Garden!

The garden is doing really well! I think the raised beds were exactly what we needed to do for our poorly draining soil. I made two of them, and John bought a scoop of this compost mix to put in them. It's done the job well, even with this extreme heat that we've had. And this spot gets full sun for most of the day, too.

 

Bed 1 has the Sun Sweet tomatoes and the cucumbers. I've even ripped some of the cucumbers out. They're insane!

 

Bed 2 has the Cherokee Purple tomatoes and the green beans.

I'm still waiting for ripe tomatoes. I've been eating cucumbers since last week. The beans are still teeny.

 

Baby Cherokee

 

Baby Sun Sweets

Yes, the yard needs mowing. That's a job for John or Rowan!

A little ambition

About a week before the tornado hit, we drove out to Broadwell's nursery in Angier and got some plants. We got a maple tree for the front yard, 3 little shrubs that I think are bayberries but I could be wrong. There are no labels at Broadwell's. And we got this twig that was supposed to be a blueberry bush.
That weekend, we planted all of it. The next weekend, we got a tornado. But wouldn't you know... all the yard damage was in the back. Not a single one of our new little plants took a hit. Not even the blueberry twig.

I call it a twig because it's really not a proper bush yet, but it's in a sheltered spot that gets lots of sun, so that will change. 

I didn't expect much of it this year, what with being planted and whipped around in a windstorm and pretty much ignored in all the mayhem. But then I went out to check on it, and what do you know? This little guy has big ambition.

 

I'm pretty proud of the plucky little thing.

Tornado!

We had a close brush with Mother Nature on April 16, 2011.
John was watching out the back and I was watching out the front while we had the tv on showing the radar.
I could see that the storm's hook was going to go right over our area and was listening for that telltale wind hum,
but the thunder was constant so it was hard to hear.
I never saw a funnel, but did see the trees start moving in that way that anyone who has been through a storm will recognize, and my ears started popping and ringing, and the hair on my arms stood up, so that's when John and I went back to the bathroom with the kids and brought the dogs with us.
The house creaked and shuddered a bit, but we had the lights off so the light from our flashlight candle was steady.
The kids didn't really know how bad it was. We downplayed it big time.
It was over really quickly. I don't why people say they sound like freight trains. They sound nothing like freight trains to me. They sound like tornadoes.
That night we stayed at Jenn's house.

The next morning, we went back home to try to figure out what to do. 
The boys are on spring break, so we decided to pack them up and send them to Fannie camp. We drove and met Fran and Tommy in Concord and traded the boys for a chainsaw. Doing that took up most of the day.
We slept at home that night.

The 2nd day after the storm, (yesterday) the water damage and restoration people came out. At one point we had 2 large trucks and 3 smaller trucks crowding our driveway and cul de sac. They had guys on the roof putting up tarp and temporary shingles, a guy in the attic pulling out wet insulation, and a couple of guys figuring out how to anchor the chimney back to the house so a stiff wind wouldn't blow it down completely.
They put industrial fans all over the house to dry things out. They will be there for the next 3 or 4 days. There's a lock box on the door so the water guys can come check on it and make sure things are going as they should. There are also two very large dehumidifiers running. They have hoses to drain into our sinks. The floor in the vanity area of our master bathroom rated as very wet, and since it was parquet flooring the guy said it would swell and buckle, so they took it out so they could get the subfloor dry.
The bathroom is the wettest area, so they also brought in something that would heat the room to 120something degrees to bake it dry. I had to do a quick dump and dash to get all of our bathroom things that would be ruined by heat out of there. There is plastic up in the bathroom doorway to keep the heat and fan in there.
Once the fans are all on, it is very, very loud in there, so we took Jenn up on her offer to crash at her place. The dogs are going to go stay at Julianne's house and play with her kids and dog. I don't know what we'd do without friends! Well... I do know what we'd do. We'd have to put the dogs in a kennel and ourselves in a hotel. This is going to be a lot nicer than that. Life is better with good friends.

