I'm a bad blogger!

I haven't posted anything in two whole months! So yeah, I suck! I've been so busy, but not much of it has been creative. I didn't feel it was worth sharing, but the time has come to at least check in, right?

In a nut shell, I've been pecking away at the shed we started building last fall. (I'll show you some other time.) We had been putting up with the inconvenience of not having a door all this time, using a piece of siding board to cover the opening, propped up with chairs and a ladder. Sheesh! It also needs insulation, interior wall board, wiring... you know, lights, outlets, the works. So that's happening simultaneously with the start of the 2011 garden. That's the other major push right now. Also there are little pieces of art beginning to evolve (the TAC 5x5 show in at the beginning of May, and I'm unsure of what to enter, so I'm making several), and I was knitting a few scarves back when it was a tad cooler, though that seems so long ago. And, do you remember the garden gate I started ages ago? I am a few steps farther along with that... so it looks like there are a lot of reports looming on the horizon. For now though, how about some garden news?

Last year, I let the garden go, and basically turned it over to the fire ants. It was insane.. and I sure paid the price for that move at the beginning of this season. This is what the garden space looked like only a couple of months ago...

You can't tell it from this photo, but much of it was over knee deep. There was no way this was going to get tilled, being primarily 'devil' grass. It sends off the nastiest runners, and it's above-ground stems are almost impervious to the rototiller blades. After much consideration, we decided the only thing we could do was burn it all off. We waited for a calm day and lit a match to the whole 5750 square feet of it, which worked perfectly. We were lucky to have a short window of opportunity without a burn ban in effect. So where we once had a dried brush field... Poof!

Before...

...and after burning, and tilling, and a bunch of 'hands-and-knees' work, pulling devil roots!...

Even these photos are older, as now there are beds starting to evolve, some looking rather lush.

After a few more days of 'shed work', I'll get back in the garden and capture more photos of real things growing!

See you soon!

What was I thinking?

I'm on day three of the garden gate construction. It has been much harder than I thought it would be. I spent the first two half-days working on sawing out the main corner notches. After completing just the first notch, I was questioning that there must be an easier way! But then by the third or fourth piece, it was going much easier and my cutting improved. Here is a picture of two very different corners, which shows how much better I became at sawing.

I could only do a couple corners at a time and then I'd have to rest my arm. So the concept of this corner is to flip one of these boards over and lock the two notches together at a right angle to make a tight fitting join. That's the term I fumbled around with and didn't know the name of before. Still don't. Anyway, 16 cuts like this one (each one took about 10-15 passes with a triple bladed saw) and I had the basic gate perimeter rectangles done.

Then I started laying in the middle supports. I was originally going to cut them to fit in between the 2x4's and jam them in, holding them with screws from the outside. But I was doing such a thorough job with this other 'new' method I had just learned, so I opted for continuing to work in the same laborious way. And the more pieces I added to the middle, expecting to cut corners at some point and switch to the easier way of attaching them, I continued notching my way along.
















It sprinkled rain on and off, interrupting my work sporadically. Then after I finished one whole gate, it cut loose with a heftier rain so I had to scramble to get my stuff inside. These are big! I will need Hubbs' help with positioning them in place to attach the hinges. But that's another day.


To add a little asymetric interest, I staggered a couple of the vertical boards. I will do the opposite stagger on the second gate to mirror this one. I didn't want too many irregularities in the basic orderly design, but I did consider all kinds of options, drawing them out on paper first. In the end, I only went for this subtle 'misalignment'. Just like with the entry borders I constructed the other day, I don't feel like the scale of this gate is apparent. When I stand next to it, I am a foot shorter!

I worked steadily all day and I have a feeling I'll be very sore tomorrow. I was working on the deck, squatting down for most of the work. But thankfully, my back has been feeling very good lately, so I think my chiropractor's last adjustment was a good one! Tomorrow I intend to finish the second gate and stain and install them on the weekend. I hope my next post finishes off with the entire thing completed! Cheers!

Entrez

I'm creeping along with my garden entrance and feel very proud of the work so far. Being 'just a girl', I feel like I'm doing a lot of heavy lifting and 'guy-sized tasks' with these 2x8 treated beams, 6x6 treated posts, etc. The treated lumber is a lot heavier than regular wood, and even these bolts required a heavy duty drill to get large enough holes bored all the way through five inches of depth. I worked very slowly, measured many times, checking that each piece was level and plumb. So this is where I left off, using up all the materials I purchased so far. I guess that's as good of a place to stop as any.

I haven't actually sunk the last decorative stair-stepped post on the right side. I've only mocked this up with a stump and a scrap piece of wood, but it shows the effect I'm going for. The right side gets two sections of support elements, the left only one. The path leading up to the garden will curve slightly to the left coming toward you in the foreground, and also forks off to the right, just at the lower right corner of this picture, and heads over to the amazing chicken run. That's a story for another blog.

When I see the structure in this picture, it doesn't look as impressive as it does in real life. So that you understand the scale of it, imagine standing directly underneath the cross beam and reaching up. If you're 5'8" like me, you will just barely be able to touch it with your fingertips. See? It doesn't look nearly that high in the picture, does it? It required me climbing a ladder and moving back and forth from one side to the other, trying to prop up the beam, clamping, then measuring and checking the level, then the other side, back and forth. Working by myself made it interesting, to say the least. Getting the beam up there to begin with was comical!

Now I have some great news. I just got my new Nikon digital SLR camera today, so in future posts, I should be able to provide MUCH more impressive photography.

I'll keep this short, but in closing, I'll leave you with a humorous little Photoshopped image I created for a women's photo exhibit a few years ago. This is nothing new, but just something I came across in my files. The theme was 'Misbehaving' and this was my entry, entitled 'Moi?'

