In the meantime, guess what arrived today?

Three for us, three for our neighbors. It's all kind of baaaaaaaaby animals around here right now. Photos and more video here.

Technorati Tags: chickens

And cherries (some Black Tartarian, some Lambert):

It's funny. We get an organic veggie/fruit box every week from a local farm, and there have been cherries in the box that tasted really great until ours started coming in. Now they just taste like store cherries. So everybody, go out and plant yourself a cherry tree (actually, you'll need two for pollination). You deserve it.

Usually June is when we say goodbye to any semblance of spring, as the summer dry sets in. The tulips have gone to seed: I take my little trowel and bury seed all over the place in a hopeless attempt to get some free tulips. The Wahlenbergia (the blue bells in the background) is covered in blooms and bees. The ground is dry and hard. But it rained last night. I give up on trying to figure this year's weather out.

Anyway, more plants. This is a campanula that is finally behaving like everybody said campanulas would behave. "Oh, be careful about planting those; they will spread like mad." And of course I ended up with a series of polite campanula. This one is a little less so.

Similarly, everybody warned me about planting lobelia. So far, they have stayed right where I planted them, in a nice tight little bundle. It's not that I don't have any invasive plants (hello, mint, ferns, and Bermuda grass), but I find it amusing that the plants that are supposed to be beasts are doing nothing. And these warnings were coming from local gardeners, so this is not about climate or adaptability.

Speaking of invasives that aren't invasive here, out back, my little Psorlea pinnata, aka "Grape Jello Tree," has its first ever blooms.

This tree, covered in blooms, smells like a piece of grape-flavoured candy. It's growing fast now, but they're actually not massive trees; the very mature ones I saw at Cal Poly's arboretum were maybe 15 feet tall. These are terribly invasive in Australia; they were brought in as backyard plants from South Africa and easily hopped the fence.

Another plant that is supposed to be a real bear is the buddleia. I've never actually met anybody for whom buddleia was a problem, but I see references to it all the time. Mine are thriving this year, and finally growing up to cover the ugly fence and the weird neighbors (see how part of their roof is different? They were putting an illegal addition on there last year and were busted).

Some garden problem areas (oh, lord, it's all problem areas right now, but I won't get into that) are this area by the side fence. My little collection of penstemons is doing nicely, and the Salvia, but I want to get rid of the grass and can't decide what else to put there.

And our quince tree, usually the super-healthy specimen in the garden, seems to have fireblight or something of the sort. Which means a heavy prune this year, but it's not as if we can figure out what to do with all those quince, anyway.

Apart from that, we continue to pick away at the hallway work, and maybe one of these days we'll actually finish something enough to photograph.

Technorati Tags: berries, blueberries, cherries, flowers, fruit, gardening, invasive plants, plants, quince, rain, seeds, shrubs, trees, weather

We spent this morning and early afternoon making more panels of anti-dog fence for the garden. Noel cut the wood to size, then cut slots in it on the table saw.

Then he strapped the pieces together with some assorted metal straps we had around (total overkill; these are for seismic strapping). Secured with screws.

In the meantime I cut pieces of chicken wire to size and folded the edges to make them easier to attach. With the whole frame assembled, we stuffed the wire in the slot and screwed it into place.

A screw every foot or so holds the chicken wire firmly into the slot so the stupid dog cannot push it out and get into the garden. If we need to repair the screen for any reason, we can unscrew it and make a repair.

We got four more panels done today. Enough to do one whole side of the garden as soon as we get our hands on some more fence posts to hang them on.

Technorati Tags: dogs, fence, gardening, urban farming

For those not in the know, the requirements are:

1. resistant to dogs on all four sides, as dogs have been known to try squeezing under, sliding over, and pushing in between previous barricades.
2. comes in panels that can be hung off moveable fence posts, so they can be reconfigured or taken down
3. easy to repair when they inevitably get trashed by some stupid animal trick
4. easy to make, because we're going to need several of them

As you can see, the current method of keeping the stupid dogs out of the vegetable plot is tomato cages stacked all over the place, which doesn't really work but is fine until tomatoes start showing up (at which point, all bets are off and the dogs will be through such a flimsy barrier).

Anyway, this is a 4'x3' panel (plus a little, because of the frame). It's made from 2x4 stock, which has a slot cut into it. The chicken wire is secured in that slot with screws. The frame is held together with some metal straps, but it doesn't need much racking support as it will be held up on both ends.

