!

Four wasp nests

Three rat nests

Two Shelobs

And a live rat looking at me

The Eighth thing we found

When we were cleaning out the shed

Eight black widows

Seven rusty nails

Six feet of web

FIVE RAT MUMMIES!

Four wasp nests

Three rat nests

Two Shelobs

And a live rat looking at me

The Ninth thing we found

When we were cleaning out the shed

Nine layers of crap

Eight black widows

Seven rusty nails

Six feet of web

FIVE RAT MUMMIES!

Four wasp nests

Three rat nests

Two Shelobs

And a live rat looking at me

The Tenth thing we found

When we were cleaning out the shed

Ten kinds of spiders

Nine layers of crap

Eight black widows

Seven rusty nails

Six feet of web

FIVE RAT MUMMIES!

Four wasp nests

Three rat nests

Two Shelobs

And a live rat looking at me

The Eleventh thing we found

When we were cleaning out the shed

Eleven-thousand termites

Ten kinds of spiders

Nine layers of crap

Eight black widows

Seven rusty nails

Six feet of web

FIVE RAT MUMMIES!

Four wasp nests

Three rat nests

Two Shelobs

And a live rat looking at me

The Twelfth thing we found

When we were cleaning out the shed

Twelve rotten boards

Eleven-thousand termites

Ten kinds of spiders

Nine layers of crap

Eight black widows

Seven rusty nails

Six feet of web

FIVE RAT MUMMIES!

Four wasp nests

Three rat nests

Two Shelobs

And a live rat looking at me

* Mr. Houses exact words were "A rat just looked at me" . . . which is actually pretty funny when you think about it.