Ew. My mom read the last post and sent me these current photos from her yard.
Showing posts with label garden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label garden. Show all posts
Spider season
Last night I dreamed I wrestled with one of these, a banana spider. They're usually out in June, making babies and living in 20-foot webs attached to your porch to 
catch the flying bugs attracted to the light. Which makes them even more fearsome to live with because you have to duck under them to bring in the groceries. I'm sure mailmen hate them. They aren't included in the average Florida tourist brochure, for sure.
From http://www.davidmichaelkennedy.com/
Living in the lawn are 2" fuzzy gray wolf spiders,
which I think are fairly national, and also on the palmettos there are spiders which look like tiny turtles with lots of legs, which sit in the middle of their nets. They are kinda cute. Inside the house are tiny pindot spiders, sitting in the caulk space of tubs and sinks, waiting for wet gnats? My mom has bulbous tan spiders which look like ticks when full, living on her patio.
The point is, it feels like insects and arachnids are taking over everywhere you go, but it's just the humid jungle bug season. You can't do much about them and they always come back. I haven't actually seen any bananas at my house this year, which is super. Ugh. And neither of those are MY hands.
catch the flying bugs attracted to the light. Which makes them even more fearsome to live with because you have to duck under them to bring in the groceries. I'm sure mailmen hate them. They aren't included in the average Florida tourist brochure, for sure.From http://www.davidmichaelkennedy.com/
Living in the lawn are 2" fuzzy gray wolf spiders,
which I think are fairly national, and also on the palmettos there are spiders which look like tiny turtles with lots of legs, which sit in the middle of their nets. They are kinda cute. Inside the house are tiny pindot spiders, sitting in the caulk space of tubs and sinks, waiting for wet gnats? My mom has bulbous tan spiders which look like ticks when full, living on her patio.The point is, it feels like insects and arachnids are taking over everywhere you go, but it's just the humid jungle bug season. You can't do much about them and they always come back. I haven't actually seen any bananas at my house this year, which is super. Ugh. And neither of those are MY hands.
Outdoor photos
While I haven't been doing much to the house, the plants I planted in February are growing along. This year I decided to have more plants more adapted to my feast/famine climate and (who knew?) have needed less water as a result.
Since I didn't buy new dirt again this year for the vegetable garden frame, the plants doing the best are in pots on the deck. There are at least $10 worth in ripening native blueberries and 10 tomato plants in big plastic pots. Corn and zucchini are struggling along in the infill sand/clay mix in the side yard.
The twin house next door is in pre-foreclosure. It seems the silly asking price resulted from the owners taking a $55,000 home equity loan several years back, to redo something at their current house across the river. Adding that loan to its main mortgage of $124000 gave it a hefty price way more than any sane person would pay. One woman driving by saw the price written on the For-Sale-By-Owner sign and asked us if there was a swimming pool made of gold in the backyard. After 1 and 1/2 years on the market, it was listed by a realtor briefly in January, for $155,000.
The lawn hadn't been cut in months and after several calls to Jacksonville city services, an independent contractor (teens working for their dad) charged up a $500 lien, for 10 minutes with a riding lawnmower. They also mowed over the Sale sign since it was buried in weeds.
Updates!
Since I don't post often enough, here are some updates. I've been doing little stuff but not much worth writing about. Little stuff like finally tightening a screw on a door hinge.
The heat pump was finally fixed in December. It was all of $85 for a replacement, warrantied fan. The fizzing sound I heard in the attic when I accidentally cut through the thermostat wire? Just the air handler fuse blowing. It cost $60 to replace. It just wasn't the $$ circuit board I lay awake worrying how to pay for. And they added 2 lbs of freon to the condenser. It's a "Coleman" brand pump, just like our camping tent. I had no idea they had a branch of home heating and cooling units until our cheapo flipper installed it here.