I have no idea what today will bring.

I'm taking pictures as I think of it. They'll all be included in the same set on flickr. You can find it here.

In which Milli has yet another harebrained scheme...

Sooner or later, John is going to slap tape over my mouth when I start a conversation with, "I was thinking..."
The road to hell is paved with "I was thinkings," some days.
But I had this idea, because a friend of mine has had this back yard pool for quite some time, and when I asked her about it she said that they're really a lot nicer than you would think. And if you do it right, it will last a long time - like hers is on its 7th summer. And we had this pretty flat spot up by the house. And this will be our first summer since Rowan started going to school that he won't be starting the school year in July...
So.
Pool. On sale at Target for $350. It would pay for itself in one summer with $ saved from joining the Y, and we would actually go swimming more than once or twice.

Turns out that "pretty flat" itsn't really flat enough. We needed a nice level spot so that the weight of the water wouldn't buckle the frame. I looked on several websites, and some gardening sites said that you could use a flat shovel to tear up grass and level ground for a pool. So, that's how we started.

This is John, kicking at the shovel to get it into the ground.

Turns out our soil is HARD and is mostly CLAY. We could have kept using shovels, and we also could have kept working for about a month to get all that yard up. You see that one little stripe of dirt there? That is 90 minutes of work. I was dirtier than I have been in a long time, and the road to swimming was looking very long indeed. But I remembered some tool that I'd seen on a website. It was called a sod cutter. I went in and searched, and it wasn't something I dreamed up. It was real, and it was for rent at the home depot.

Sod cutter. $65 for 4 hours. Money well spent.

The sod cutter was very cool. It sheared off tree roots. It cut the grass up to 2 inches deep and then we could just roll it up like carpet. Rowan was highly impressed.

After all the grass was up (and the cable/internet/phone line was cut, whoops!) John had the idea of running the cutter all over the ground again to make it easier for us to dig. So he drove it around a bunch and we congratulated ourselves on using the sod cutter to the fullness of our 4 hour allotment and went into the house to rest up for the next day.

Hard packed clay with tracks from the sod cutter all over it.


Tired John, post shower, wondering what I've gotten him in to.

Turns out that we should have rolled up that dirt right when John cut it, because when we went out there with shovels and tried to hack at it, it was HARD and really wasn't going to move anywhere without a huge fight. We tried to do things with shovels, but nothing was happening, and it was getting hotter so we went to hide in the house in the a/c and formulated our next plan of attack.

Phase two: the tiller. $26 for four hours. This project was racking up the bucks.

It's always like that, isn't it? You start out simple, but then have to do more things along the way and it ends up being even more than a pain than you thought it would be. At least, that's how it is for me. John tries to shoot down my pie in the sky ideas, but then I accuse him of being a pessimist. Sometimes he goes along with it anyway, like here, because he knows it would be fun to have a pool, too.
So anyway, the big idea was to rent a tiller and bust up the soil so we could rake it where we needed it to be and then stomp it down again. He also brought home this rolly thing to roll it out, but I didn't get pictures of that because by then it was raining on us.
Oh yes. It started raining at the end of the day on Monday, and rained and rained and rained. And then we had pop up thundershowers that kept rewetting the ground. The ground that wasn't so solid because we had just tilled it.
And then there was that event with the dog, who when presented with a large circle of mud in which to dig, took us up on the offer that we didn't know we were making. Which led to the mess of mud and dog wee all over the floor in the living room (that was FUN, let me tell you!) which then led to me blocking the doggy door and making all dog visits to the back yard be supervised pee pee only visits until that big patch of diggable dirt was covered by a pool.
The party doesn't stop here, you know.
But FINALLY, on Saturday the ground was dry enough to put down the ground cloth and build the pool. Actually, we tried to smooth it out a bit, pick up any rocks, get any remaining roots, and then John went inside to get a drink while I was unfolding the ground cloth and BIG FAT RAINDROPS starting coming out of the sky! I screamed, "NOOOOOOOOO!" and ran around putting the cover down anyway. God heard my cry, though, and it only did those few drops and the cloud blew away.
Thank you, God. I owe you one.
So then we layed out the pieces of the pool.

