Heehee. A really big roll of toilet paper. No particular reason, it's just amusing.
Heehee. A really big roll of toilet paper. No particular reason, it's just amusing.
Click on the picture to see an even higher res picture of that smug fellow! Who does he think he's fooling, impersonating a Norwegian?
While gardinning in this area is...challenging, we still enjoy it. It's a nice way to get outdoors, do something mildly active, and spend time together with one's spouse. Here are a collection of pictures of our garden. Once again, click on the pictures to see a higher res version.
We haven't got much space to work with, the soil is glacial clay, and the frost-free growing season is laughably small, but the sunlight hours are long while they last, and the plot of ground we've got to work with gets good light in the summer.
Our little garden is snuggled in beside the garage. The last owners used this as a kid's play area, with only the small fenced off part being cultivated. They needed this kid's area, as most of the yard was reserved for their rather large dog to poop in.
Having no outdoor pooping requirements, we decided to convert the grassy area into something more useful. These two pictures show the planting area next to the garage.
Those pictures, of course, having been taken during those two weeks every year that the grass is actually green in this part of the world.
These next two show a nice little overview of the planted area. I could go into what plant is where, but anyone who actually cares would be able to spot it from the pictures at least as well as I can remember it.
I dig those cinderblocks. I needed to level off the planting area, and this also allows me to conveniently keep the herbs from spreading around the countryside. The concrete block path was added late in the year, after non-stop walking on the grassy path started to wear it down to the bare dirt. I used 12" x 12" x 2" blocks for most of the path, and only put two of the larger plates at the bottom. I prefer to use the smaller stones any time the ground I'm working with isn't flat. In the end I got the blocks reasonably flat, although there is one annoying corner I couldn't make much progress on.
Bye the way, left to their own devices (I probably would!) those cinderblock walls love to fall over from the soil pressure. I took care of this by driving steel bars down between every third or fourth set of bricks. The bars go down about a metre, and make the wall very stable.
Actually, "I pity the fool" who tries to take it out some day. Unless he can get a back-hoe with an extender boom in to knock it our, he'll be working with sledge hammer and wheel-barrel for a couple of weekends. I do have this mania about building solid structures, don't I.
The final two are of the little back planting area. Raspberries love it here, and I'll need to cut these ones back energetically for them to bear well next year. We got a few cups full of yummy fruit from these bushes, and all-in-all they required relatively little effort.
After tearing everything down for the year, I also dug over the area next to the garage, and put walls around it. This is intended as the home for the peas this year, so that the little stinkers don't shade the more useful plants. We may also stick some flowers here, and the pole beans.
The walls are made from a convenient pile of broken paving blocks that our neighbour was looking to get rid of. They were almost the perfect size, and only needed a bit of corner trimming, and a strip of concrete along the bottom to make them fit. I still need to back fill more dirt into the new area, and am wondering what to use.
My appologies for the poor photo quality, but digital cameras don't seem to like low-light conditions.
I highly recommend a bit of theraputic gardenning to everyone out there.
Plants that worked well:
Plants that didn't work well:
Our experiences with the potatoes were so-so, but that's probably an error on our part. They produced nothing bot foliage, which I've since read is likely to be due to too much nitrogen in the soil. Since I'd dug in the contents of the compost bin into that piece of ground 6 months earlier, this is in hindsight not surprising.
Next year we're going to start most things inside so as to make what use we can of the growing season.
I recently spent a few weeks in California on buisness and took a camera along. Here are some of the things I though worthy to suck some photons off of.
First of all, here's some of the interesting wildlife.
The lab I was at was located in a scrub bush area, and these little guys were everywhere. Ever time you walked around a corner a few of them would go scuttling for cover. They're small, but those little legs really motor. The centipede was hiding under a rock. I took a picture because he was larger than the ones I'm used to seeing up here in calgary.
The toad crawled out of a sump tank and started motoring it across the concrete pad. We had to hurry to get this picture of him, which was worth the trouble mostly because he was so gross. The bug was interesting partially because of his size, but also because he had this habit of pointing his backside at anything he felt was threatenning.
That posable Jesus wraps up California in a nutshell. Cheeeeeesy. In case you can't read it, he comes with "Posable Arms and Gliding Action". Gliding action in this case means that he has four little wheels on the bottom (I looked). Looking at the length of his shirt-thingy, I can see why he needs wheels. Loose floor length clothing needs a suspense system to keep it away from your feet or you end up doing a lot of non-beatific stumbling. Hopefully a bunch of fanatical protestant rioters will trash the joint for it's blatant use of iconography.
The skate board was on the wall of a store specializing in electric scooters located on Holywood Boulevard. Note the red remote control throttle. If I had to comute on an electric vehicle, this would be a nice one to try. According to the proprietor, the batteries are good for about 90 minutes. I'm suspicious of that number, but even if one can get 30 mintes out of the thing betweem charges one could skate a long way (assuming reasonable free-wheeling functions).
This vehicle is called a "Jungle Mule" and dates back to the Vietnam war. Forget a lawn tractor. If I ever get an acreage I'm building myself one of these babies out of used Lada parts and a small Honda engine. I was told that there's some sort of a system using which one can colapse the steering column, and control the vehicle from ground level, although I didn't see how this would work.
There's a classy set of wheels. It's limo built on a 89 Civic chassis. Event the front seats and steering wheel looked original.
I am truly the master of fashionable dress, am I not? You have to understand that this is at a test lab near the desert. In the mornings its quite cold, leading to the jacket. Then the sun comes up and it gets very warm quickly, leading pale guys like me to adopt mexican-farm-worker hats and turned up collars. The coveralls are required by the rather messy equipment I'm working with (although if the twits at NTS's Santa Clarita lab had properly functioning equipment nothing would have gotten hosed down in hydraulic fluid). You have to admit that it makes a very slick looking outfit.
Unfortunately I don't tan. Especially that big shiny forhead. My freckles just expand when exposed to sunlight until -POP- I'm black.
The hat itself looks silly enough, but with the coveralls, the jacket, and the sneakers....Damn!
The Munchkin being fed. He doesn't like it.
Go back before it's too late.