Speaking of our flipper-installed unit, we went to the local home and patio show a few weeks ago where we were willingly solicited by several AC companies. A guy came over last Saturday to give us a replacement quote. He was from the company whose booth representatives laughed at us. I told them 1. Our house is 80 years old. 2. Our house is not insulated because 3. the crawlspace floods 3-4 times a year (old creek bed) and is a happy place for mildew. When I said the heat pump was a Coleman, he said, eyebrows raised, "Do you live in a trailer?" (what, an 80 year old trailer??) When we walked away, fully aware of how dysfunctional we must be for having an old house, I heard "whooooeeee!" and lots of laughing. Their field guy was much nicer though, and commented on how clean and accessible the attic was, and told me he's seen far worse in old houses. He left me with a roll of aluminum tape and a $4800 system quote.
Outside of the ongoing deck construction, I've been working on the plant situation. I think flowers are great, but in this small yard there really needs to be lots of practicality. I made a border of sweet banana peppers between rows of dusty miller and hibiscus, and planted sage, dill and rosemary around some small plumbago. In the side yard is lots of parsley, some cilantro, dianthus and that herb which is supposed to be a good substitute for sugar and whose name I can't remember. I seeded basil around the plumbago but the rain has been pretty heavy the last 3 weeks so I need to redo it. I think we've had our last frost, though.
We've tried our third go at exterior paint colors. The colors are either too light, too dark, or seem too much like colors in the neighborhood to our north, where only the brave can live. The trick seems to be finding historical colors that won't cause a run-down drab look. Also, the stores which carry small sizes of trial colors are only open til noon on Saturdays. How can we get the swatches, take them home and view them in all lights, then go back for trial bottles then go back to buy the paint? Everytime I think "It will take 3 Saturdays just to choose the house colors!", I decide to do something else like pruning, instead. This weekend I hope to build and replace a fragile fence portion the renters keep knocking through, and then finish the deck framing.
Dusty miller and baby hibiscus. So unglamorous.
We don't know what to do about mulch because it
keeps floating away!
The heat pump was finally fixed in December. It was all of $85 for a replacement, warrantied fan. The fizzing sound I heard in the attic when I accidentally cut through the thermostat wire? Just the air handler fuse blowing. It cost $60 to replace. It just wasn't the $$ circuit board I lay awake worrying how to pay for. And they added 2 lbs of freon to the condenser. It's a "Coleman" brand pump, just like our camping tent. I had no idea they had a branch of home heating and cooling units until our cheapo flipper installed it here.
Speaking of our flipper-installed unit, we went to the local home and patio show a few weeks ago where we were willingly solicited by several AC companies. A guy came over last Saturday to give us a replacement quote. He was from the company whose booth representatives laughed at us. I told them 1. Our house is 80 years old. 2. Our house is not insulated because 3. the crawlspace floods 3-4 times a year (old creek bed) and is a happy place for mildew. When I said the heat pump was a Coleman, he said, eyebrows raised, "Do you live in a trailer?" (what, an 80 year old trailer??) When we walked away, fully aware of how dysfunctional we must be for having an old house, I heard "whooooeeee!" and lots of laughing. Their field guy was much nicer though, and commented on how clean and accessible the attic was, and told me he's seen far worse in old houses. He left me with a roll of aluminum tape and a $4800 system quote.
Outside of the ongoing deck construction, I've been working on the plant situation. I think flowers are great, but in this small yard there really needs to be lots of practicality. I made a border of sweet banana peppers between rows of dusty miller and hibiscus, and planted sage, dill and rosemary around some small plumbago. In the side yard is lots of parsley, some cilantro, dianthus and that herb which is supposed to be a good substitute for sugar and whose name I can't remember. I seeded basil around the plumbago but the rain has been pretty heavy the last 3 weeks so I need to redo it. I think we've had our last frost, though.
We've tried our third go at exterior paint colors. The colors are either too light, too dark, or seem too much like colors in the neighborhood to our north, where only the brave can live. The trick seems to be finding historical colors that won't cause a run-down drab look. Also, the stores which carry small sizes of trial colors are only open til noon on Saturdays. How can we get the swatches, take them home and view them in all lights, then go back for trial bottles then go back to buy the paint? Everytime I think "It will take 3 Saturdays just to choose the house colors!", I decide to do something else like pruning, instead. This weekend I hope to build and replace a fragile fence portion the renters keep knocking through, and then finish the deck framing.
Dusty miller and baby hibiscus. So unglamorous.
We don't know what to do about mulch because it
keeps floating away!