Pool, ready for assembly.

We are experienced babyhandlers, and as such we know all about putting things together that have the little pegs that have to line up with the little holes. Working together we had the pool assembled in less than an hour. Yes, after all that work, the actual pool construction was really very easy to do.

Pool, fresh up. No water.


John checks the legs to make sure they're straight.
Yes, it is near our deck but that gap is pretty intimidating.
There will be no jumping from the deck, at least not at this point.
We had to coax Niall off the ladder.

We started filling the pool on Saturday afternoon, turned the water off overnight, and then back on again Sunday morning. By Sunday afternoon we had this.

And yes, it was a lot harder getting the ground ready than I thought it would be. But it was sooo worth it. We are going to have a fantastic summer. We should have gone out there a few times while it was filling to check the legs, because a couple of them aren't straight up and down anymore, but it seems okay. I'm so glad we did this, and John still seems to like me. It must be love.

The yard

Fran and Robert, this one is for you!

So... when we looked at this house to buy, we thought it was good for our family and we made an offer. As part of the closing, we had a survey done. We knew we wanted to fence in the back yard, and it would have to be done eventually, so we went ahead and got it done.
Imagine our surprise when it came time for the walkthrough before closing, and we found out that our backyard did not end where we thought it did!
We thought it ended right behind the shed, where some briars were growing up. But it didn't. Our realtor Jo was practically jumping up and down when we realized that the surveyor's flags were waaaaaaay back there. Beyond the briars. Meaning that our back yard was HUGE.

So we had a job to do.

This is what the back yard behind the shed looked like when we moved in.


The briars were huge. Thick and healthy, and they didn't want to go anywhere.
John's parents came for a weekend to help, and we quickly figured out that loppers were NOT going to do the job if we wanted it done before spring really hit and the briars grew even more.
So the next weekend

We rented a bobcat!
How fun, and how satisfying to see those briars come down.
We also pulled out A LOT of metal that weekend. An entire pickup truck load. I regret that I didn't get a picture of it. There were bikes, at least 6 tires, a bedframe, the backseat of a car... BUNCHES of stuff hidden in all those briars.
I joked with the neighbors that if they came home and saw crime scene tape up
they'd know we found Hoffa.

So after that, it was time for fence kinds of things. Our friend Robert came up from Charleston to help John out. They planted stakes and measured and did all those manly things.

And rented a post hole drill auger type thingy to make the job easier.

After that, John began to set the posts.

He decided to go ahead and set them, and worry about topping them after they were done. This ended up being a pretty good plan. I actually got to help there, measuring the posts and marking them, since pg me couldn't do any of the heavy lifting for the rest of it.

After that, he put up the sections, and finally, we had a yard!

This is the section that is pictured with the string above.


This is the other part of the front of the back yard, or all the yard we thought we had when we made the offer on the house. The shed is not pictured, but the wagon is right in front of it.


This is the same spot that I took a picture of before,
the picture with the briars and the bag caught in them... WHAT A DIFFERENCE!


And this is the one side of our bonus back yard.

And the other side.

Yay!

Future plans include moving the shed to the back of the yard, near where the little plastic table is sitting now. I'm also planning on a compost pile behind the shed. The swingset will be moved so it's under the big shade trees, and since there's no grass there right now I want to put in landscaping timbers in a large rectangle and fill it with mulch for the swingset to be on. This will give the kids a shady place to play (the slide gets HOT in the sun) and a soft place to land, and will give us less yard to seed with grass and eventually mow.

So that's the yard! We'd like to thank Tommy and Fran for financing the Bobcat weekend, and Robert for his help and knowledge in fence building. We couldn't have done it without you!