Farmer Lori Gets her Grow On!

As part of our renovations before we moved in, we had to have the drainage system around the house completely redone, and replace the main water line into the house and the storm water and sewer drains lines out of the house.  Which meant that what little landscaping there was around the house was mostly destroyed.  And then we moved in and had so much else going on inside the house that we didn’t have time to deal with the outside.

So here’s what it looked like last fall:

Yes, that’s horsetail fern down the middle North side of our east-facing front-yard. (Plus blackberry and ivy and lots of dandelions.  Probably the worst looking yard on the block.)  I wasn’t too fussed about it, since I like the look of horsetail fern, and I think they’re cool plants.  They’ve now spread a bit further and are very well established.  At least they’re green, I thought.  Until I started reading about them this Spring.  They’re very hard to get rid of.

Well, I have never been a fan of lawns.  Eventually I’d like to terrace this bit (there’s a steep hilly portion) and have one level full of asparagus, and the level closest to the sidewalk full of medicinal plants like Echinacea and Valerian.  But first I have to get rid of the horsetail fern.  And there aren’t many plants that can outcompete it, and even herbicides are pretty much useless if I wanted to go down that road (and I don’t).  Digging it out is impossible because they have very deep roots and even the tiniest bit of root will re-grow into lush horsetail ferns.  They prefer low-nutrient soils (and hog whatever they do find).

So here’s the new plan:

Grow CORN!  In my front yard!  For five years!

Yep, I’m gonna dig me some rows, fertilize ‘em and grow me some corn to outcompete them there horsetail ferns.  Of course we have lots of squirrels (they eat all the plums and hazelnuts), so we may get no corn out of the deal, but that’s ok.  And you know, if you let a geeky girl grow corn, she’s going to want to try out the traditional First Nations companion planting “Three Sisters” system, so of course she’s also going to plant beans and squash.  I only like some squash, and I’m the only one in the family who can tolerate it, so we’ll see how that goes.

Today I made a special trip out to Ladner (I LOVE the new South Fraser Perimeter Road - it only takes 30 minutes to get there!) to get seeds from West Coast Seeds’ retail store.  And since I was going out that way, I found a lady on Craigslist who was selling old hay cheap, which I’ll use for mulch between the rows. (Straw would be better but I can’t find any.)  Of course I only have a sedan, so I put one bale in the trunk and one in the back seat.  Note to self: if transporting hay inside a vehicle, it’s probably best to completely wrap up the bale rather than just cover the seat with a tarp, or else you get hay *everywhere*.

I decided to go with the Triplesweet Honey Select Corn.  Then I’ll grow some Purple Peacock beans with them at the front (some attempt at curb appeal), and Scarlet Runners towards the back.  Then pumpkins (mostly for carving) all along the top of the retaining wall next to the sidewalk, Kabocha along the back near the house, Pattypans near the stairs and Spaghetti squash (for my low-carbing sister) along the property line.

I also got a new “Pot Maker” for making little seedling pots out of newspaper.  We have one but we gave it to the inlaws to use after we moved to our townhouse (and had no garden).  I could have got it back from them, but every time we go over there, elder Brother-in-Law gives us more of Husband-Man’s teenage boy stuff.  Bless elder Brother-in-Law for trying to declutter other family members’ stuff from his parents house (where he still lives with all his stuff), but we don’t have any more room for teenage boy stuff at the moment, so it was easier to just buy a new Pot Maker.

While we were down in the states for the Life is Good Unschooling Conference last week (it was a blast), I also picked up two Burpee’s self-watering seedling trays on clearance.  ($5 each!)  They come with little pellets of seed starting mix, and Kid 2 thoroughly enjoyed adding water to these to see them fluff up and fill the cells.  Here’s one all sown with corn on my table (well, the lid is on, so it just looks like a plastic square):

Pardon the mess on my kitchen table.  I suddenly discovered that I had to rearrange my kitchen (and basement and garage) to make this project happen.

I also made lots of pots, because these trays only have 16 cells each, and I had a lot of corn to grow in a hurry.  I decided to start the seedlings indoors because the ground’s not ready yet, and I don’t want to go to all that trouble only to have squirrels dig up the seeds before they sprout, and because our last few Junes have not been very warm.  I set up my new seedling storage system next to the back door using an Ikea Trofast unit that wasn’t being well-utilized in the basement, and discovered that the Trofast bins are perfect for putting all my newspaper pots in.

And that’s 98 seeds sown, in hopes of getting 96 plants.  That could be a lot of sweet corn… there might be a few corn boils in my future…

And in the backyard, I was going to cut down the rosebush by the back door because it’s a bit straggly and Emily is allergic to roses.  But it’s not very smelly.  And then it gave me this today:

 

It might have to stay...

