Category: Landscaping

The Plan.

With the house remodel being finished, it’s time to start looking to the yard.

One of the harder things with expanding the house was losing back yard. We spent most the summer cleaning up refuse from the remodel, and it was time to start thinking of what we want in the yard.

I always wanted a path between the gardens, and all the way around the house. We needed a patio. And we wanted a nice fire pit area.

So, we began looking for fire pit area ideas, and really fell in love with the idea of these standing stone ones.

 

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No, I can’t recreate any one of those, but it does give a direction we can look towards.

Seeing what we had to work with, we first marked off a new patio area.

And then the fire pit circle (we don’t think it will end up this large, but giving plenty of room to play with depending on what stones we can find)

So, with such a big project in place, Halloween once again is going to take a little bit of a back seat. But, that doesn’t mean I’m not finding interesting little tidbits to draw inspiration from.

Gardening and strange sights.

Been rather quiet recently. A lot of behind the scenes stuff, mostly just stressing over the pumpkins.

Figured starting seeds should have been easy, heck they practically exploded like weeds in the garden last year as volunteers. But, I wanted specialty varieties, so we’ve been killing all those and trying to start seeds.

Direct sowing seeds didn’t work last year, so we got a window box seed starter kit, threw a bunch in…nothing.

Added some grow lights to make it a more controlled environment and started a second batch…4 sprouts out of 25 seeds.

So, it started the line of suggestions. Scoring the seeds, floating seeds to see if they are viable or not, soaking prior to planting, and the old wet paper towel in a baggie.

That paper towel/baggie combo is MOST effective, I must say. A day later, most the seeds sprouted. transferring them over to the little pots, another 2 days, and they had fully broken through.

Near 100% germination after a couple more days, and so we tranplanted a ton of pumpkins into the garden this week.

However, I’ve had to leave the tending of the little pumpkins in the hands of my boys, as I’m on the road.

Didn’t expect to run into this in the middle of nowhere.

Image source.

Will try to stop and get some more comprehensive pics on the way back through, I was heading the wrong direction with no good place to turn around/stop.

 

Pumpkins!

The only problem?

I planted CORN.

We actually took steps to discourage volunteers last fall, attempting to dispose of the guts rather than throw them in the garden. The idea being I would plant specialty kinds of pumpkins. I have more than 100 seeds across 8 species of pumpkins ready to be planted…in a couple weeks.

On one hand, these are not the pumpkins I was planning to plant. (odds of them being from the few luminas or cinderellas we planted last year are slim) On the other, the whole looking a gift horse in the mouth thing.

Oops.

Little accident.

Kyle dropped trevor and broke the lid.

Fortunately, we were able to save Trevor.

Just a few minor little cracks as he started to seperate from the base.

We’ve also started to get the tomb coated with protective coat.

In the process, we discovered a little springtime miracle.

Aint they cute?

well, a few might be…

thousands?

Got at least one pumpkin sprouting finally. Should be a Lumina, so hopefully we’ll get some variety this year. Otherwise the garden isn’t doing so great. Some of the corn’s coming up, not much yet. Have some volunteer pumpkins I need to transplant over if the others don’t start sprouting soon.

Gardening time.

Been working dirt a lot lately.

Talia has thuroughly enjoyed her role as “the flower boss” and our little shopping trip together so she could pick out our flowers was quite fun. She’s always thrilled to see them blooming, and getting new ones.

Her “Magic” flowers, that open with the sun and close at night are the favorites, I think.

And, we finally have an official garden.

Renting a sod cutter and clearing out most of the grass there made for a full day with Kyle. Mostly making room for corn and pumpkins, of course. We need to clean out the grass along the fenceline by hand, as I want to keep my raven grass along there, and there were some old bush stumps that need to be dug out, couldn’t just run the sod cutter through there.

All the dirt didn’t stop me from getting the kids out to play, though.

The train was especially fun since the tigers were restless on a rather chilly Saturday morning.

And the Lion was letting them know who was boss. Not often you get to see one ‘talking’.

Of course we had to hit the terror ride as well. Don’t think I’ve ever noticed that figure lurking off to the right cubby here. There’s stuff coming out the door and windows that distract from it. Lots of little treasures like that on this ride.

The best part was that it broke down and lost some power while we were on it. Alec and I stuck in the dark surrounded by skeletons, with nothing but the scary music playing was priceless. If I ever get to build a dark ride, I would include a long pitch black stretch. Nothing scares people more than their own imagination.