It seems like quite a nice construction, and I'm thinking of asking him to make me a chicken tractor along the same lines, so I can get the girls to work on weedy or snaily sections of the garden without having to be out there to make sure they don't devour other plants, or get out of the yard, or get eaten by a hawk.

Technorati Tags: carpentry, chickens, construction, dogs, fence, gardening

Yes, somehow the cherry tree has produced lots and lots of fruit this year with little or no urging on our part, and only minor predation from birds. We're also enjoying strawberries (I even made some jam), and the occasional blueberry (OK, one so far, but more to come).

The secret to lots of strawberries seems to be limited water. The plants like the water well enough, but the real kicker is snails; if I water the snails show up and eat all the strawberries. This year I've been watering a lot less, and so no snails, and so more strawberries. It works for me.

This is our sour cherry about a week ago, so maybe we'll get enough sour cherries to make a pie this year. Assuming the chickens don't eat them all as they did last year.

To protect my garden, I've been keeping the chickens locked in their yard lately. But they get bored there, so I've solicited some rancid grains for them. Here they enjoy a double meal of black sesame seeds gone slightly sour, and some other grain that was a bit off.

Despite all those precautions and the fact that it's late May, I still do not have my tomatoes in the ground. And in part that's because we still haven't made fences to keep the dogs out of the garden area.

There is one tomato in the ground right now: this volunteer that came up near the chicken yard (see the little tiny plant next to the raspberry?). That will be a dog tomato; Rosie can eat all she wants of it.

In non-food parts of the garden, things are going well. We have hollyhocks in bloom (plus $%^@! invasive ferns):

And it's nigella season so we have lots of these:

And these:

The freebie sweet pea I got from Annie's, 'Black Knight', has started blooming where it has not been pecked back by the chickens.

And Tinkerbelle has started opening her buds up, just in time for a bunch of wasps to appear in the garden.

And the Tanacetum niveum has gotten going, looking much happier.

Not really in bloom but good looking are the poppy seedheads. I'm always torn about what I like more: poppies as flowers or poppy seedheads.

The Brodiaea have started opening up, looking interesting if a bit out of place in a world surrounded with big lush blooms and foliage.

And the variegated hebe:

Which is turning into a nice bush, if quite a bit shorter than the 6-feet height on the label.

And the last of the Leptosiphon, which seems to be getting rangy and thin, so I'm not sure it will last out the summer. I planted some last summer and refreshed it in the fall, so maybe it will hang in there, but this year will be characterized by less watering, so possibly not.

Technorati Tags: berries, birds, cherries, chickens, flowers, fruit, gardening, jam, plants, poppies, seeds, strawberries, tomatoes, urban farming

Anyway, yesterday evening Noel installed the door, gave it a test run, and then we had to go out.

When we got home well after dark, the chickens had figured out how to get in their room by hopping in through the little door, and were up in their roost. This morning Noel made a couple adjustments and we gave it a little test:

The girls seemed to like it, and Carole even gave it a test run.

The door still makes a lot of noise and there are more adjustments to be made, but we're now able to open and close it from inside the house.

The odd thing is that the chickens have spent more time inside their room today than they usually do. I guess they like the room a little darker and less well ventilated.

And in other chicken-related news, three more chicks will be coming sometime about a month from now. Plus three for our neighbors that we will be brooding for them, so we'll have quite the little chickie entourage very soon now. My master plan is to have a chicken in every back yard on our block by 2015 (actually, no, but that would be pretty funny).

Technorati Tags: automation, chickens, urban farming

When we set out to work on Saturday morning, it was ungodly hot out (92F, which is ridiculous for May here), so we decided to start by working in the basement on the pump, because it was nice and cool down there. We cut out the pipe from the pump to the manifolds, and removed the elbow at the corner here:

We replaced what had been an elbow with a tee, then added another elbow facing down to the pump outlet, where we spliced in the filter we had been using outside. There was a brief foray into the intense heat to rinse the filter (which was a bit gross), and then reconnect the outdoor manifold to the system. Then it had to sit overnight and cure up.

As the sun started going down, Noel dug a continuation of the trench to the place where we planned to put the hose bibb. That's along the front of the chicken shed.

I spent some quality time going around the garden fixing sprinkler heads that had been savaged by dogs and weather, and Noel glued and cut and got us these two lovely pipes sticking out of the ground.

