"What's Up?" /Ohhhh, not mulch"

If you don't mind, I think I'm going to be done with the outdoor projects in 2011 (with the exception of the garden, lawn mowing, and plotting what plants I might wanna throw down.)

Yup. I gave myself a deadline this weekend to get the rest of the outdoor frass finished. Last weekend I made my 4 trips to the Home Depot to collect the last of the 100 or so bags of cedar mulch (they had a sale) so that's down. The rain barrel had been sitting by the side of the house looking forlorn so THAT needed installed. The paver block to line the walk way wasn't going to install itself so I had to get THAT in the ground. (To be fair, it would've been done two weekends ago. Except since I couldn't seem to figure out how to remove the correct amount of dirt, so it ended up being a lawn-chunk by lawn-chunk process.)


And did I mention it was f#ck all hot out? Yeah. As I stood in the shower rinsing the black dirt off and picking wood fragments out of the corner of my eye, I wondered why I was there and not with my friends frolicking in the river. As my co-worker exclaimed: "Were you high? You should have gone to the river". Good answer.

I'll let the pics speak for themselves. If anyone knows of any good ground scrubby kind of the "come-back" kind of plants, or knows something about landscaping to make it look pretty...well I wouldn't be adverse to the assistance. In case you're curious, this was all done this weekend.("Before" pics can be found in the archives here and here.)

Now isn't that inviting? Clean? Doesn't that make you just wanna grill? Take that, creeping Charlie. Pictured: Toil. And for the uninformed, the Mazda can fit 12 bags of mulch. 16 if I'm not worried about visibility.

A row O' hostas is begging to be planted here, don't you think? This part of the house gets d#ck for sunlight.

This will, I'm hoping, keep the rain from getting in the basement. The nice thing about chunking out all of that soil is there was plenty of dirt for assistance with grading. I admit, I got panicky and I've been stalling the install as it were since part of it required my cutting away a portion of the downspout. During this phase, I discovered that stucco siding is really good at exfoliating the skin from your knuckles.

More soil for grading. I found some moisture in the wine cellar and the only time I've ever taken in water is when a downpour knocked off the drain spout last year. I'm reminded of my home-inspector years ago, when he advised keeping the soil high here on the South side of the house to keep the basement dry. Good advice, that. A good idea to follow it occasionally, Michael. (Incidentally. The dirt was sitting in a light plastic "garden" barrow. Overnight. And then it rained. Do you know what's heavy? Mud.)

Transplants, courtesy of the Mel's via Moda. That's all I have right now. I'm taking more. Anyone? Backyard is clean and mulch-y, but pretty nekkid.

Re-painted the picnic bench. Go on. Imagine eating some steaming weinies...baked beans...that crappy yellow potato salad and some lemonade. Ugh. I just threw up in my mouth. (*Note, by "painting" I mean I dumped the paint on it and pushed it around with a brush until it was even-looking. This was the final project of the day, and the heat/humidity had me a little addled)

Table courtesy of A and D. I scraped it, then re-painted with this nice textured spray. Doesn't this help you envision polite discourse over mojito's?

This was a completely unnecessary project on my part. I don't know. My herb pots used to live on the picnic table so I had this idea that I could build a small "herb table" to live next to the garden. I had some superfluous lumber and some really, really weak building skills. After a few hours with the cutting, the drilling, the cussing, the new fixes I discovered while building...we have a reeeeeally ghetto herb bench.

Hot banana pepper. I picked up some new (sturdier) tomato cages but I'm still a little chafed that my garden feels like it's taking forever to grow. (Coupled with the fact that Moda and Cap't Dawn's bounty already looks edible) This is what I get for expanding the dumb thing. See why this year? This year? Is the last time I expand the stupid thing.

Flaky and slow. Just like me! We ended up finding two scapes that escaped our notice. (See what I did there?) It made for a delicious and pungent egg scramble mixed with some goat cheese. Slurp.