Au revoir!

A Lull in the Action

There is not always going to be discernable changes on any given project from day to day, and if I were you, I might assume all progress had halted, or we’d hear bragging about it and see photos, right? I hear tell of projects that can be finished in a day or two, or even a few hours, but those are rarely ever my projects. So just because there is no mention of the last project you thought I was working on, I may have been making such slow progress (undoubtedly due to an absurd level of complication I chose to pursue), that I see no reason in bringing you up to speed. I could place two photos side by side, showing off the work before and after some subtle bit of completion was attained, and challenge you to see if you can spot how these two photos are different… but I won’t. Of course, there’s the flip side. I may have indeed halted a particular project, my A.D.D. getting the best of me, and moved on to something more exciting.

Case in point: I have tabled the hat rack cushions for now, deciding that central Texas garden season is well underway and our pitiful garden entrance is screaming for attention. I have set foot inside the garden a few times, I really have, but not enough to have brought it up to the state it should be this far into the year. One barrier for me right now is the awful menagerie of plastic mesh fencing, and stakes, and bungee cords that obstruct the opening. It’s there for a reason. Our 20-some cats love to ‘help’ in the garden, realizing that freshly tilled garden dirt is far superior to litter box granules! But cat urine is a very bad ingredient in a soil recipe, so we do what we can to discourage them. It doesn’t always work, but our ugly gate/fence/entrance here has cut back somewhat on them getting in. (Hotwire is effective too!) All through the winter, as short as it was for our region, I didn’t need to access the garden as much, so we rigged up this bit of ugliness across the opening. The photo (another embarrassing tattoo?) shows what I’m talking about.

Keep in mind, it was taken during the off-season when nothing but weeds were growing, and I had given up caring, for the most part. But, still... yikes!

So this garden entrance will be my next project, only requiring minimal help from Hubbs with strong arms and my father-in-law with a Bobcat. Mostly, I think I can manage it myself. You’d think I would’ve gotten this entrance done last year at the very start of my Texas gardening experience, but it just got TOO HOT too soon, and I couldn’t bear to spend one more second outside than necessary. It’s hard to imaging how this area looked when it was just a field with cows and horses grazing in it.

So here’s a stroll down memory lane from one year ago. The first step was to disc the ground.

Once again, it was my father-in-law to the rescue. In fact, he helped in so many ways that his name could appear in almost every sentence describing the first couple of months of garden beginnings. So F-I-L did the disc work around the whole corner of this field. We incorporated a light fertilizer and he churned up the soil a couple more times. The soil analysis turned up some surprising good numbers, so we didn't need that many amendments right off the bat.

Then F-I-L erected real fencing around the perimeter of the 50 x 115 foot garden. I helped him for two days straight and it was the most rigorously physical work I had experienced in a long time! I didn’t even do the hardest parts of the work, just assisted as best I could. Thanks to the Bobcat auger, drilling the post holes wasn’t too much of a chore, but everything after that was hard work. We took advantage of an existing fence for one long side of the garden and only needed to add the other three sides to enclose it. We set 26 more fence posts, bracing the ends and corners, and attached some serious 5-foot-high horse fencing. A deer could still bolt over it effortlessly, but maybe not with more of that hotwire extending outward and upwards.

I proceeded to set some reddish concrete pavers vertically to create raised beds. This one was for the future 6’x10’strawberry patch (now plush with healthy plants, flowers and the beginnings of a bountiful harvest!), and was followed by 2 more beds of the same size which became permanent herb beds.

And finally, this last photo shows the meager beginnings of the garden. We had a freakishly late freeze last April which killed the tomatoes and stunted the potatoes (in the foreground) and surprised everyone three whole weeks after the last freeze should have happened.

It’s funny to see such a barren space, and I hardly remember it looking this way, as it soon filled up with cornfields, squash, okra, more tomatoes, more covered hoop rows, beans, peas, Armenian cucumbers, watermelon, cantaloupe... and the list goes on. I learned a whole lot about organic gardening, and while I felt like a failure at times, I discovered a lot of what NOT to do, and what NO one, even expert master gardeners, can do in temperatures constantly over a hundred degrees.

So that catches me up to date and it seems fitting that this year’s improvements start with a proper entryway. I can’t tolerate straddling and tripping over that mess of a blockade to enter the garden anymore! So you’ve seen the ‘before’ shot. I estimate the ‘after’ shot will be unveiled in a couple weeks (or months), but I'll keep you updated all along.

Hubbs and I love Asian architecture and are patterning this project after Japanese Shinto gates. See this example: http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/11244305.jpg

I'm shooting for something similar to my crude drawing here, which could take some twists and turns as it develops. Don’t be too surprised if I add my own ‘flair’ to the design. I'm not striving for anything strictly authentic. But I will head roughly in this direction:

I’ll leave you with one more detail from the Nemo Room, since I haven’t worked on anything Nautilus related in awhile.
I will report in much detail when I get back to working in there, but I thought you might like to see the floor design I painted. There was a nasty crack in the floor that fought wood fillers, and putties, and even defied the Bondo epoxy mixture made especially for wood. So we gave up and decided to camouflage the line by making enough visual texture and detail so the eye just wouldn’t see the crack. Most of the floor is fleck-speckled with little bits of red/black/tan and coated with a super strong shell of a garage floor topcoat, but the main traffic path is now this faux metal grate walkway. It also has several layers of a clear sealant topcoat. (Pardon the plastic sheeting- as cat proofing the fresh work was important.) I felt like I was working rather sloppily with this, but the effect is still decent, and the bolts look somewhat realistic.

Stay tuned for more garden news...