One will be for the hose bibb, of course, and one will feed a new irrigation line for plantings around the chicken house, and sprinklers to water the compost, because I have really lost it on the composting thing. The hose bibb will be a continually pressurized line, and it will also connect to the auto-waterers for the chickens, so we no longer need to have a bucket in the attic of the chicken house.

Today was just as hot, if not hotter (the nearest weather station says it was over 93F), so very little happened until late in the day when it cooled down enough for us to venture out and work on the manifold end of the lines. Noel called into one of the pipes at the shed and I listened on the other hand for where the sound came out, so we knew which pipe was going into a valve and which would be continuously pressurized.

Then it was a bunch of gluing up of pipe, with canine oversight.

When you have lots of PVC pipe to glue, the best way to deal with it is to just sit down and make a little assembly line. I used a small piece of pipe to hold the end I was working with up away from the dirt (dirt will mess up your glue joint and make the pipe leak), but mostly it was prime, wait, glue, repeat.

The piece we connected first was the hose bibb pipe, and we needed to dig a little bit of dirt out to bring the pipe into the right spot. It sticks out so much because we put a union in there to allow us to tighten up the threaded connection at the end, even after the whole thing is glued together. Otherwise any leaks at that threaded joint would be basically incurable.

And there we have that connection. We ran out of 1-inch pipe making this happen, so Noel had to run to the store and get more. There wasn't enough light to finish the second circuit tonight.

Our next step was putting on the hose bibb and making the PVC-to-tubing connection be at ground level over on the shed. The tubing connection was easy: cut off the pipe, glue on an elbow, and glue in the tubing connector. (Well, apart from me forgetting that the tubing was 1/2" and not using a reducing elbow as I ought, requiring a reducing bushing to make it work.)

Then we dry-fit the spigot assembly and chose the right height for everything, and Noel drilled a hole in the wall for the connection to the chicken waterers. Carole was intrigued by what was going on.

And here we have our finished (mostly) setup, with one of my sinks there to act as a splash guard. We still need to blow the dirt out of the pipes and tape and properly install that hose bibb, and I haven't added any drip tubing to the now-hidden elbow behind the sink, and we want to secure the thing to the wall so it doesn't flop around, but it could work as soon as it's all cured up.

Inside, the same connection appears with a hose-threaded end there to connect to the hoses for the chicken waterers (made of special food-quality hose, so as not to leach cyanide and other nasties into the chickens' water).

In all a pretty decent weekend of work, given how unpleasantly hot it was all weekend. Fortunately, the evening winds kicked up at the right time, and opening all the doors flushed the heat right out of the house. Yay for our Maritime climate, and boo for global warming which has made this year so unusually hot, and will probably mean we have to relocate to higher ground in the next 20 years.

Technorati Tags: automation, chickens, digging, heat, irrigation, plumbing

The niche avoided the battleship paint, but it did have several layers of paint to get off. This morning the Peel-Away had made good progress, visible through its protective paper layer:

So tonight, after a fairly decent day of other work, I pulled away the paper and scraped as much of the paint off as would come off reasonably.

There are two great things about Peel-Away, and number one is that most of the paint really does peel right off when you pull off the paper. The other great thing is that it doesn't require a neutralizer before repainting.

My usual method is to allow as much paint to come off with the paper as possible, them pull off the really loose stuff left behind hanging off the surface, then go through and scrape off the lower stuff.

(The colour is really messed up on some of these photos; the niche is painted a sort of aqua blue, not lime green.)

This is the first time I've used Peel-Away on plaster, and it worked OK. Underneath the layers of latex paint is the usual chalky paint on most surfaces in this house. Even though the niche is still weirdly coloured, it's good to no longer have it pink, which was just ridiculous.

A new little tool for us and very useful on this project was a little plastic chemical paint removal brush, very handy for rubbing the loose paint off the curved surfaces.

And there we are, all nice and not-pink. (Not that particular green, either, but I wasn't going to wait to do this post tomorrow when the light would be better.)

We still need another go-round on the sill, which is wood and has more layers of paint on it.

Technorati Tags: paint removal, renovations, victorians, woodwork

We stayed at the mythical Whistlestop Inn, a bed and breakfast in a big late Victorian house (1903 or thereabouts) with a few railroad car cottages, as well.

