Looks like my bell peppers are about to start blooming. My lettuce bed is doing quite nicely as well.
Jas decided she wanted to play with the windchimes. They need to be cleaned off but I’ll save that for a rainy day I think.
Start.
Finish.
Not as much visibly done today but I feel just as accomplished. I need to finish going through the uprooted Gladiolus to see how many can be saved.
Gratuitous cuteness.
Mom sent me a little something and I immediately got my inexpensive bench. Jas declared all of the cushions available uglier than sin so we left without them. It is comfy enough and looks really good for only $27 after tax.
Back to the project at hand.
Because I got farther than I thought I could yesterday, and also the wall isn’t as decrepit as I’d feared, I was able to start putting everything back together.
The weather looked like it wasn’t going to cooperate. It started sprinkling, which usually drives me indoors, but I just pulled my hood up and went to work.
Hubby commented, quite unnecessarily, that if it rained this afternoon my work thus far would be undone. I told him to go away. Then I worked for another hour til my mortar ran out.
Pretty good in a couple of days, right?
Not much done visibly today. I needed to eat then water the plants since it didn’t rain at all/enough in the last few days.
So……..
I’ve started on The Wall.
The wall is actually mostly cosmetically atrocious. I started by scraping down the worst of the paint. Then off comes some of the capstones to asses the interior of the curve.
Looks like I’ll only need to take down a few rows in the middle of the worst of the curve. Much of the debris can be chunked down smaller and be used as backfill in untouched cavities. I may be able to save a few of the blocks too.
Once I get these first couple of blocks down I’m calling it a day…
This is just as tiring as I thought…
Even when the come down “easy” I get tired fast.
A little more done than I’d hoped. Maybe I can keep up the pace and get the harder part done by Friday. I want to be putting things back up by Wednesday. I hope to be learning to stucco next week and painting by mid-month.
We shall see.
The playground is a hit, even though it’s not finished according to my personal standards. Just think about how think about how much she’ll love it when it has more in it.
Lowes needs a rewards card.
This is the conclusion that I’ve come to after both me and my brothers spent a good chunk of money in their establishments this weekend on different projects (in different states). Even if most of the “good” rewards were unobtainable except for by pro-contractors, I’d be satisfied that I was working towards some type of save-money-goal…
But enough about my gripes.
I bought enough CMU to get the majority of the work done, some gravel for fill, and enough mortar to also start on the additional fill-in I need to do on the natural rock border at the sidewalk. Only one Lowes employee looked at me oddly when I started pushing my loaded down pallet to the register. I gave the kid (and he was maybe High School aged at best) who helped me load the truck some friendly advice on evenly loading block so it doesn’t shift and told him to buy himself some gloves. He said that he would and I drove home to unload before the impending rainstorm hit.
Since that STILL hasn’t hit [11 pm], I feel justified in mowing the lawn before the neighbor can guilt me into it.
When I get the section down on Monday, I’ll be able to see exactly what I’m up against. Sunday’s wall-work will only be me seeing how loose the capstones are and how adhered the dirt is to the wall. If Papa has a sledgehammer, I’m going to borrow that sucker for a heap o’fun. Hmmmmmmmmmm………………………… CMU bits are much easier to cart off in a truck bed or a trailer……..
Paaaapaaaa? Can I borrow you Monday?
In plant news, I’m waiting for my Blue Danube Asters to bloom! They have blossom-heads poking up! (^o^) I’m so excited!!!
Today, I’m not even going to finish bagging up the trash from yesterday.
I saw that damn spider again today.
It’d moved a little but it made the mistake of moving closer to the house and I got within biting distance again without knowing it. Worse yet, Jas did too…
So I killed it. Nursery Web spider or Brown Recluse. It doesn’t matter. Seeing it made my hair stand on end and my heart race in fear. I don’t get that much adrenaline from stepping into an unseen garden spider web and heaven only knows how paranoid I am about coming face to face with a Black Widow…
To add some irony to all of this, I’m playing a Drider in our DnD group now.
No hopeful pictures of my progress today. Not that I didn’t go outside. I did.
Even though today dawned like a 40 year storm was brewing…
Today, I cleared the vines encroaching on our AC unit. A glamorous job indeed, I know. So after all that filth I will leave with a few pics.
The reason I decided to stop working after 3 hours:
UPDATE: I think it’s a nursery spider. That’s as close as I can get to identifying it since I didn’t see the front. It was almost 2″ as it sat so it’s too big for me to settle on brown recluse… Whatever. It’s hopefully gone now.
An onion plant with E.D.:
And my roses vs my neighbor’s roses. 1st my roses (my best bush):
My neighbor’s roses (the worst bush):
The difference is clear. I have a long way to go yet….
The more I look at the wall, the more I think I should stop planting and go ahead and do it this Saturday. When I can grab hubby’s truck and buy a bed of CMU and concrete. Because I’m sure I don’t want to do any patchwork on something this broken…
It’s not just a crack. It’s hollow, poorly mortared, and cracked.
If I break them out now, dig it out some, and stagger in a rough curve I think I can make it to last the rest of the life of the wall.
Then all I’ll have to do is fill the cavities with concrete, chip off loose paint, and figure out if I’m going to repaint or go with a fake stucco… and I won’t have to worry about the wall caving in or housing ants anymore!
Today it has been difficult to make myself stay outside. Whatever they’ve been doing around 17th and Cumberland has tainted the air upwind almost as much as it has downwind.
Finally found a few more lights in the right color (blue mosaic is popular and sold out at the other WalMarts) after nearly running over a Canada Goose. I also got 2 more Creeping Phlox to help out the border since they were marked down 50%. Since the bloom time is done, they’re harder to sell. They’re perennials so getting the good ones before they die back is fine. They’ll live long enough for me to see them at their best in another year.
Got the bed extended and need to water the transferred grass in a bit when it’s a little cooler. It feels like I’m stronger as I got a lot more done than I had anticipated. As I get closer to the curve, the grass gets thinner and less likely to transfer properly. The weather hasn’t helped by not raining this last week then alternating freezing then sweltering days.
I need more dirt so I can transplant the gladiolus from around the roses and forsythia. That may take me a few days. I think they’re pink but I don’t remember as they don’t bloom long anymore.
The wall needs some work around the upper edge:
And that needs to be done before I can connect the beds. I need to figure out how to transition the front edges as the hedges will have a low stone border and the rest of the bed will be edgeless.
The wall needs…….. something………
I think I know how to better-fy and beautify it but I need more time, thought and energy…
Well, there’s always tomorrow!
Today I had something of an audience while gardening. Jas started naptime in the car on the way home from the grocery store after church. The house across the street had a party of some sort for the kids and they were in and out while I worked.
I decided to see how many rocks I could find around the trees and stump. They look so much worse after I got done but this puts me one step closer to my design goals.
The stump has ants in and around it. The trees have a humongous nest all through the roots. That was “fun” finding when uncovering rocks, let me tell you…
The result of this effort today was a border that only needs cement to call it done and some extras for the inevitable tweaking of the design.
