More surprises from the yard

I went home over the holiday weekend to visit my parents, check the bees and help my Mom get some seasonal chores tidied up. When I got back, I found that more new things are blooming around the yard.

Blackberries are getting ready to bloom.
I've left a few of the second year canes to see what kind of fruit they bear -
if it's worth taming them into cultivation or not.

This sleepy Poppy was not quite open.
It's in the weird cement planter on the side of the house - I have to find a new home for it.

Iris on Hosta

Iris under Fern

There's grapes in the mix.

A very pretty, very out-of-control Wisteria is currently crushing the life out of some of the lilacs in front of the house.

Asters among the Spiderwort

A a pretty little clump of Buttercups.

The conclusion to the flowerbed.

I took yesterday off from work. Primarily, because it was my birthday and I didn't want to be at work. Happy bonus is that the weather was beautiful, and I was able to get the flowerbed I started over the weekend done.

This is where I left off on Sunday, and started Wednsday.

I decided to edge the bed with old roofing slates, the reasons being -
1) They can be shaped, sort of.
2) Environmentally friendly.
3) The price was right.

Roofing slates are pretty big, and I didn't need to hammer 14" of slate into the ground, even in an attempt to keep things out of the bed. This was really just so that the dirt didn't run away. Or ran away slower, at least.
Slate is a really under-utilized building material. Fire proof, rot proof, rodent proof, it's only enemies are acid rain, time and an errant tree falling on it. We still have a bunch of 100 year old roofing slates because of it's vertical durability.
Horizontally, it's durability is another matter. Remember that tree I mentioned? Well, a hammer works similarly.

My proof of concept.
(And my mason hammer.)

When struck on the face with a solid sharp blow, you can leave a very nice punched hole in slate. It's how they put holes in the slates to hang them on roofs.

A hole that matches the profile of my hammer end.

The reverse side blows out though, leaving a dished surface.

Cool.

Because of this nature, you can kind of predict how slate is going to work with you. What I would do is pick up a slate, and drop it on the lawn flat to see if there were any hairline cracks where it wanted to break. Barring that, I'd give them a good pop in the middle and see if that would inspire any cracking. From there I'd perforate a line when I'd prefer it to crack. 90% it would work, sometimes it would crack in weird ways.

split into 3.

I hammered them into the edge, I like to think decoratively. I needed to use a wood block because hitting hammer on stone would cause the stone to flake and splinter. Even using the wood block caused some cracking.

Edged!

Plant placement!

Right about this step it started to look a whole lot like the Crazy Old Cat Lady Backyard Cemetery Starter Kit. I had put slates in below each plant to further slow erosion, and to make little shelves to hold the plants where they belonged.
I started to second guess my decisions...

Tada! With plants planted and mulch!

Luckily, with the addition of mulch, it looks a whole less Crazy Old Cat Lady. I've put in 3 white, 2 dark pink, 1 light blue and one purple creeping phlox, 2 Sliver Mounds and 2 Lemon variegated Thyme.

What a weekend

Wherein I tried to do all the things, by myself, while under a deadline.
Saturday morning I woke up bright and early and drove out to Uhaul to pick up the truck. I had a deadline to hit - the brush dump closes at 1 on Saturdays, and I wanted to make the most of my quality time with the truck. I was able to average 1 load an hour, so 4 loads of debris gone. The debris included:
• All of the trimmings from the back yard, which included a lot of blackberry canes, and black raspberry vines (1 load),

After the pickup - Trust me, the edge of the woods was encroaching a lot more before my Thursday night brush cutting fiesta.

• All of the pile from the front yard that was here when I bought the place, which included lots of old lilac trunks, wet leaves, 1 broken leaf rake, 1 Nikon lens cover, and 2 green and blue Nerf darts (1 load),

Now you see it.

Now you don't.
That was one full 8' pickup bed of sodden leaves.
(And some sort of rodent nests.)

• 2/3 of the giant pile from in front of the shed (2 loads. A third would have finished it.)