The first night we spent in one of those cars. It was certainly an experience, which might have been vastly improved had either of us been really, really into trains. As it is, we liked the shape of the car just fine, but the overdone Victorian interior was not really our style.

That's the view looking into the sitting area of the car. You see all those windows? Every one of them has a shade that needs to be lowered for privacy at night, but then must be raised for light during the day.

Breakfast was delivered on a rolling cart in a nice basket, and every day we stayed there it was different and well-made. New York Mills is really the middle of nowhere, so nobody was going to be getting too fancy with the breakfast, but that was fine by us.

My only real gripe about the Imperial is that it has no shower, so I was glad that they moved us to a different room for the rest of our stay. I would also be remiss if I failed to mention that the entire inn, and much of New York Mills, is right next to a railroad with heavy traffic. Not a great location for light sleepers, but neither Noel nor I have ever been accused of that.

I admit to my one spoiled-rotten moment when I ate a strawberry garnishing breakfast and immediately thought of how much better our own always are than any strawberry from the grocery store. Well, duh. Nothing beats a strawberry right off the plant, and certainly it's hard to compare an unripe store berry with a fully ripened berry at the peak of flavour.

Anyway, that was our Mother's Day weekend. Now back to the real world, right? The good news for us while we were away was that Gene finished putting drywall up in his kitchen (which he is doing all by himself, making us look lazy and codependent), and now we get to borrow his drywall lift. We rented a lift when we put the drywall on the parlour ceilings, and it made the project possible, in no small part because I got the flu and had a 102-degree fever, so Noel did most of the work himself. Then we felt rushed to get the work done fast in order to save money on the rental. Borrowing tools like that is much less stressful.

Also, I don't plan to get the flu while we fix the dining room ceiling.

Let's see, we had some other stuff we've been doing that is all lined up waiting for free time. Like the side of the metal shed facing the house, where we want to put in the pathway that will be alongside the greenhouse once the greenhouse goes in.

It seems like an easy project, but I've been dithering over pathway materials for, oh, years now. We have decided to just get on the list for a huge pile of free wood chips from a tree trimmer, and use that. It's worked well enough on our other pathways. The path will be a little wider than the area covered by the wood and the ladder here, and of course it will involve removing more grass which inevitably means heavy work in the hot sun. But it would be nice to have a pathway there.

While we were away a box full of PVC fittings to finish the two runs out to the chicken shed was delivered to our doorstep. I spent some time today laying them out and figuring out how I wanted to put together the runs, but it was too sunny for me to get much done. I need to find my sun hat and sunglasses, if this weather is going to continue to be so bright (which it is, though October at least).

Also, over the last several months some crazy number of things have come into this house because of other people decluttering. Sort of a professional hazard in my case, since I've been guilty of bringing home things given to me by clients who hire me to help them clear out their stuff. Between that and neighbors selling up, and friends moving, and so forth and so on, we've got quite the pile of things we need to sort through. I spent a nice chunk of time today sorting fasteners. Whee.

Of course, one of the things I brought home was this nice set of drawers from a friend/client of mine, and I want to spend some time cleaning and de-rusting it. I've never refinished metal before, so this should be exciting.

For the rest of the stuff, I'm sorting it into piles of "we always use these, put it in the regular supply," "we use these but already have some, so may not need it," and "we never use these, find somebody else who wants it." I've had mixed luck with donating used tools and home improvement supplies lately, so I'm thinking of having a social event at the house with a tool/supply swap at the same time (you needn't bring anything, but you can't leave anything, either). Anybody up for it?

And one quick update, so this is not just a trip report and some idle speculation on possibly doing some tidying in the future. Noel now has a functioning (if incredibly slow) chicken door.

He made lots of modifications, including changing to a screw drive and swapping out motors and all kinds of software changes to the controller. It's been very exciting. The only issue is that the door moves up and down incredibly slowly, and impractically so. On the other hand, we can now open the chicken door via a web interface from bed, which is a good first step. Now all we need is a robot that will take the dogs out and feed them first thing in the morning and we can sleep all day on weekends, never accomplishing anything. (Any time we appear to have done more than humanly possible on a weekend, you can blame Goldie and her total inability to let us sleep after the sun comes up.)

OK, now to catch up on everything ELSE we're behind on.

