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].  Use [...]

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 1980s).  [...]

Seed Sharing Gone Bad

From our local paper today (not sure what accounts for the several-week delay on this news being reported; perhaps there was an attempted hush-up):
A spring party intended to be an opportunity for friends to exchange seeds landed one woman in the hospital after she ate some of the seeds.
Monroe County Sheriff’s deputies were called at [...]

Recycling the World of Interiors

Sarah was coveting Matt and Miranda’s subscription to The World of Interiors.  This is a high-end, expensive (at least $100 for the year’s subscription) British design/decoration/architecture magazine.  The photography is beautiful and they somehow seem to avoid the typical design-porn cliches — it’s not just a sequence of rich person after rich person’s predictable homes.
Some [...]

New Wall Project

Sarah is working on a major project — rebuilding the wall adjoining our front driveway. It looked very picturesque, covered with ivy, but sagging & bulging all over.  When we pulled the ivy off we realized that it was in mid-collapse.  This is a classic D.I.Y./ My Wife Does it Herself project in that I [...]

Hugelkultur!

We are practicing Hugelkultur — we are hugerkulturists. Our garden is hugelkultural. Actually I don’t know much about it, it’s Sarah’s doing. Hugelkultur is a kind of ‘permaculture’ (‘agro-ecological design theory’) that is basically all about using wood as compost. So, as I quipped, someday our descendents will enjoy rich, [...]

Cleaning gutters

We cleaned our gutters for the first time ever. We never did it in the house we lived in from 2001-2007, and I’m a bit unclear on whether there was some reason we didn’t have to. We’ve been here for almost a year, since June, and had never done it here either. [...]