Backyard Hugelkultur Redux

Sarah has developed a new Hugelkultur initiative in the backyard. (I previously wrote about backyard Hugelkultur way back in June 2008.) What, you ask, is Hugelkultur?  Think of it as very slow composting. Hugelkulture is the practice of composting large woody material to create a raised garden bed. It is a way of dealing with [...]

Secret winter fairy house

Activity for an MLK day holiday afternoon (no service component here…). Materials mostly gathered on walk to park: sticks milkweed (or something) fluff seeds berries acorns one round box Tools: saw, hot glue gun. And here is the finished product, so far, the house of two fairy children and their pet mouse Rollo (made from [...]

*Cedar Rapids,* Eliot Coleman, and the Midwestern greenhouse dream

[image: http://www.urbanfarmonline.com/urban-gardening/backyard-gardening/small-scale-greenhouse.aspx] We watched the El Helms movie Cedar Rapids: Ed Helms is Tim Lippe, a modest, upstanding, nerdy small-town Iowa insurance salesman who is sent to a conference in the glittering fleshpots of Cedar Rapids, IA, which functions (often wittily) in the movie as a very tame/toned-down version of Las Vegas in The Hangover.  [...]

I Built 1% of this Wall

I spent last week reading, among other things, George Eliot on the sanctity of skilled manual labor (Adam Bede) while Sarah constructed a stone wall in our front yard.  It was pretty funny.  In the evenings we’d both be saying “Whoo!  Long day!  I’m tired!” but I was tired from sitting in the library/cafe turning [...]

Willy Streeter Community Garden

Sarah took the plunge and joined in on a community garden plot.  Or rather, 4 plots, I believe, as part of a team of five people.  Here she is planting some onions. It’s great — the Willy Streeter Community Garden, a former pig-farm (apparently) a little more than a half mile from our house, very [...]

Snow (day) candles

Our school district closes school at the drop of a hat… or a snowflake.  Last week we had a “rain day.”  To be fair, the predictions were for serious snow, but it was just rain that sometimes got a bit flake-y, with zero accumulation.  Now we actually do have a few inches, so natch, no [...]

Valentines

Today’s project was making valentines for school (classmates and teachers).  I gave them a big pep talk about how much better homemade ones are — they seemed to buy it. Target was predictably disappointing.  There’s a whole section of the store now dedicated to Valentine’s Day stuff, but no colored construction paper to be found [...]

How to Make a Fruit-fly Trap

Take a glass and put some fruit-fly bait in the bottom.  A piece of tomato or banana works well. Cover the top with saran wrap and poke some decent-sized small holes in the top [just realized my holes have been too big -- they should be tiny, made with a pencil tip or some such].  [...]

Free Boxwoods/ New England Mental Institution Look

We dug up the boxwood bushes in front of the house.  Waiting to see if we get any takers.  Sarah commented that the house no longer has that “New England mental institution, Brick n’ Boxwoods look.”

Drain Pipe Ditches

When we came home after over a month away we found a very damp basement.  No actual puddles or leaks but a kind of miasmic moldy atmosphere and, we discovered, some actual mold in some cabinets. We went out and bought a new energy-efficient dehumidifier (we had one that looks like it dated from the [...]