A little bit of everything

I didn't really have a good plan headed into the weekend. With the heat, I wasn't sure what I was going to do when. I needed to mow the lawn and do some trimming (2 weeks is about 4 days too long to let that lawn go right now). I needed to treat more Poison Ivy I found (I mentally note living Poison Ivy when I'm in the yard and wander around once a week to squirt new patches.)
Over the course of the weekend, I cleared the 10' left of the back wood line to the little path to the composting foundation. Under the blackberry and multiflora rose and poison ivy, I found a pretty little spiraea - a friend of mine versed in these things thinks it's S. latifolia, "Meadowsweet". (Thanks Camille!)

The bugs love this bush. Bumbles and all sorts of flies all over it.
Curiously, no honeybees though.

Little by little, I'm reclaiming the edge of things. Not having a truck to haul things away to the brush dump is starting to be a real impediment. I have to start seriously thinking about what is going to replace my trusty '07 CRV - at 270k miles, with a shot heater core and a dead AC compressor, it's going to be time soon. I like the idea of the Ranger or the Tacoma - not too big, but big enough to haul away all the yard waste with.
I did the mowing and the trimming around the pop-up rain drops, and cleared away the ferns that were encroaching on the left side of the driveway near the shed.
I also decided that this was the weekend to do the basement stairs (since it was cooler and drier down there than upstairs.) I don't have any before pictures, but image it a dark chipped grey. There's no good ways to photograph this (no light in the stairwell, I should fix that) but there's the after:

Washed, primed and painted a light "thundercloud" grey in the Benjamin Moore "Patio Floor" paint line. Now it matches the door to go out the bulkhead, and that pleases me. As a glossy, it should be easier to keep clean. I also painted the two support posts at the bottom of the stairs to match - they had be kinda-sorta painted over the years - (really I think it was someone just cleaning extra paint off their brushes) - but now they are nice and clean too.

Speaking of the basement, I managed to hit 45% humidity in the basement last night! For the first time since installing it, I heard the dehumidifier click off for a little while. 

I've scraped all the rest of the devil's spackle off the wall in the upstairs bedroom (taking bits of the wall with it as I went, grr,) and purchased a 3.5 gallon bucket of regular old dust-control drywall compound. Hopefully that will start to come together a little faster now.

I installed a wifi repeater, so now I get internet all over my back yard. That wasn't really the purpose though - the point was to put up a Ring device to monitor who might be behind the house. Now I've got a lot of great short videos of me mowing the lawn and watering the flowers. It's entertaining, if nothing else!

The side effects of drying out -

When water evaporates, sometimes things get left behind. There's a fancy term for that, called "efflorescence" - the salts get deposited on your masonry.
 On walls, it looks like a white stain. In my basement, it looks like a science fair project.

Not snow. Or frost.

Must be aliens.

Salt aliens.

It's hard to tell, but that fluffy white stuff is a crystalline structure "growing" out of my floor. Dehumidifier is doing it's job! This weekend I should vacuum the basement again.

Dryin' out!

I have been doing a ton of research over the past couple weeks (well, months, really) about a dehumidifier for my basement. It's really wet down there, even after the gutters. (They helped, but didn't solve the issue.) What I've got is a good case of rising damp and a super porous foundation of dry-laid field stone and some roughly dressed granite.
I knew that manually emptying a dehumidifier wasn't going to work to fix the problem, because I'm not home to dump it so much of the time. I looked into dehumidifiers with pumps, but they all got terrible reviews. It seems that you can dehumidify or pump, but you can't do both, economically, with one machine. I agonized over this, because even cheap dehumidifiers aren't cheap, and I hated the idea of spending money on something I knew going in was likely to break.
Then one day, a happy accident of key word searches yielded a different idea. If a combo dehumidifier and pump stunk, what about separate gizmos? It's not like I'm trying to dehumidify a finished space, I don't need this to be pretty - I need it to be functional.
That led to me purchasing:
• a Frigidaire 70 Pint Dehumidifier,
• a Little Giant Automatic Condensate Removal Pump (with Safety Switch and 20ft. Tubing.)
• a 25' heavy duty extension cord
• and a 10' garden hose (that I needed to cut down)

After a lot of reading and a little monkeying, the rig was rigged! And it worked!

That's not a leak, that where I splashed water when I was pouring it
into the little pump to make sure it worked.
(It worked.)

I don't have a reading of what the humidity was when I left on Friday morning, but it was so moist the water was condensing on the water filter cover attached to the radon system and dripping to the floor. I left it running continuously to try to draw it down hard, and by the time I got back on Monday night, it was down to 60%!!
I have the machine set to 45%. We'll see if with all this rain the little machine that could can get there.
I'm afraid of what the electric bill will be, but it'll be cheaper than the house rotting from the inside out.