Landscaping help
We went to a kind-of local nursery (across the river and south, Jacksonville proper is 2hrs in diameter) looking for zucchini and tomatoes, since it's time for our second planting season. I asked the man at the counter how much they charged for lanscape design. He said Mr. Trad draws them for free, you just have to buy all your plants there, and can use their installation service or do it myself over time. We are meeting at the end of the month. I figure it will be cheaper to have a plan than to plant things willy-nilly, right, Jason? I know I like formal plantings, but I think the house likes cottagey-plants. The lot is 50 x 100 with an incomplete city sidewalk, narrow original driveway and 4 fully grown fat trees threatening to eat power lines/fall on neighbor during hurricane Shoot Me Now. Our main needs include:
A barrier bed to keep adult walkers on the sidewalk and kids running to the park from cutting across our front walkway (if you're within spitting distance of my couch you are too close!)
A hedge to block out the neighbor's motion sensor driveway light
Plants which won't mind being flooded twice a year or only five hours of sunlight a day
Suggestions for pavement/shed placement (Me=clueless!)
Meanwhile, in the backyard, our spreading butternut squash vine has killed lots of grass but is popping them out like a bunny, and there are 15 broccoli babies from last year's seeds.
A barrier bed to keep adult walkers on the sidewalk and kids running to the park from cutting across our front walkway (if you're within spitting distance of my couch you are too close!)
A hedge to block out the neighbor's motion sensor driveway light
Plants which won't mind being flooded twice a year or only five hours of sunlight a day
Suggestions for pavement/shed placement (Me=clueless!)
Meanwhile, in the backyard, our spreading butternut squash vine has killed lots of grass but is popping them out like a bunny, and there are 15 broccoli babies from last year's seeds.
Of plants and sinks
There hasn't been much going on at Ralph's House in the last 2-3 months, except for great new back steps and hooks I installed in the laundry room. Not nearly the progress that would be if money and health were normal. Especially money. It's better to be sick when there is enough money to buy basics, let alone get me a lovely new router table with 3hp motor and shaker cabinet door/45 degree joining bits.
So we'll focus on free things for a while. This is the butterfly garden I planted a few months back; now it's nice and overgrown. It has purple Swedish ivy, sweet potato vine, yellow moss roses, a leggy plant with striated leaves and tiny white flowers which the bees love, irises and random marigolds. It
hasn't attracted any butterflies, but it has attracted bees, lots of them, where there were few before. Subsequently, we've had lots of tomatoes and bell peppers this winter, 3x more than in the regular growing season. Last week I made tomato sauce with a pound. I think I'll keep this plot around. It makes the vegetable plots and compost look more attractive.
Parsley loves mushroom compost.
The NY Botanical Garden grounds are free on Wednesdays. They say they have 90563 vascular plant specimens. When I went up last week to move my sister to Florida, we visited. How do you make these things in miniature for a tiny corner-yard?
The bus from LaGuardia passes Demolition Depot, so we got off and looked. $$$.
Since dreams are also free, this is my dream kitchen sink! I want to acquire one before starting the kitchen cabinets. Here in the south, it's harder to find the salvage you see in the north and midwest. Here, new construction is far more popular and old building salvage gets put in the trash; when you do find stuff like sinks, stoves, doors, it's silly overpriced or in very bad condition, usually from rots, rust and other water damage. As in many towns, lots of early 1900's stuff was torn out in the 60's and 70's, from cabinets and plumbing (my house) to entire Henry Klutho buildings. Currently, Florida is besieged by developers razing swamp ecosystems, farmland and trailer parks, and the Jacksonville City Council seems pretty susceptible to their needs in the name of slick progress, similarly to what happened here in the 60's. Without the internet and vigilant citizens' groups, much of the historical buildings that give downtown Jacksonville its character might have been razed in the name of building a glossy new downtown. I think true progress and revitalization in a city involves embracing history, rather than just building 10 new highrise riverfront condo structures to bring in the winter tourists.
Anyway, in looking for this sink on ebay, as I've been doing for 7 months now, all listings have been in Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Michigan and the like. I kick myself every time I see a listing in upstate New York, where we used to live. If only I'd been psychic!
