Landscaping… the long list

I cannot bring myself to write a list of everything I want to do for renovations in the house, but for some reason I have no problem doing a master list for the landscaping outside.

Alright, I’ll admit it. That’s a little overwhelming.

There’s obviously a lot to be done, so it’s a matter of prioritizing what part of our 129 acres we want to focus on. This year, it’s the residential area.

And just to make things a little clearer than the animation above, here’s the plan for this year.

That’s manageable, right? As you saw at the beginning of the week, we’ve already made some progress on the turn around, the flowerbeds and the pond shore. Maybe by the end of the growing season, we’ll have the property in shape.

The long term plan will take who knows how long.

I’ve decided my goal when it comes to outside work is to transition from landscaping to gardening. Weeding flowerbeds is much more manageable than building them.

How do you handle renovations and landscaping at your house? Do you write everything down or just keep a mental list? What are you hoping to accomplish this summer?

Death by landscaping

I am dead.

I’ve been working on a lovely introduction to this post referencing the Secret Garden and the joy of tending a neglected garden. But it’s not coming together for me, and I lack the mental power to make it work. Because I am dead.

You never heard any of the characters from the Secret Garden say, “I am dead. This garden has killed me.” Let’s be honest here, Ben probably said it, but Frances Hodgson Burnett did not include it in her story of love, childhood and horticulture.

In my story of love, adulthood, responsibility, country living and horticulture, landscaping has started.

The turn around has gone from mountain goat terrain to a blank slate, thanks mostly to our farmer with his heavy equipment.

I’ve weeded one flowerbed and my mother-in-law tackled two more. (All of the plant pots were left by the last owners. The plants are still alive, so I’ll be planting them soon on the blank slate of the turn around).

My father-in-law trimmed some of the trees and stumps around the pond. We still have a ways to go before we can actually mow the shore, but I’ve staked out the new fire pit, and we have lots of wood ready to burn.

Matt, my Dad and I dismantled one of our biggest rock piles on the property–and it only took us four hours.

I started building a new flower garden around the well head. And this is when I died.

Last year’s landscaping efforts were limited to some very cursory grass cutting. The property was unkempt when we bought it, and our neglect over the past year while we focused on the basement reno made it worse.

The amount of work required to bring a garden back after years and years of neglect is never mentioned in the Secret Garden. Sure there’s a bit of pruning and weeding, but mostly it’s romance and roses.

In the category of things get worse before they get better, even our efforts at clean up have led to more mess. Drilling the new well and trenching new waterlines destroyed one established flowerbed and left lumpy piles of very hard dirt in its place. Burning brush and scrap lumber as we’ve tried to pick up around the property resulted a mountain of ash and a half scorched spruce tree.

Landscaping was at the top of the list on my home goals for this year, and I will get a handle on the situation outside, even if it kills me.

How to match seams across an invisible zipper

I have a different type of how-to for you today, completely unrelated to home improvement or farming (not that I am any particular expert in that area yet).

This how-to is related to the dress that I sewed for my sister’s wedding. The bodice on this dress is made up of lots of pieces with a zipper in the side seam. The challenge when putting in that zipper is to line up all of the seams from front to back.

I’ll admit that the first attempt was a big fat fail. Horizontal seams were stair stepping down the zipper. Not attractive. In fact, I couldn’t even bring myself to take a picture.

Second attempt was much more successful. So, here’s my tutorial on how to line up horizontal seams across an invisible zipper.

Sew the first side of your zipper to the dress, having the zipper open and leaving the other side free.

Close the zipper and, using pins, mark the seams that you need to match. Insert the pins horizontally in the tape on the unsewn side of the zipper.

Unzip the zipper, and pin the unsewn side to the dress, starting at each of the seams.

Baste the zipper in place and stitch. When you close up the zipper, all of your seams should match.

Or at least match close enough.

Next week, I promise a return to our regular program of home improvement and country living. We’re heading into the first long weekend of “summer” and I have big plans. Chainsaws–not sewing machines–are involved.

Hope you have a good weekend. Happy Victoria Day to my fellow Canadians.

Celebration

This past weekend, my extended family came together to celebrate my youngest sister’s wedding.

Another sister and another wedding mean another special dress. Given that my post about my bridesmaid dress for my middle sister’s wedding last year is still the most popular post on this blog, I of course have to write about the dress I sewed for this latest wedding.

This is Simplicy 2253. When it came time to choose bridesmaid dresses, my sister the bride said, “Whatever you want.” My other sister already had a dress that she liked, so I just had to find something that complemented her dress.

My Mom, who taught me to sew, also sewed her dress (Vogue 1182). If you want the details on my dress, here’s my review.

As fancy as we all look here, it was a construction themed evening, as my sister and her new husband are building a house together. The message of my Mom’s speech was how building a house is like building a marriage. Her take away quote: “When the mud gets deep, celebrate. Buy a great pair of rubber boots and celebrate that you have each other and you can handle whatever comes your way.”

The wedding was a great celebration for our family. Congratulations to Cynthia and Dave. I wish you a great marriage and minimal mud.

Battling the litter bugs

Our property is situated so that we have three road frontages. What this means is that we have about 2 kilometres of ditches that to passing drivers apparently look like one large trash can. A recent notice in the mailbox for a community clean up was the motivation I needed to pick up after all of these litter bugs.

The saddest thing about this photo is that I didn’t stage it. I simply set the notice down amongst the trash.

