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 [...]

*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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]