New House Blog: Episode XXXIIII - Into The Garden

Once again it is time to share with you the things we have been doing at our house recently.  I'm glad to say that we finished up a big project, and smaller projects are in the works.  Also once again, Becky's awesome sister, Amy, was a big help to us in completing the afore-mentioned big project.  Thank you Amy.  In the comment section of the previous Episode someone suggested that the conduit/romex and rivet gun were possibly used for communicating with aliens and constructing tin hats to block brain waves.  While we can't 100% rule out that possiblilty, we have to point out a glaring weakness in this theory: if the people who laid out the conduit and romex wanted to communicate with aliens, why would they also want to block brain waves?  Wouldn't such hats, if they ever existed, impede human/alien communication?  No evidence of either aliens or tin hats has been found so far.

Someone else commented in person that we might have to engage in more battles with stumps.  We have, in fact, four stumps in the front yard that will need removing.  Each stump removal promises to bring with it a thrilling tale of battle and valour.  That's four thrilling (and valorous) tales to look forward to in addition to our exciting, continuing feature, Back Yard Archaeology.  This Episode, however, will not deal with BYA.  Excavations continue, and we will post updates in the near future.

Into The Garden

The large project that was completed was the creation of our garden.  We dug a roughly square pit (very roughly), manually tilled the dirt , mixed it in with a lot of gardening soil, and planted our potted plants in the ground.  Additionally we built a brick retaining wall to keep in some of our new garden's soil.  This was necessary because the garden is not in level ground - there is a gentle slope from the back of the garden area to the front, and in order to create a roughly level garden we had to lower the soil level a little in the back and raise it up a little in the front.  We have not planted any new seeds yet, and because of the time of year of this Episode we will be postponing the planting of most of our seeds until the spring.  There are, however, some fall-plantable seeds among our collection.

As I mentioned, all of the garden soil was manually tilled.  We know of the existence of rototillers, and Bish has used one or two in years past, but we don't own one and we don't know that any of our friends has one. And we don't mind a bit of manual labor.  Here's what the garden area looked like before we got started.  Remember the stump from this Episode?  It was right about near the middle of our garden area.

Before

Here you can see the three amigos, Longspade, Shortstaff, and Spike, as the garden pit is being dug.  These three were instrumental in excavating this site.

The next three pictures show the progression of soil tilling, starting with the freshly-dug garden pit and showing the progress of tilling and filling the pit.  Tilling and filling was done in stages and not all at once, and the process took several days.

The empty garden pit

Partially filled with tilled soil

All filled in and roughly level

Brickwork

I'm giving the brickwork its own section because it was a project by itself.  Hauling and hefting into place 20# bricks can be a lot of work.  In the pictures below you will see the progression from the foundational corner, across the front of the garden, and up the sides a bit.  The extra bricks that you see lying around are going to be mostly for a border and not for structure.

The foundational corner

Extending out from the corner

Almost all the way across

All the way across

As you can see, the retaining wall is not quite a strait line.

Back Into The Garden

With the retaining wall structurally complete we were ready to plant our potted plants in the ground.  It was during this planting process that Amy mentioned something called, "weeding."  I may have heard this term before, in the distant past, but I may have to look up its meaning.  Becky claims to know what it means.

Our first transplanted plant was our strawberry plant.

Becky's feet can be seen for size comparison.

 Next we translplanted our peppers (6 bells and one pimento) and our tomatoes (one grape and one composed of various small varieties).  After that came the catnip (two catnips).  All were given a healthy watering from our conveniently-located water spigot and hose.

Our new garden

The plants look kind of droopy and sad in this picture.  Most of them didn't seem to do too well after we moved, and we're hoping that the new location, new soil, and new room for root growth will give them their second winds, so to speak.  The strawberries, however, seem to be thriving.


Lighting The Way

We installed some lights in our back yard, and one in our front yard.  They're little solar-powered LED lights on stakes.  The stakes and housings are silver.  Nine are set up along the edge of our back yard patio, two are set up in the front corners of our garden (if you look closely you can see them in the above picture), and one is set up in the corner of our front walkway.  Their placement may change in the future.  We have pictures of them in the daytime and at night.

Daytime

The same lights at night

It can hard to take a good photo of lighted lights at night.

More daytime

More nighttime

The lights in the garden

The front walkway light

Bonus Picture

And now for a bonus picture.  This is a photo of the first stir-fry stir-fried in our new house.  Included in this stir-fry are peppers and tomatoes harvested from our garden.  The beef, olives, and water chestnuts are not from our garden.  The noodles are also not from our garden.

We eat tonight!
   bIsh