Outfitted with my rubber boots, work gloves and multiple garbage bags, I headed out. I had two bags on the go at a time, one for recycling (mainly cans and bottles) and one for garbage. I could have probably separated the garbage a bit more, but two bags was about all I could wrangle. The most common finds were takeout coffee cups, plastic water bottles and cigarette packs.

There was lots and lots of plastic.

We have a creek that runs along the front of the property, and while it is set farther away from the road, it was still full of trash as well.

These particular pieces of plastic turned out to be a very big sheet of bubble wrap and a large jug which had formed a dam.

Some of the more unique finds included a shoe, two gloves (not a pair) and the remains of a wine glass.

Sometimes, I wasn’t sure what things were right away. As when I first spotted this item a few feet back in the reeds along the west side of the property.

It turned out to be a small photocopier. Yup. Someone went to the effort to carry a photocopier out of their office, put it into their car, drive it to our property, pick it up out of the car, carry it across the ditch and heave it into the marsh. They didn’t even just open the car door and push it out. They put work and planning into this–I know, because I climbed into the marsh and dragged it out and it was heavy and awkward.

Fortunately, I was able to leave the photocopier, other large items and even the full bags of garbage on the shoulder and our amazing garbage men took them away on our regular pick up day. The recycling I carried home and dumped into our bins.

The final tally on the clean up was

• 5 1/2 hours (over three days)
• 7 1/2 bags of garbage
• 5 bins of recycling
• One awful sun burn
• Multiple scratches
• Numerous ant bites
• One ruined pair of gloves
• A general feeling of disgust towards my fellow humans

Some people were encouraging–one driver honked and gave me a thumbs up as he drove by and another pulled over to say how great it was that I was cleaning up. However, I probably was not as gracious as I could have been to them as I spent most of the clean up being royally ticked off. Who finishes their coffee and decides the correct action is to roll down the window and pitch the cup into the ditch?

My irritation went to another level when Matt and I went out and passing by two of the garbage bags I’d left on the side of the road I saw that someone had pitched a Blizzard cup and two plastic spoons onto the shoulder–and they’d obviously aimed to get them right beside my bags. Who is that rude?

Fortunately, our garbage men are incredibly considerate, because not only did they pick up all of the trash bags and larger items I’d left on the side of the road, they also picked up the cup and spoons.

Out of the whole clean up, I only found one item worth keeping.

You better believe I tucked that 5 cents into my pocket and brought it home with me. I need some new work gloves!

Finally forsythia

Our forsythia is finally in bloom. It’s more than a month later than last year, which shows just how long spring has taken to arrive. I think with the appearance of the bright yellow blossoms we can safely say that spring has finally arrived.

Happy birthday, Easter

Our fluffball, our baby, our idiot, our kitten, our Easter turns one year old this week.

She snuggles like a baby.

She has the attention span of a toddler.

She has the ambition of a teenager and is keen to get her driver’s license.

She wrestles with her mama Ralph, errant stones on the driveway or the strings on my lawn chair.

She’s always starving and has been known to break into the house in order to get to the milk at the bottom of my cereal bowl (seriously, she’s crafty). She has also learned to hunt for herself.

She thinks she’s a dog, chasing sticks, digging holes and coming when Matt whistles.

Her voice is still her squeaky kitten meow unless she thinks we’re abandoning her–going down the driveway to take out the garbage or walking around the corner of the house out of her line of sight are cause for very long loud meows.

Around the farm, she’s known as baby (my label), BH (Matt’s holdover from when we called her “Big Head“), DB (“Dancing Bear,” Matt’s label for her tendency to rear up on her hind legs so that you can scratch her head), and occasionally Easter.

Happy birthday, Easter.

Medium rare with a side of blue air

The result of writing a post showing your barbecue bursting into flames is that your in-laws send flyers full of barbecue sales home with your husband. As a result of those flyers, you arrive home later that week to find a very large box sitting in your foyer.

That very large box leads to a very big mess all over your living room as your husband assembles the new barbecue. It also results with you being kicked out of the house so that your husband can curse in private.

Readmission to the house is conditional on your participation in carrying the new barbecue outside, which results shortly thereafter in dinner–cooked by your husband.

So he took care of the shopping, the swearing, the constructing and the cooking. I’d say I got the better end of this deal.

Doe a deer

It’s apparently wild kingdom week here on the blog, and I’ve saved the best for last.

For the past week or so, deer have been grazing in the back field. They show up every night around 8 o’clock and eat their bed time snack before heading back into the bush.

Some nights there’s been only one. Usually there’s a group of three or four. The high point was a herd of seven.

We can walk partway along the back lane towards the field without them bolting.  Usually we just watch them with binoculars and try not to spook them.

Fortunately, Matt’s brother, who came to visit last weekend, has a better camera than we do–and is also apparently a bit of a deer whisperer–because he was able to get quite close and get the best pictures so far for us. Thanks, Greg!

Operation identification

While I didn’t see any ducks or geese at the pond this past weekend, there were lots of other animals. Red-winged blackbirds, a turtle, a frog, seven (!) fish, jitterbugs, waterstriders and this guy.

It’s been almost exactly a year since I asked for your help in identifying a pond creature. I’m pretty confident that last year’s was a beaver as everyone said. I’m also pretty confident that this guy is not a beaver.

I know the video is not the best. He was all the way on the other side of the pond, and it turns out that’s quite a ways away. But what do you think? Is he a mink? A weasel? The Loch Ness Monster?