So we'll focus on free things for a while. This is the butterfly garden I planted a few months back; now it's nice and overgrown. It has purple Swedish ivy, sweet potato vine, yellow moss roses, a leggy plant with striated leaves and tiny white flowers which the bees love, irises and random marigolds. It
hasn't attracted any butterflies, but it has attracted bees, lots of them, where there were few before. Subsequently, we've had lots of tomatoes and bell peppers this winter, 3x more than in the regular growing season. Last week I made tomato sauce with a pound. I think I'll keep this plot around. It makes the vegetable plots and compost look more attractive.Parsley loves mushroom compost.
The NY Botanical Garden grounds are free on Wednesdays. They say they have 90563 vascular plant specimens. When I went up last week to move my sister to Florida, we visited. How do you make these things in miniature for a tiny corner-yard?
The bus from LaGuardia passes Demolition Depot, so we got off and looked. $$$.
Since dreams are also free, this is my dream kitchen sink! I want to acquire one before starting the kitchen cabinets. Here in the south, it's harder to find the salvage you see in the north and midwest. Here, new construction is far more popular and old building salvage gets put in the trash; when you do find stuff like sinks, stoves, doors, it's silly overpriced or in very bad condition, usually from rots, rust and other water damage. As in many towns, lots of early 1900's stuff was torn out in the 60's and 70's, from cabinets and plumbing (my house) to entire Henry Klutho buildings. Currently, Florida is besieged by developers razing swamp ecosystems, farmland and trailer parks, and the Jacksonville City Council seems pretty susceptible to their needs in the name of slick progress, similarly to what happened here in the 60's. Without the internet and vigilant citizens' groups, much of the historical buildings that give downtown Jacksonville its character might have been razed in the name of building a glossy new downtown. I think true progress and revitalization in a city involves embracing history, rather than just building 10 new highrise riverfront condo structures to bring in the winter tourists.
Anyway, in looking for this sink on ebay, as I've been doing for 7 months now, all listings have been in Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Michigan and the like. I kick myself every time I see a listing in upstate New York, where we used to live. If only I'd been psychic!
Shiny floors, gardening
Last week the office/sewing area was cleaned out. Miraculously, it still looks pretty clean, despite sewing projects and moving furniture to continue painting that lovely pub green on the walls. J's color choice. This week the shed area (dining room) was cleaned up, as well as the thicket out front.
It's nice to see our shiny floors. I'd say there is no storage space in these old houses, but the apartment we just moved from, built in 1915, had 3.5 closets the size of our current bathroom. We're not really messy people, but our only box-worthy storage space is the attic, average humid temp of 103, and the closet with the attic door.
There was a tree under the vines! And I'm elated that the trash collectors picked up all that extra tree in one visit. We're only allowed as much rubbish as will fit in a pickup truck bed. And everyone 'round here should know how much stuff you can cram in a pickup bed. Are we talking Nissan? Dodge? Half-cab?
It seemed that much of the ungroomed tree was old suckers, which I didn't cut away because then we'd have no tree.
Then I planted 4 broccoli, onions, 6 pinto beans and 4 zucchini. I'm worried that it might not be cool enough for broccoli yet; spinach doesn't grow well down here because of the warm temperatures, in containers or otherwise. I bricked in the compost pile because dog-walkers could see rotting melons and tomatoes from the street, mmm, and continued with the shredded cypress mulch. I've heard it's better than eucalyptus chips; its shredded state doesn't harm plant stalks and eucalyptus somehow retards growth, which you'd want for your weeds but not for the useful plants. Plus, it's cheap (I'd get the free stuff but where do we have space to dump a pile of mulch?). Most landscaping companies around here use cypress. I gave up on the aluminum flashing edging, it wouldn't stay straight, and bought black plastic edging instead. In the butterfly garden (the grave-shaped plot closest to the fence where the bags are) will be strawflower, some sort of bushy shrub with red stems and white flowers that bees like, and sweet potato vine, amongst other plants as soon as I can make up my mind. Someday it will all come together. I'm just making it up as I go. More and more, I'm thinking, why not get a professional consultation? Or at least try a rental tiller.