Technorati Tags: automation, berries, chickens, construction, dogs, drywall, greenhouse, new york mills, organization, paths, plumbing, strawberries, victorians

The real big news in the garden this week (and the one of which I have no photos) is that Rosie has decided fava beans are delicious, and she'll go harvest the pods off the plants and snack on them. This means even more anti-dog defenses are required. Stupid dog.

We had more than an inch of rain last weekend, which was great news for the garden. Many of the weeds are now waist-high back there, and of course the only time I had free was when it was raining/ Here's one plant I can see using all over the place (though it doesn't work so well right by the path as it's much taller than expected): Echium plantagineum. It's about 18" tall and maybe 12" across. I have another one that mysteriously came up white, which half makes me wonder if they somehow got mislabeled.

On the other hand, the theme of TOTALLY OVERGROWN is going strong up there in the orchard, as the salvia bed decided to blow this summer. I don't know how obvious it is from this picture, but we have there a couple of savlias (especially a Salvia candelabrum) that have run into each other hard and are sending up stalks more than five feet high. It's a little nutty.

The only thing that saved this scene from being as overgrown was the judicious application of the lawnmower. Note that the Salvia apiana has stalks that are taller than the dwarf Montmorency cherry. The Buddleias are also getting nice and tall, covering up the fence.

You can see the Montmorency cherry is in bloom now (the sweet cherry trees have fruit already). Also in bloom are the standard apples. Look:

Yay, apples.

And oh, yeah: yay nectarines. The whole tree might look this great if I could just remember to spray for peach leaf curl in the winter.

This year I'm trying to save up enough strawberries to make a batch of jam. That's about 2 1/4 pounds of hulled berries, so I come through and pick the ripe and intact ones (snails get quite a few), wash and hull them, and stuff them in the freezer. We're up to just over a pound now (with some supplementation from our weekly veggie box).

Over the fall and winter I worked on getting more flowers planted around the garden that are good for bees. As I discovered at the class on native bees I enjoyed a while ago, bees like daisy-like flowers that are blue and white.

This particular plant, Senecio stellata, is not the most popular (Wahlenbergia still wins that prize), but it works for me.

The real problem, of course, is that most of those flowers are not yet in bloom. Our native bees emerge for periods of a couple of weeks at a time, at very specific times of year. So this very pretty Leucanthemum x superbum 'Tinkerbelle', with lots of very promising buds, has already missed out on at least one species (probably more; my ability to monitor bees in the garden is pretty limited).

I was amused to see that the Feverfew had self-sowed and one seed came up in the middle of this Erigeron 'Pink Jewel'. Erigeron was one of the plants specifically recommended for native bees.

The Feverfew came back even more bushy and insane than last year. (That's Chrysanthemum parthenium 'Virgo', grown from seeds I got from Select Seeds.) I've taken several seedlings and put them in other places this year, but I think I might not need to sow the rest of the seeds I have.

So maybe no flowers for the bees, but the ladybugs are pretty happy.

I'm liking this little guy. Partially subsumed under the poppy explosion happening around the dwarf apples, we have Tanacetum niveum. Little daisy-like flowers, pretty airy foliage. I really should move it so it doesn't have to deal with those poppies.

Speaking of insanity and poppies, I sowed some over by the chickens, and they seem to be coming up. Anything remotely green that comes within beak-range of that fence is history, though.

As the poppy onslaught dies down, the nigellas are preparing for their turn.

Nigella hispanica is one of my faves. I've not gotten it to self-sow like the everyday nigella, but maybe this year will be the charm.

If you're a plant fanatic and in the Bay Area this weekend, consider making a visit to Annie's Annuals for the big Mother's Day sale. Mothers or those willing to impersonate mothers get a free plant with purchase.

Technorati Tags: apples, bees, cherries, chickens, dogs, flowers, fruit, gardening, jam, nectarines, plants, poppies, salvias, strawberries, trees, weeds

We delayed digging the trench for this project all winter, but when it rained this last weekend Noel noted that we'd better dig now while the ground is soft from the rain, instead of waiting until it has dried and hardened to the texture of concrete.

Over the last couple of days he has dug and dug all along the eastern fence, doing me a huge favour and root-pruning the Cecile Brunner in the process.

Then today he laid in the long straight lines of pipe for two more circuits; the trench used to end where the pipe makes a turn to the left there, which is the lawn sprinkler on the far side of the lawn.

