SO much respect for landscapers!

This is where we started: dirt mounded up from re-pouring the sidewalk, dead grass, rocks all over the yard..and the random nail here and there left over from roofing and siding projects.
Pretty much a mess!

Cleared the river rock from around the house, laid my landscaping fabric, and trenched in the stones for a nice border.

Added wood mulch inside the rock border, raked up the dead grass, rocks, and junk with a steel rake, and smoothed everything out.
This picture shows the before (foreground) and after. Now the yard is a nice clean slate - hopefully the grass seed I threw down yesterday will start taking off over the next couple weeks!

So..I got myself into another project. I read about a method of organic fertilizing called compost tea - it's all of the benefits of spreading a layer of compost, but it's liquefied so it reaches the roots faster.
I bought a fish tank bubbler to aerate the water so helpful bacteria would grow during the "brewing" process. 

Ideally, you'd use a rain barrel, but I don't have one - I just used City water from the hose and let the bubbler work at it for a while.
Compost tea in practice at Haaaavaad Yaaaad ;)

Make a giant tea bag filled with compost and suspend it from the lid of the can into the bubbling water. Add molasses to feed the bacteria, and a little organic fish fertilizer if you can get it. All in all, it's a great shot of nitrogen to the soil, it helps the root system of the grass reach deeper and increases the lawns drought resistance. And it's organic - even if it doesn't work exactly like it's supposed to, there's nothing in it that's going to hurt anything. Pretty cool process!
Compost Tea

Hodge-podge

This is one of those ‘catch-all’ blogs I do that pertain to everything and nothing all at once.

The first part of that is me being a creeper and taking random pictures of random people’s property J I went on a little farm visit late last week for work – I had to take pictures of the houses and outbuildings on the property to satisfy my underwriters, and ended up deciding I might like to be a farmer if I could be a farmer on this particular farm.

Maybe I'm just too big a city-boy, but I don't know many of you who have cool little 100-year-old water towers in your yard. Or playhouses.. these are cool grandparents :)

This spring has really gotten to me for some reason. It’s unseasonably warm, everything is in bloom, the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing just enough to mess your hair and it’s amazing. Something about this old farm – and Iowa in general – just struck me as being the coolest place in the world at that particular moment. It has been in operation by the same family for over a hundred years and it has just the right amount of character that comes from 50 layers of paint and thousands of feet shuffling across the front porch. Luckily, the owner was happy to show it off J

I didn't know what this bush was? Fire engine red blooms. Like I said, this spring is getting to me.

Back on my homestead..

The baseboard project has gone really well! I have designated myself as the outside corner master. Inside corners..not so much, but we’ve decided “That’s why God made wood putty.” When it’s all painted and sanded, it looks really great..just like it’s been there forever J Pictures to come!

After a long Saturday of crawling around on the floor with the baseboard project, I decided to walk up the block to the brewery to take in the music. I hadn’t shown you the brewery yet, so I snapped a picture. Good beer, good music, no manual labor. It was a great night!

The Brewery in all its live music glory.

Dad and I worked most of the morning yesterday leveling out the backyard and making the back of the neighboring apartment building’s garage look less like a bomb had gone off near it. The latter of which turned into kind of a neighborhood effort: we raked the brush and pulled some old wood out away from the building, the neighbors came by to help haul stuff away, and a friend brought by some hosta splits from her garden. I watered them in last night and again this morning..we’ll see how they do!

My backyard was less a neighborhood effort, and more sweat on Dad and my part. Since my concrete man laid my driveway and the footings/slab for the garage, we’ve had these piles of dirt/gravel lying around. He offered to level everything out for us, but we borrowed our neighbors tiller and got after it. It looks much nicer than before, and it should be ready for homegrown produce whenever I am. …which could be a while, but it’s a nice thought.

Today, I’m back to work, but Dad has the day off and decided to build a prototype cabinet for the kitchen. We’ve got the materials and many of the tools..now if we could prove our measurements are correct we’ll be off and running!

It looks like a cabinet, right? Actually, shortly after I took this, Dad put its feet on and it looked much more convincing. We'll work on drawer slides soon and after a few more boxes come together we'll cut out a face frame..and it will be glorious.

More cabinets tonight, I imagine..and more pictures to follow!