It's nice to see our shiny floors. I'd say there is no storage space in these old houses, but the apartment we just moved from, built in 1915, had 3.5 closets the size of our current bathroom. We're not really messy people, but our only box-worthy storage space is the attic, average humid temp of 103, and the closet with the attic door.
There was a tree under the vines! And I'm elated that the trash collectors picked up all that extra tree in one visit. We're only allowed as much rubbish as will fit in a pickup truck bed. And everyone 'round here should know how much stuff you can cram in a pickup bed. Are we talking Nissan? Dodge? Half-cab?
It seemed that much of the ungroomed tree was old suckers, which I didn't cut away because then we'd have no tree.
Then I planted 4 broccoli, onions, 6 pinto beans and 4 zucchini. I'm worried that it might not be cool enough for broccoli yet; spinach doesn't grow well down here because of the warm temperatures, in containers or otherwise. I bricked in the compost pile because dog-walkers could see rotting melons and tomatoes from the street, mmm, and continued with the shredded cypress mulch. I've heard it's better than eucalyptus chips; its shredded state doesn't harm plant stalks and eucalyptus somehow retards growth, which you'd want for your weeds but not for the useful plants. Plus, it's cheap (I'd get the free stuff but where do we have space to dump a pile of mulch?). Most landscaping companies around here use cypress. I gave up on the aluminum flashing edging, it wouldn't stay straight, and bought black plastic edging instead. In the butterfly garden (the grave-shaped plot closest to the fence where the bags are) will be strawflower, some sort of bushy shrub with red stems and white flowers that bees like, and sweet potato vine, amongst other plants as soon as I can make up my mind. Someday it will all come together. I'm just making it up as I go. More and more, I'm thinking, why not get a professional consultation? Or at least try a rental tiller.
Follow the cypress-mulch path
Our Paint program does helpful house things.
We're deciding paint colors and whether we want to change the porch shape. We think there used to be arches because houses in the neighborhood with the same layout and brick issues, like the house next door, have two arches on the front of their porches and a side entrance. The front view of their arches are formed with the butt-end of the bricks, and the space from the porch corner to the bottom outside edge of the brick-end arch is exactly the front width of our columns, if that makes any sense. Our porch may also have had a side entrance.
One thing I can't figure out is why our house is at least a foot higher from the ground than its brothers and sisters. Yes, and why we have yard where everybody else has a little room next to the back door! Maybe they ran out of brick. It would have been a kick-ass place to keep the cat box.
I built a compost bin and dug a path to it yesterday. Anywhere we put the bin it would be easily smelled by neighbors so it's by the house.
We're filling the path with $1.70 concrete slabs from Lowe's, embedded in shredded mulch. This seems more removeable and less messy than chipped rock, and simpler than continuing our brick path. Although, we seem to be having a boric-acid-proof carpenter ant problem... guess they'd live under brick too, though. Florida is the perfect climate for those guys. The vegetable bed's getting elevated and duplicated on the side by the camera.
The end of the yellow brick road (it's actually a peachy terracotta)
We're deciding paint colors and whether we want to change the porch shape. We think there used to be arches because houses in the neighborhood with the same layout and brick issues, like the house next door, have two arches on the front of their porches and a side entrance. The front view of their arches are formed with the butt-end of the bricks, and the space from the porch corner to the bottom outside edge of the brick-end arch is exactly the front width of our columns, if that makes any sense. Our porch may also have had a side entrance.
One thing I can't figure out is why our house is at least a foot higher from the ground than its brothers and sisters. Yes, and why we have yard where everybody else has a little room next to the back door! Maybe they ran out of brick. It would have been a kick-ass place to keep the cat box.
I built a compost bin and dug a path to it yesterday. Anywhere we put the bin it would be easily smelled by neighbors so it's by the house.
We're filling the path with $1.70 concrete slabs from Lowe's, embedded in shredded mulch. This seems more removeable and less messy than chipped rock, and simpler than continuing our brick path. Although, we seem to be having a boric-acid-proof carpenter ant problem... guess they'd live under brick too, though. Florida is the perfect climate for those guys. The vegetable bed's getting elevated and duplicated on the side by the camera.
The end of the yellow brick road (it's actually a peachy terracotta)
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