Before. I forgot to grab an "after" - I'll update it later.

 I did my best to avoid the Dreaded Poison Ivy. I intended to go out fully suited, but it was already so warm, my choices were to potentially itch, or drop from heat. I put on the long rubber gloves and long sleeved shirt and just hoped a lot. I also washed my hands and face between dump runs.
So far *knock wood* it seems to have worked.
Also, literally pouring your own sweat out of the rubber gloves was... gross.
The witching hour came all too soon, and I had to bring the truck back. I made so much progress in such a short period of time, I was really bummed it couldn't have gone on longer. But the Town of Grafton forced me to pace myself. Maybe it's for the best.
Then I mowed my lawn.

Next up was to fix the holes in the floor of my basement. I have a radon system that relies on positive pressure to suck the radon out from under the floor before it filters up through the concrete and into the house. When they installed the system, the back of the basement was still covered in about 2-6" of sand and dirt. When I cleaned it out, I discovered that there were a number of rectangular holes down into the ground, likely left over from a long-forgotten coal room that was present when the floor was poured. I can't have holes in the positive pressure system, so I got to play with cement patch.

I tried to put my initials in it, but the fast patch stuff didn't like to hold details.

It seems to have set up nicely.

Sunday dawned rainy, so I did a bunch of chores and errands - laundry, grocery, cleaning and tidying the house. I have to say, I never thought (back in college) when I hoarded quarters in order to make clean socks that I would still be hoarding quarters 20 years later.
It cleared up that afternoon, and I decided (on a whim) that after having only mowed the lawn twice, that mowing the hill behind the house was for the birds. It needed to be not-mowable. I stopped at High Hill Farm in Westborough and picked up a bunch of creeping phlox, some lemon thyme, and some odd fluffy thing. I got home, put all the groceries away, and started turning the hill into a flower bed.
Turning hills into flower beds is harder than flat ground. There's more odd bending and stretching. But by 6:30 on Sunday evening, I had a good half of the bed turned.

Before.

After. About 2/3 there.

I need to figure out how I'm going to edge/hold the dirt back. I put some old bricks Alicia and I found around the bottom for now, but I'm not 100% sold on it. I have to stop by Home Depot for some mulch so I'll think about it. I've seen some neat ideas using planks and/or pipes hammered into the ground. I have some planks from the basement clean out that I could cut up and repurpose...

That was that.
This week, I'll try to finish the flower bed, and then get to work on the upstairs bedrooms. The Ben Moore sale is on!

Light

My intention is to eventually strip, sand and repaint this door, but this morning I enjoyed watching the shadows of it's long life play out in the light.

Morning light, reflected off the floor down the hallway.

It's been a little while

Hi there.
I didn't forget you.
I got busy with a work trip to Vegas, and a trip out to the Hudson Valley to help with volunteer day at Eastfield Village and a visit to Ian.
Don't worry. I have lots of things planned, and the parts slowly starting to assemble.
I have cement patch for the basement floor.
I have sacks of fancy lime mortar for re-pointing the chimney.
I have fiberglass tape and joint compound for fixing cracks in the upstairs bedroom walls prior to paint.

There's a sale at Koopman's on Ben Moore paint next week. I might have to make some decisions. ($10 off a gallon for the first 5 gallons!)

I've been fighting the malaise of the weather and the dragging crud of allergies.
I've been wary of working outside because that only invites itching.
But this Saturday, I'm renting a truck, putting on my Tyvec suit, and getting rid of the piles of brush I've created. I can't afford the hundreds of dollars the landscapers wanted to do it, so I'll be as careful as possible.

Surprise Jack-in-the-Pulpit out by one of the brush piles.

Something a little different - bees for the farm

You know it's spring when bees hit the road.
I've been keeping bees for a few years at my parent's place. My sister and her husband built me the best bee yard, which is on the same line as the cattle fence. I call it the "Bee Fortress of Solitude."
The past number of winters have been pretty epic learning experiences.
You do not want to get into it with me about climate change. I will be (un)happy to point at hundreds of dollars worth of thousands of dead bees who couldn't winter over because of bonkers weather.
Right now, it's cold and wet and we have to feed the new bees like crazy because all the rain is literally washing the nectar out of the spring blooms.
Ahem.
Anyway.