One pipe will end at the soil line by the shed, and I will run some small sprinklers from there to the compost pile to keep it moist in the summer, and also use that to water some plants I'm planting around the shed to help settle it into the landscape a little. The other pipe will come up and end on a hose bibb, and I'm thinking of using one of my many sinks (don't ask) under it to make a little outdoor washing-up area. That pipe will also connect to a float valve in the chicken water tank (up in the attic of the shed, above their room) to auto-fill it.

I've been too busy to do my half of this, including ordering the pieces we don't have on hand, but Noel filled in the center part to keep dogs and other passers-by from falling in the trench.

I still need to even the soil out with a rake -- this will eventually be a narrow path behind the greenhouse with a narrow planting strip along the fence, but for now it's just a dog-trail through the tall grass -- and I still have a lot of work going around the yard repairing irrigation fittings that have been damaged by time, weather, or dogs. But it looks pretty nice.

Technorati Tags: chickens, compost, digging, irrigation, plumbing, shed

One area where we will switch to chemical paint remover (we have several gallons of Peel-Away just itching to be slathered on the trim) is this decorative bit where the second floor is cut away. It just doesn't clean up as nicely with the heat methods.

The baseboard does, however, come nicely clean. Big flat-ish areas are best, I suppose.

The niche is made of plaster, and thus totally sucks as far as paint removal. I'm going to give it a try with Peel-Away and see what happens. I have to admit that I always thought I would like having a niche, but I am not very fond of it now that I live with one. I'm still mulling the idea of putting a narrow, tall window here and letting more natural light into the stairway.

Another odd little spot: they painted the floor pink along the handrail. Fortunately, it came up easily.

And the big project has been the Accordion Room door, and the surrounding trim. While it does make the hallway much darker to not have the pink, it also makes it, well, a lot less pink. This will be really nice when we repaint the doors white.

And finally, one of my favourite things in the house is this riser near the top of the staircase. It has a funny dent in it that looks to me like a guy sitting on the toilet reading a newspaper, and I call it "The Pooper." When we repair the staircase I'm sure it will disappear, along with all the other weird dents and gouges, but for now I think of him as part of the family.

Technorati Tags: paint removal, renovations, victorians, woodwork

Anyway, over the last week or so Noel and I have had a couple of discussions about making a small pergola for the passiflora (passifloras are where we get passionfruit from) to grow over. It is currently wrapped around a tomato cage and running out of room. This would also be practise for making the foundations for the deck, so we're talking about the world's most over-built pergola, here. Which is a good change from the usual flimsy trash you see in catalogs. Should we get another tornado, our pergola will be going nowhere.

This is the entrance to the back garden, and I wanted it to really be something more than just a thing to hold a large aggressive vine. Here's what I came up with as far as design:

That's a very simple post-and-beam structure with a series of decorative beams across the top. We'll fill in the sides with a wire framework for the passiflora to climb up, and maybe I can plant another clematis on the other side (I'd been planning kiwis, but have been informed that kiwis will require way more room).

I modeled it out in Sketchup, mostly so I could play with shapes for the upper decorative beams. We're going to build this out of redwood and then (horror of horrors!) paint it red. At the base it will be about four feet wide by four feet deep, to give room to get things through. After modeling, it's apparent that the 4x4 posts take up a lot of that space, so we may even make it wider.

I'd originally been trying to figure out how to put a little bench in there, but the pergola will be right under our neighbor's bedroom window, so I doubt I'll want to spend lots of time sitting there.

This will be a good test of our ability to do more fancy woodwork. Noel has been playing Mad Scientist in the basement, and has some ideas about how to approach this. Which is good because quality craftsmanship and I are not good friends.

Technorati Tags: architecture, carpentry, design, passionfruit

So yesterday Noel got some hardware and attached the new pump, which works like a charm (a somewhat leaky charm, unfortunately, but liberal applications of teflon tape seems to have stopped that). I need to build it a little pump house and then do the permanent plumbing into the tank.

One of the major benefits of this pump is that it has a pressure tank, so it maintains a consistent water pressure. It's also self-priming, and can be at any elevation relative to the water tank, so I can abandon the stupid hole in the ground we were using.

With the pump hooked up and the hose back in the water tank, I need to go around and make repairs on the sprinklers. I'm replacing a lot of sprinklers with drippers this year, because plants have gotten large enough that they don't need support water any more. I hope this helps with my weed issues in the roses, but we will see.

