Little Delving
Beyond Here There Be Dragons
June Already???
Jun 01, 2009 07:03 AM Filed in:
Day To Day
Happy
June 1st, Campers! 
Wow,
the year is spinning by fast these days.Things here have been going
pretty good though so I can’t complain! Been a busy spring so
far, but now I’m home and settled in for the summer I think.
Nothing ahead for me except a LOT of yard work. Major yard projects
going on, well, that and getting my new front porch built, but
that’s one for the contractor. I’m doing all the
landscaping myself though and it will be plenty to keep me busy, no
worries there. My neighbor Lois asked me the other day if I would
ever get it all done, and I told her to ask me again in October.
LOL! Yep, looking forward to autumn already and having all of the
big stuff behind me.
So far this spring I’ve put in an 87 foot long drainage ditch and berme across a third of my front yard. When we get the real gully washer rain storms, I was getting a small wall of water racing across my front yard, enough to totally wipe out any landscaping I might ever dare put in there. So now we have a nice long ditch to catch that run off and channel it to the side of the yard where there’s an existing drainage ditch to take it on to the creek bed in back of the house. And my side of the ditch is a berme maybe a foot or so high which I will eventually have covered with wild strawberry and some ajuga. I think it’s going to look pretty good when I’m done, but so far nobody’s seeing that potential but me, LOL!
Part
of this project will also be burying the old gravel driveway that
cut across that part of the front yard. I managed to scrape up a
large portion of the gravel to use in the new ditch, and
what’s left over now I’ll cover with a nice thick weed
barrier and then mulch over for now. Eventually that will all tie
into the existing front yard space, be covered in top soil, and
planted as a flower garden. This front garden space will wind
around the new front porch and tie into the side gravel parking
area between the house and garage.
And
this weekend I planted seven trees. That felt great! I put in a red
delicious apple, a golden delicious apple, a moonglow pear, a
summer crisp pear, two autumn blaze maples and a hoopsie blue
spruce,
the
bluest of the blue spruces. LOL! Sorry, an old inside joke from my
Seattle days. Most of the planting action happened on the southwest
end of the house where we get good sun all day long, but one of the
maples is out at the opposite end of the yard and the other maple
is right in front of the house. I think that one will look really
nice in a couple of years and hopefully eventually grow large
enough to almost reach the front porch, but we’ll see! Even
if it doesn’t I’m expecting some wonderful fall colors
from it.
The
last big project is building a grape arbor structure similar to
this one. It’s going to have six big posts just like this and
be maybe fifteen feet long and about six feet wide. It will take a
long time to get the grapes going on it, but in the meantime I
think it will add just the right bit of something at that southwest
end of the yard. I’m planning to put it at the end of the old
gravel driveway so I can basically leave the ground as is and just
cover it with weed barrier and mulch. The grapes I may not get
around to planting this summer, but when I do I’ll plant them
in nice roomy and well treated holes near each post. So in another
couple of years I may just have to open a roadside fruit stand.
Apples, pears, grapes....oh, and I forgot to mention the pumpkins.
I’ve got a nice long strip of ground between my driveway and
my neighbor’s. I’m not real big on having well
manicured grassy lawns, so I’m thinking of tilling up that
strip and planting it in pumpkins and maybe some cantaloupe. I
think that would add nicely to this whole “working the
land” endeavor.
So that’s about it here at Little Delving. We’re taking our name literally these days and doing lots
of
digging all over the place. I say we because Josie & Finn
manage to be in the middle of it all. D’oh! They are all for
digging those big holes and have a fun time jumping in and out of
them. But the next day when I fill the holes up with something they
look pretty confused. LOL! It’s pretty funny. If you’d
like to see some more pictures just check out the
Pot Luck Gallery.
That one changes with the times, but right now it’s all about
the projects. I can see a whole summer ahead of hijinks in the
yard. Life is good!
Cheers, JB
So far this spring I’ve put in an 87 foot long drainage ditch and berme across a third of my front yard. When we get the real gully washer rain storms, I was getting a small wall of water racing across my front yard, enough to totally wipe out any landscaping I might ever dare put in there. So now we have a nice long ditch to catch that run off and channel it to the side of the yard where there’s an existing drainage ditch to take it on to the creek bed in back of the house. And my side of the ditch is a berme maybe a foot or so high which I will eventually have covered with wild strawberry and some ajuga. I think it’s going to look pretty good when I’m done, but so far nobody’s seeing that potential but me, LOL!
So that’s about it here at Little Delving. We’re taking our name literally these days and doing lots
Cheers, JB