The hole is good for something!
But I need to get a longer hose to get it further away from the house.

So that's the expensive and thrilling conclusion to the saga of of moisture issues in the basement. With the addition of a fan in the crawl space, hopefully it will be well and truly under control.

Everything's out to poke me.

Or make me itch.
I made pretty significant progress in slashing the back treeline back to the woods this past weekend. I've resorted to tossing all the old brush and yard clippings into an old  3-sided foundation hidden behind the shed, or putting on the lower original pile that is *huge* at this point. The problem is there's no good place on the property for a burn pile right now - everywhere is too close to something I don't want to burn down - the road, the house, the shed, or trees.
If you remember, a lot of my wood line looked like this:

After trimming and mowing and pulling and a whole lot of rubber gloves and Round-up, I've beaten it back to look like this:

You can see the open spot there on the right, where I cleared a path up into the woods. The very path that the deer used to get to the rose bush (and then relieve themselves.) I threw down some grass seed without much hope that it will grow. I'm hoping it sprouts this fall - it's just too hot and dry for grass right now.
I got from the far edge of the path opening all the way around to the other side where there's a short path to the foundation where I dump the trimmings. I can't go mush further here, as from the dump path to the shed is a solid mass of poison ivy at this point.
That's where I decided that the gloves were coming off. (Just proverbial. That would have been a bad idea. Keep the gloves on.)

I went to Tractor Supply and bought the largest container of special brush killer they had. Came home and spent Sunday morning stalking the property, hosing down the 3-leafed devil everywhere I could find it. If I want to have a garden, I'll have to bring in top soil, but I was just done. Done.
I also mowed the lawn and whacked back some of the brush that was encroaching into the lower lawn, but that's going to take a more concerted effort to control.

I hope all this work pays off next year and I'm some sort of maintenance level with the parts I've done this year.

It's on.

It is the most dangerous time of year.
Home Depot has a sale right now - 50% off trees and shrubs, including roses.
I was good. I walked by them all.
Until I walked by this pretty, compact, "Coretta Scott King" rose (which I think was mis-labled - the blooms look nothing like the internet pictures.)
I got it home. Planted it carefully in one of the few area open that I could.
Fertilized it, fussed over it and enjoyed it.
Woke up this morning, and looked out my kitchen window to admire my pretty rose.
No roses.

3 days.
3 days and the deer came through and ate every single bud off the bush. Open ones, closed ones, all of the buds are gone.

Deer. One reason why we can't have nice things.

Long time gone

It's been a while since I updated. Two weekends ago, Ian and I attended an SCA event down on the Cape, so that ate up all my free time. When we got back, I came down with a stomach ailment that left me on the couch for two days and pretty useless for two more. The weather didn't help much, with it being so hot I didn't want to move.
Then it was the 4th, so I went to hang out with Ian and watch him work on his shop, and then went to my folks to visit and check on the bees. (Bees appear to be doing great, but I need to order them some new frames.)
Yesterday I finally had a little time to get some yard work done. At the top of the driveway where it curves around the house, I'd noticed a few little pink flowers hiding in the brush.

What are you?

I started digging out all the brush (which contained a lot of weeds and black raspberry, which acts and feels a lot like razor wire.)  I uncovered that plant, and then another, and another, and... over 10 plants later, I culled out the sickly little ones, staked up the bigger healthier looking ones, and put down 10 bags of mulch.
Between the lilac bed, and now the Surprise Roses bed, I'm up around 25 bags of mulch. At 2 cubic feet per bag, that's 50 square feet. Next year, I'm just going to have it delivered loose. The one nice thing about the bags is the portability. Lot of plastic waste when you're done though.
After uncovering the roses, I started working my way up along the back tree line. I had been mildly annoyed that while I own 1.6 acres, I couldn't access about 1 of them because of the prickery barrier at the treeline. I found a place that with a little encouragement turned into a natural access, once I bush-wacked my way in.

This isn't exactly before, but it's a really good representation of before.

After cleaning, but before mulch. I forgot to take a picture post-mulch.

Make-do fence. This open area already existed but was full of prickers - it might have been the access path before it grew up.
Now cleaned out it looks like you can walk up the driveway into the woods,
and I don't want just anyone using it as an access to the conservation area.

Uncovered roses! They have no scent, and are awfully cute. I think they might be ramblers?
I've given them a little support to get them off the ground, and be able to keep the area more clean now.

So pink!

*Edit - After some digging, I think it's possible that these roses are some long-neglected "Dorothy Perkins."