For those who don't have the back story, we have sand here, and for sand you're supposed to use sprinklers rather than drippers in order to get even water distribution across a larger area; you can also use more drippers but our sand drains so fast that that was actually impractical. Solutions to this include amending the soil with organic matter (which I've been doing). As plants get larger and have more established root systems, you can stop adding so much water.

Anyway, with the pump installed at least temporarily, Noel moved on to his unending chicken door project. He's been up in the office working on this for weeks, and finally he got to the point where he was ready to test it out in real life.

There were some snags, though. Some having to do with the speed at which he was running the motor, and some having to do with the odd angle the string ended up at.

There was a lot of modifying the controller board to change the speed, and messing with the spool that wound the door up. In order to keep the chickens out of Noel's way during all of this, I forked off the top of a compost pile so they had something interesting to dig in.

So the door opener still doesn't work, but we're closer. And when it does work, we will no longer realize, as we sit down to watch a movie after dinner, that somebody has to go out and shut the chickens in for the night. And we can sleep in guilt-free on weekends! No more pulling on rubber boots and tromping out to the chicken yard to let the little buggers out! I'm looking forward to it.

Technorati Tags: automation, chickens, construction, engineering, irrigation, plumbing

I've been so busy that literally NOTHING has been done in the garden. So while it's in the finest bloom, it's also overrun with grass and other weeds.

All the dianthus are looking good. A classic flower for dry summers, and a great way of covering ground.

This is a more traditional carnation (also a dianthus, also known as a pink because the edges of the petals look like they've been pinked: trimmed with pinking shears).

I got that pink and this white one at the same time, unmarked at a local nursery. I can be kind of a plant name junkie at times, and I like to get some plants that I don't know exactly just to keep it under control.

And this one I definitely don't know the name of, because it's a seedling, off my 'Firewitch' dianthus. I think I will let it grow for a season and move it to a more useful location.

Another unnamed plant is this campanula. It came in a little pot at Trader Joe's. While campanulas with more documented provenance have curled up and died, this little guy soldiers on. That is not usually the result I get from grocery-store plants, so it's a nice change.

And here's my Iris nelsonii (all that un-identified plant stuff was making me antsy). That plant is spreading slowly across the back of the daylily bed. Since the daylilies are in desperate need of dividing, I'm thinking this iris will get split up at the same time. I was unsure it would thrive, because it prefers marshy land (which we really do not have), but apparently it's just fine with well-drained sand.

For Steph, another shot of the ladybug poppies. You can get them from Annie's Annuals, either in their nursery or mail order (or sometimes you find the plant you wanted at a local nursery).

The funny thing is that there are two identical plants there. One going crazy, the other looking a little sad. I think the invasive ferns are bothering the smaller guy.

And here are some of the poppies in the orchard. They are engulfing the dwarf apple trees, which have just started putting out leaves and flowers.

Another seed pod that started appearing this week is the fava beans. Yes, that is a ridiculous number of weeds at their feet. I should see how I can tell when these are ready.

And here's my pink ceanothus ('Marie Simon'). People actually call this a California lilac, which is a total misunderstanding of what a lilac is. It's a pretty flower, and a very nice bush, and deserves to be admired on its own merits. They're notoriously hard to grow East of the Rockies because they don't like water in the summer, and keel over dead from rot.

The big development this week is that the rose hedge has started blooming. I saw buds last week and knew it would be along soon, but in the last couple of days the flowers have started really opening and making a show.

I like this stage because mildew and black spot have not yet set in and started making the bushes look ragged.

And here we have the arch, responding nicely to the pruning I gave it this winter. Roses generally bloom on horizontal branches, which is why it's kind of looking like it got a funny side haircut.

Lest you think it's all looking great out front, check out how bad the area around the magnolia has gotten. I suppose it would not kill me to drag the mower over there once in a while, right? I'd like to put down pavers and have a little front patio there for sitting on summer evenings and gabbing with the neighbors. But that might require some real grading work which I'm not prepared to do right now.

And last of all, the hydrangeas are blooming. Admittedly, they have only the briefest of deciduous periods in this climate, but I like their big poufy bracts. This is 'Harlequin,' very pink because of the foundation replacement work (concrete leaches into the soil, shifting the pH near it upwards, so plants near a concrete foundation must not require acid soil).

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