Boring House Work
We've been doing a lot of the boring stuff you end up doing when you own a house: all those maintenance tasks that the previous owners were not so keen on. Things like taking a stiff brush and brushing dirt off the sides of the house -- how's that catch you for an afternoon of fun? And pruning plants back from growing into the stairs or through the shearwalls. Nothing really photo-worthy but all essential.
This little project is about the only thing we've done lately that is obvious, and not entirely so. The bottom step was too high: it was cast when the foundation was done, and without a complete understanding of how tall the rest of the stairs would be. Code allows a certain amount of variation, but not the 1/2" we had, so we got a sack of non-shrink grout (basically concrete with small aggregate) and put 1/2" there and tapered it into the sidewalk.
And that, my friends, allows us to finally close the foundation permit. Yay!
In the farming-the-suburbs project, we have the first major tomato harvest. These are Costuluto Genovese. They were... disappointing. Maybe the plant needed to be pruned to improve flavour, maybe we just don't get hot enough, but whatever it was they were kind of mealy and dull. Better than supermarket tomatoes, but not by much.
Other produce in progress is a treeful of Key Lime blossoms, plus a bunch of pink lemon blossoms. I'd been picking the blooms off these trees to help their roots get established, but now they can go crazy.
And here's my latest project: a path back to the compost/future chicken yard. After much dithering around with ideas about a nice sandy gravel or possibly crushed shells (traditional Victorian pathway material for this area) I finally decided to go with pavers. But because the pavers at the store are kind of boring until they get well out of my price range, I have been thinking of designing my own, making some molds, and setting up a small factory for them in the back yard.
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Technorati Tags: concrete, landscaping, tomatoes
posted by ayse on 08/20/07