Firewood rack

This was one of the last minute DIY projects in the Fall of 2011. It got bundled up in tarp right away and seems to be holding up very well.

The firewood is off the ground, leaving no room for those damn rodents, and all those leftover pieces of lumber that the resident packrat has been holding is also put to good use. I am a happy camper.

Getting ready for winter

The past couple of weeks we got our garden ready for winter and all the weeds. Our yard has been riddled with weeds of all kinds. Slowly we have been trying to eliminate them (most importantly without the use of any chemicals).

Every year we have been covering unused areas with weed fabric or newsprint and a few inches of wood chips. (Read about our experience with Oak mulch here).

 Some of the woodchips we put down in 2008 have already started to decompose really well and are turning into organic matter. I now see weeds growing in them. I am not quite sure how I should deal with this. Add more woodchips on top maybe? or should I first remove the decomposed matter and them add new chips?

In areas (where I intend to plant this summer) I have not put down any weed fabric. Just a nice thick layer of woodchips.

Now that this big task is done...I can rest easy knowing that weeds wont take over my wonderland.

A new herb garden bed

It has been a while since new posts were updated in a timely fashion. The summer of 2011 has been pretty hard on us. Many a times we forgot to take pictures, and in the off chance that we did, the picture never got downloaded from the camera for many months.

Here is one such update about our new "herb bed". (Read the Prologue to this story here). We added a nice seating area and some finish trim to the herb planter bed.

Go Green !

Spotted at the local USPS post office

Love and support the idea, loved the caricatures and the expression. Just wondering if these will be used. Are people going to start writing letters now?

The well

We picked up these lovely green tinged, even sized pieces of concrete for our recycled retaining wall project (read here and here)
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But then we went overboard or guesstimated badly and ended up with a lot more concrete pieces than what we would need.

There is no dearth for ideas, and off we went....building our well. A dry well like structure around our Magnolia tree. I had always envisioned a small seating area around the tree, probably made of wood. But concrete would work too.

And the full picture

And the birds eye view of the new well and the retaining wall

Concrete retaining wall

Completed pictures of our second concrete retaining wall....the bigger and better one.

It took a person one whole day to fill it up with a mixture of soil and compost.

We still need to hook up irrigation i.e the soaker hoses. The white T that you see is the water pipe that we put in

All that is left is to pressure wash it one time to bring out that lovely green color the old concrete was stained in.

The next recycled concrete retaining wall

In the fall of 2010 we envisioned a project to use recycled concrete to shore up the back fence that had a grade difference with our neighbors. This is where we started off (read here).

You can see the difference in grade in this picture

We completed that wall in the spring of 2011, and used up pretty much all the concrete we had hauled from almost 25 miles away from home in multiple trips.Filling it up took a lot of soil and compost, and needless to say time. (read here)

This is how it looks now

Ever since, we have been scouring Craig's list for any listings that had at least some decent looking concrete pieces. It turned out to be either too far, or ones broken up pretty badly.

Just a couple of days back during my drive to work I spotted a demo crew down our street tearing up an old house that was sold recently. I figured the driveways were going to be taken apart as well. We spoke to the guy doing the demo, quickly rented a pick up truck form the U-Haul down the road and bagged these beauties. This batch is much nicer than the ones we picked up the first time around. Bigger beefier pieces that have been broken into even pieces and they are also stained a light tint of green.

Our reliable "garden help" helped haul it in during the week and has been working on getting the wall up over the last couple of days.

Looks like I might get rid of all the soil (piled up behind the concrete pieces here) and compost piles I have had sitting around for this project.

Black Gold

Over the last 3 years that we have lived in this place, we have added almost 70+ cubic yards of compost into the predominantly clayey soil (I would rather call it debris).

A big chunk of it went to the backyard when we closed the pool and started our raised vegetable planter beds.

 Our bulk compost supplier has been Mountain View garden center. We have had them deliver a full truckload of compost on more than one occasion. We recently ordered a truckload (about 10 cubic yards) to add to our planter beds for this growing season and also to mix into the massive concrete retaining wall that we finished and the herb planter bed that we are building right now.

