I thought I would just post that we've been busy. Right now we are tearing apart the mudroom and turning it into the washroom /(slash)/ nice entry way to the house. I only have 2×6's in the ceiling area, and I would like to put in some fancy recessed lighting… It's hard to find a good compact recessed lighting can. I came across these however: http://creelighting.com/LR6.htm

I am thinking about do it. They use so little energy! Speaking of energy, you have got to try this:

YUMMMMM!

Welp, I'm hitting the sack. 

Tags: led, lighting, mud, rececssed, room

First we get the Lilacs in white and purple. The fragrance is amazing! You get nice wiffs of it through the house on the warmer days. After the Lilac flowers are beginning to die back the Plum Tree’s white blossoms show. They don’t last too long. After the Plum blossoms, this yellow rose booms out of the yard and down the rock wall. The flowers don’t have a real fragrance to them, but they are just beautiful in the early morning and especially in the evening. The kind of glow out of the green back drop. About 2 months after these roses pass, we’ll be sharing our plums with everyone. What a great cycle!

P.S. This yellow climbing rose is either a Garden Sun, Golden Showers, or a Royal Gold according to Sunset’s Western Gardener.

Tags: buds, climbing, rose, yellow

Click on image for a very large image.

Tags: blue, columbine, flower, pastel

We have a lot of Iris’ around our place. This past fall we disturbed the majority of them in order to get some flowers to show. The majority of Iris’ we have are the perennial Bearded Iris (Iris Germanica). Iris are a rhizome, so cutting the roots is OK, and actually enchorage to a certain extent. The best time to divide them is in August or so around Northern California. Iris’ prefer a slightly acidic soil with a pH around 7. If you have heavy rainfall in your area, make sure your bed drains well, as Iris do prefer a more well draining soil. If you don’t have very good soil, get some good organic potting soil or amendment, double dig an area and lay the rhizome on top. They don’t need to be covered much, if at all. Actually, they won’t grow any flowers, only green leaves, if they are too deep in the ground.

In an old house we lived in a few years back, there were some old Iris’ that never bloomed while we were there, the year before we left I took a shovel and dug all around them, then gave them some BioSol. Bam! We had flowers in June. Below are a couple pictures from our Iris’ that are blooming now.

Tags: acidic, bearded, germanica, iris, well drained

It’s the second week in April now and we have just began to amend and layout the garden. This year we began with a little help from a friend, and gained about 120sq-ft for the squash and cukes that took over a quarter of the garden last year. We had planned to go about 5 times that, but haven’t taken the plunge, and instead have fenced in the berries in a little section outside of the main gardening area for the time being. I want to go huge, wife wants to think about it. Is that how it is?

Here is a panorama of our current layout with 2 outbuildings in the background. No I don’t have identical twins as wives. That is my 1 wife in both pictures, she’s just quicker than our cat Turbo (no really, his name is Tomas, but he’s really fast! Really!).

We know that there will be more freezes to come, but we think that getting the hardier root crops and leafy greens in the ground now will be a good choice. When the last freeze happens and summer really hits, then we’ll know for sure. The day after we seeded the beds, we got about 1/8″ of snow/frozen sleet. The area to the right that is not tilled is the area that we are going to put in the vine crops such as squash and cucumbers, oh, and some gourds to make shakers out of for those who love shaking.

Our friend Tyler was telling us about “no till” planting, so we are going to try that and see if the weeds stay down better than in the tilled area. I bet they will, but it’s hard to plant lettuce unless it’s tilled. Any suggestions? Anyhow, we are going to dig small holes and fork around the holes a bit before we put the vine starts in. In the middle of the screen you can see a large fence. That is where the peas will climb. The old fence posts are cemented into the ground fairly deep, so we left them for this season.

Next garden update, I’ll show what our garden looked like last year on paper, then how we rotated the crops this year to help the soil stay well balanced nutrient wise. We also attended a talk on the benefits of mycorrhizae in the soil. Man, that stuffs incredible. We have added some Dr. Earth Fertilizer to the area, Organic of course, to add more mycorrhizae to our well drained decomposed granite (DG) that we keep amending. In a few years, the garden will have beautiful, dark soil.