Our New Old House

The trees in my back yard are surrounded by a lot of really random brush. One of them sort of looked like it might be a lilac bush that had grown beyond being productive. Sure enough, this spring my suspicion was confirmed and way up high there are a few lilac blossoms. I’m going to trim this bush all the way down this fall and hopefully train it back into being a nice looking lilac for next year.

[tags]yardwork, photos, lilac, bushes[/tags]

Went to the Des Moines Farmer’s Market and brought back lots of delicious food! Not all of it is locally grown. Our growing season just started. But it’s all very fresh and from pretty nearby, so that’s good.

Here’s Zoot contemplating stealing a tomatillo.

[tags]farmers market, des moines, vegetables, roma tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatillos, onions, eggs, asparagus, carrots, bell peppers, cats[/tags]

With some awesome spring weather these past couple of weeks, I’ve been taking the opportunity to do some much needed work on the outside of Our New Old House. One task I have to accomplish is to remove the broken old gutters and rotten fascia boards so we can hire someone to put on shiny new gutters for us.

Well, many of you have seen exterior pictures of our house and have probably noted, as have I, that the gutters look like they’re ready to fall off the house with a strong breeze. Unfortunately for me, that’s just not the case. Looks can be deceiving, and after forty five minutes of probably looking as dumb as the Keystone Cops, I called my buddy Matt, who works for a company that does metal fabrication and stuff. He talked me down from my frustrated haze, convinced me that it was not a good idea to take power saws up a ladder, and reassured me that I probably don’t weigh as much as a foot of snow. Matt’s cool like that. In the course of our discussion, he came up with the idea that I may need to cut the nails that are holding the gutters onto the house. “Brilliant!” I announced in true Jib-Jab fashion. However, there’s a little tube surrounding each nail and I can’t get to the nail with a hack saw without removing it.

That’s when Matt told me that those are called ferrules and that an interesting thing about ferrules is that in prisons when they have things like sewer tunnels going out of the building, they put bars across them and put ferrules around the bars so that when you try to saw through the bars, the ferrules just spin and you can’t get the saw to grip.

Matt’s full of awesome information like that.

So I had to get these ferrules off before I could saw through the nails.

Here’s me braving my fear of ladders. (Ok, I’m not actually scared of ladders, I’m just not very comfortable on them. Don’t mock me. )

I found a screw driver worked pretty well to loosen the ferrules and pop them off.

Then I was able to saw through the nails with a hack saw.

I pushed the gutter off the nails with a prybar. Didn’t take pictures from that point on because I was just too darn pooped. But I will tell you it made an awesome crash when it hit the ground!

And here’s one more picture of me being awesome on the ladder:

[tags]gutters, photos[/tags]

How’s that for a family friendly title?

Spring is in full swing around here and I’ve got the photos to prove it!

I don’t have much time for gardening this summer, so in the places where there have been unsightly weeds growing, I just dug up the ground and sprinkled a bunch of random wildflower seeds. We moved into this house at the end of summer last year so we never got to see what kinds of things would come up in the springtime. Not really knowing what would come up, or if they even would, I’ve been gratified to find that there are actually some sprouts coming up! It’s nice to know that my touch does not automatically mean death to all plants, just indoor ones. (I can’t seem to keep houseplants alive!)

I’m trying to remember just what I planted where, so if you notice my identification of certain sprouts is off, please don’t mock me too harshly.

These two flower pots were left behind by the previous owner. They were growing some pretty serious weeds when we moved in last fall, so I just cleaned them out and planted marigolds and alyssum.

Some ferns came up in one of the front flower beds, and I like ferns, so I let them stay. They seem pretty happy there.

Anybody know what this tall, shooty thing growing in my back yard is? It’s probably a weed, but it just looked so different from all the other weeds that I thought it might be something important.

There’s a good chance that some of that undergrowth is poison ivy.  I haven’t been itching from walking through there yet, but lots of people in this neighborhood have mentioned having poison ivy sprouting up in their yards.  My mom got a horrible outbreak last year when she was clearing some dead grape vines and there was some poison ivy intertwined with them.

I’m blogging like a crazy person this week, so check back often for more photos!

[tags] yardwork, photos, weeds, ferns, marigold, flower pots, wild flowers, poison ivy[/tags]

Too much? It’s ok, you can tell me if I’m being too graphic.

First off, I’ve got a shot of what will soon be my very own vegetable garden! Well, ok, it’s not all mine. My friend Lars is a gardener who grows much of the food he and his wife eat through the year. He was telling me about all the veggies he wants to crowd into his back yard this year and I thought, hey I’m not using my back yard right now! He can grow some in mine! So he and Christa came over and while Lars and I dug up the ground out back, Christa cooked us an amazing dinner of vegetarian shepherd’s pie and roasted asparagus.

More pictures coming soon!
[tags]vegetables, vegetable garden, gardening, photos, yardwork[/tags]