One of the nice things about living in an eco-friendly place like the bay area is the composting program that many cities offer. Ours is no different and therefore when we do not have a big project going on, we pick up free compost from the Sunnyvale SMaRT station for our regular needs.

Now that we are close to a steady state situation, we have been contemplating setting up our own composter at home, and maybe even a worm bin!!!! Vermicomposting would be all left to Guru!

Our home composting enclosure is all set to go. Hopefully we will finish installing it this weekend.

I put in the exclamation because my approach to gardening has a sense of dichotomy. While on the one hand I love digging around in the garden, tending to my plants, pulling out weeds for stress relaxation, on the other I have an unfounded, unbiased distaste for all things slimy. Though it may be justified for those slugs and snails, unfortunately my hate does not differentiate our best garden friend, the earthworm. Yes, I have to accept that I am a worm hater :( I wish there was a class to overcome this.

We have always segregated our degradable trash from the kitchen. Our local Costco in northern California has been carrying compostable trash bags for a while now. Even my parents in India have begun using these Biobags and add it to their compost pit that is in the yard.

I usually have my BioBag set up on my kitchen counter lining a plastic bowl. The biggest flip side is the fact that it attracts fruit flies very easily. On a recent trip to Marshalls I found a steel pail composter that was big enough to hold a decent amount of kitchen scraps, had a lid, looked nice and cost me only $14. The lid was perforated to allow the trash to breathe and not start decaying at the same time, the lid was fitted with a carbon filter to take out the bad odors. And the Biobag ensures easy cleanup and disposal (considering our diet is all vegetarian and we fill up our container in about 2-3 days).

Good find eh !......retail therapy rocks

More use for broken concrete

We had some small pieces of concrete that was left over from our retaining wall project.

We have now put them to use....

They help keep the wood chips away from the base of our fruit trees and also lend a rustic appeal

Making the Luffa Gourds usable

Read about my attempt to grow the Luffa gourd in my 2010 garden...here

Here is what I harvested from my plants in the fall of 2010.

These are some of the nicer looking gourds

And the not so nice ones with some dry moldy discoloration

Now that the heat is picking up, I am off to clean these up with a dilute solution of bleach and water and set them out to dry in the sun.

Retaining wall...an update

This is how it all began.

After 6+ months of working on it (on and off) thanks to the wet weather and focusing our other love (skiing) we finally managed to get one of the walls up.

We managed to find some additional pieces of old concrete that were stained red. These were put in as the top most layer.

All the layers (except the top most) are just dry stacked, and some 0.25 inch rebar's added in the top layer

The retaining wall is behemoth and took a lot of soil+compost to fill it up. Now that it is ready to go, I am wondering what to plant......Asiatic Lilies is what I am thinking. Add to that some more fragrant flowers and that area will be a great place to sit down and relax.

This is how the other wall is looking at this point. We need a lot more concrete pieces for sure and now we will have to figure out how to get them home. The trailer damaged the chassis of our car and has to go. It is up for sale.....sitting in the driveway waiting for a buyer.

Backyard retaining wall

I have gone off the blog radar for a while...thought I'd peep in with some progress reports.

The work to build one of the two retaining walls in the backyard is under way. The retaining wall is to hide the difference in grade between our neighbours fence and ours.

This is the smaller of the two walls, on the smaller section of the back fence. 

It is a tough job....each of those concrete pieces weigh a ton ! 

More on the progress coming up soon...

Recycled Concrete Stepping Stones

We picked up a ton of concrete pieces that someone was giving away for free a few months back. (Read my earlier post here). It was with the idea of building a retaining wall to compensate for the change in grade and the stop the neighbour's dog from digging under the fence !

The progress on building the dry stacked hasn't taken off, it needs a lot of investment in time and money that we are not ready to do any time soon. Plus we needed some walkways in the garden.

Over the last couple of months we have been creating walkways and paths in our front and back garden with the recycled concrete pieces, and here is how we laid them out

In the front lawn

In the flower area in the front

And in the backyard