An August Saturday

It has been a refreshing day - one in which I have procrastinated - most successfully - at most everything that I should have been doing. But I can't help it. The sun is shining. The locusts are singing. The trees are whispering. And we bought a new bench!

Let me tell you about the bench. It all started this spring when we went to Rick's Garden Center. I was hankering for a replacement bench for our rotting, but once lovely, beauty which sits on the front porch. It was no longer safe and I missed sitting on it waiting for whatever needed to be waited for. We found a nice one at Rick's, and it was on sale, but we weren't ready to buy a bench quite yet. We had to anguish about it for awhile longer. Today we went bench shopping again and returned to Rick's.

There was our bench - only now it was on CLEARANCE! Hoot hoot hoot! I had earned some Rick's Bonus Bucks by emptying out the bank account on so many spring flowers and I was hoping to use it on something we would not normally buy. We don't normally buy benches, so this seemed like a legitimate use for the Bonus Bucks. With the $24 off for the Bonus Bucks plus the low clearance price, the cost for our bench came down to $88.00 (plus an inordinate amount for Ceasar's tax, of course.) We preened and clucked all the way home. Who says that "he who hesitates is lost."

End of story. I like happy endings, don't you?

The "Great Wall" Project from the North

This photo pictures the Great Wall looking south. This is also taken before the last 2 layers of stone were positioned. We are so blessed to live in this house and to have this beautiful piece of property to work with.

The "Great Wall" Project

For the past 5 years, approximately, Bernie has been working on his piles - his rock piles. In order to avert more erosion into the ravine, we have had tons and tons of concrete pieces hauled and dumped into our backyard. It has been a great solution to the erosion, and also provided needed materials to make an enormous retaining wall. The only cost was Bernie's commitment to intensive hours of backbreaking sweat labor, and the cost of hauling in the cement waste. The end product? A fabulous 10' tall and 50' long undulating retaining wall. It truly looks like something made by the W.P.A. in the 1930s and it is beautiful.
Tonight he finished the last of the rock laying.
This picture shows the wall just before he laid in the final tile line and the 2 last layers of rock. Now all we have to do is transfer topsoil to the area so that we can plant shrubs and perennial grasses along the lawn-side edge of the rocks.

Excited About Compost! Who Woulda Thunk It!

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
(Walt Whitman)
The compost pile needed revamping. I've been nagging Bernie off and on for several years about establishing a verifiable compost pile - which is not just an untidy ash heap! I would toss egg shells onto my valuable pile only to chase after them as they rolled down the hill into the ravine.
Tonight, while brainstorming about where we would store the leftover sand from The Great Wall project, we decided to put it in the spot where I'd been tossing potato peelings and other great compost makings. We would then move the compost collection a little further to the side so that we would have all of our soil making supplies in one area.
We came up with a creative solution to make the compost framework, which for some mysterious reason had eluded us until this magical moment. Bernie spotted 2 great stones in the ravine and rolled them up to the yard (a labor intensive operation). The stone pictured on the right is the most perfect headstone ever! It is rounded on top, weighs a ton and stands as upright as a soldier on duty, just waiting to guard the next deposit of vegetable scrapings. We made a "backsplash" from 4 old fence posts that were currently purposeless.
After manhandling these pieces into place, we stood back and proudly admired our new serious compost heap. It looks like a grave - which it is - a grave for unused vegetable parts which will be recycled into gorgeous fruits, flowers or plants. But it also looks very "Mother Earth"y or like something that would be at the Living History Farms. We're very pleased.

My Husband the Amateur Arborist

We've been doing a lot of yard work this year. After cutting down an oak which was dying, Bernie was able to use the same tree men with their boom truck to reach 50' into the top of another of our oak trees. This tree had been struck by lightning a number of years ago and is in fragile condition. For several years Bernie has been planning how he can brace the branches of this tree by chaining them together. It took him a long time to do his calculations, gather the materials and then accomplish the long awaited task! The tree men would not do the work because of liability issues, so Bernie did it himself. He is in the gray sweatshirt leaning over the edge of the basket. At this point he is putting the nuts onto the bolt which has been drilled through the entire huge branch. He ended up with a tri-brace chain situation that was totally amazing to the tree guys and to myself as I watched him accomplish this task. He had to brace three branches with the drilling and bolting process. I was terrified as I watched him leaning so far over the basket while so far off the ground. But I also know how careful he is. We both had a sense of tremendous satisfaction after it was over.