New Bees!

You pick them up at night so that any of the bees that were out flying for food
in the daylight will be home in time to come along for the ride.

Trucks are the best way to do this. Ian and I get our bees from Hudson Valley Bee Supply. They've been great. I got 2 spring nucleus colonies, Ian got 3 overwintered nucs. I've also gotten bees from BetterBee before.
This year sees the introduction of top feeders to the operation. My first year we used entrance feeders, and they seemed to work fine. Every year since it's been a leaky, sticky mess. The bees must be fed, especially right now, so, we'll see.

A nuc sitting on top of it's hive.
A few years ago I got creative and painted some of the brood boxes.
It's been a long hard bee-time since, and I've lacked time and creativity to paint new ones.

Little faces in the top entrance after installation.

Here we go again.
Keep your fingers crossed.

At one point I was up to 6 hives. There's enough room in this yard to do 6 comfortably. 8 gets tight. I can only hope that my worries this year are about space and not disease, swarms, absconding, freezing, pests, etc.

Get into beekeeping, they said. It's a fun hobby, they said. You can make a little side money, they said.
It's been a lot of reading, trying to keep up with the most recent developments in management and medication, heartache and dead bees. When you have livestock, you have dead stock, but it doesn't get any easier when you crack into a hive and no one flies out to greet you.
Where once there was a hum, only silence.

The hum is back - let's hope this time I manage to beat the odds and get it right.

Call me The WeatherStripper

Because it feels like that's all I do for fun right now.
Saturday before I had to take off to do Bee Things, I rolled down to Koopmans to pick up the 3 screens I had them do. It cost $96, and they were done in less than a week. My first-time screening didn't look so bad in comparison, but where they had me beat was that they didn't tear the edges of the screen next to the spline.
The last of the fiberglass screens is now clad in aluminum, which means that short of damage I probably won't have to rescreen any more. Weatherstripping, on the other hand...
I started putting up the screens, but that means re-weather stripping. Some areas on the north side of the house still have their fuzz. But also have moss and lichens.

Something here is no factory original.

Some areas on the east and south of the house are so badly worn, it's not that there's no fuzz, it's that there's barely even a backer left in the channel.

That little black stitched looking line in the channel is all that's left of the weatherstripping.
The black stuff is aftermarket adhesive backed rubber the former owner tried to retrofit with.

At some point if the nice weather ever comes, I'm going to have to go window-by-window with the goo-gone (to get rid of prior attempts as fixing the windows), a bucket of soapy water (to clean the outside sash and window wells), a razor blade (to get rid of old caulk), and the caulking gun (to reseal it again.
There's a good argument for replacing some of the windows. The two in the master bedroom should be done, as the seal is shot in one of them. As I've mentioned, they are not quality windows.

I've found that if I use the short-fuzz (.25) weather stripping on the windows, and the long-fuzz (.4) weather stripping on the screens, it's enough to bridge the gap. I'm getting pretty good at it. I've only got 4 more windows to do, and I'll be done with the first floor.

Today I had the furnace cleaned. I had the receipt to show that it had been done in October before the house was sold, but I wanted to make sure it was ok. The filter situation had me a little concerned, and I wanted to see what he thought of the balance. He was able to fix the filter situation in about 3 minutes, gave me tips on balancing the system, and said that if I wanted to know about micro-ducts (for the bedrooms upstairs) I'd have to call and talk to a sales guy in the office. Super nice, answered all my questions and was pretty quick. Since my system is only hot air (no AC, no hot water) it doesn't get a huge amount of stress. Now I know that it takes 20x14" filters (x2). So I'll see about picking some of those up - the "filters" that are in there are really just good at "keeping squirels out" per the cleaner.
A few more flowers are up!

Tulip!