An update for any of you wondering where things are at...

The giant hole in my front yard (and really, the giant trench all around my house):


(yes, that’s an excavator)

Has been filled in:


So the new drainage system is in place (yay!) but my yard is a giant mudpit.  Especially with all the rain we’ve had lately.  In the process we lost the juniper bush that lived over in the top left there.  I intend to replace it, because it smelled lovely.  The dirt is also full of bits of ivy (all those tiny green bits in the top middle of the picture) because there had been ivy growing there before.  Unless we do something about it, that ivy will grow (as ivy likes to do) and spread everywhere.  I don’t think I’ll be getting to vegetable gardening this year - the focus will be on landscaping!  We saved the bricks from the chimney we removed and plan to use those to make a new sidewalk along the side of the house.



Apparently the ceiling rafter thingies were all dodgy (like everything else) so the contractor had to spend a fair bit of time fixing things up.  Some of the rafters went just over that wall you see in the bottom left corner and stopped, a good 6-8 inches away from the rafter that they should have been joined to, so they had just sort of nailed a 2x4 to join them.  That sort of thing.  The contractor solidified all that, partly so he could install pull-down attic stairs.  We wanted these so we could use some space up there for storage (he put taller rafters there and a plywood platform over them for us to use), but more importantly because he said it would save lots of time (and therefore money) if the tradespeople could use those stairs instead of a ladder.  He also made sure that our lighting fixtures would have enough support.


Here you can see the kitchen wall framing is in place, along with a new window.  They had just installed a window into the opening of the original sash window and it wasn’t very well attached. So now we have a nice new window over our sink.  Same story in the basement bathroom, but we decided to keep the upstairs bathroom window as is, since it wasn’t toooo bad, and now that we’ll have good fans, we won’t really need to open it (it doesn’t open very nicely.)  The contractor and his crew took out the particleboard that was down over the original kitchen floor, but that floor wasn’t salvageable, so they put down new plywood, all ready for our new flooring.

Since that picture was taken, the plumber and electrician have done their rough-ins (and the plumbing rough-in has passed inspection).  Today they also just installed a new back upstairs door (the old one was very thin) and a new door to the garage.  We had to do that one because someone broke the old dodgy door down and made off with the copper piping we were going to sell.  That’ll teach us to procrastinate!

We’re still house-sitting in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood (I am going to miss living here), but we’re moving to our next place in Dunbar this weekend.  Waaaaaay out on the West side of the city.  Getting Kid 2 to lacrosse and gymnastics (and me to gymnastics) in New Westminster is not going to be fun.  That’s 30 km, and about 35 minutes with no traffic (i.e. at 3 am.)  But gymnastics and lacrosse don’t happen at 3 am, they happen during rush hour.  Sigh.   Good thing I got Kid 2 some fun Klutz books to work on in the car!  (He is currently working on a graphic novel, one sentence at a time, so I figured a book on “how to draw funny” and another on “creative lettering” would be just the thing.)  And good thing I stocked up on cassette tapes at the thrift store.  Yes, the car we bought to replace our poor banged-up Echo is so retro that it has a cassette deck!

Our next big hurdle: I have to commit to kitchen cabinets!!!  I have been dreaming of kitchen renovations since we bought our first house 12 years ago.  But now that I actually have to choose something, I’m finding myself a bit paralyzed!  The contractor really wants me to get a Merit kitchen.  Plywood cabinet boxes, wood doors, the whole shebang.  I always thought I’d get an Ikea kitchen, but none of their current door styles are quite what I want (white painted shaker-style doors - Adel off-white is close but not quite!).  For pretty much the same cabinetry layout, the Merit kitchen will cost about 50% more.  And that’s without any pull-out shelves in any of the cabinets (the Ikea kitchen I designed had pull-out shelves in the pantry).  As a good friend pointed out, the guts of the cabinets will have the biggest impact on my day-to-day use of the kitchen.  A 21” wide, 24” deep pantry cabinet with ordinary shelves is going to be far less useful than one with pull-out drawers.  It’s a fairly small kitchen with limited shelf space, and with my kids having food allergies, my pantry needs are greater than most families’ (e.g. while you might have white flour and whole-wheat flour, I have about 17 different kinds of flour plus all the fancy additives.)  So I’ll have to see how much more it will cost to have some sort of pull-out shelves added to the Merit quote.  (And if it’s waaaay too much, then I need to consider if I want to go with aftermarket pull-outs, like Rev-a-shelf, etc.)

I’m still having commitment issues, but I need to decide soon because if I go with Merit, it will take 4-6 weeks!  Wish me luck!