Thursday, May 29, 2014

The Never-ending Chore Begins: Yard Work

Our project list for spring and summer is mostly yard work.  And not fun, creative, bang-for-your-buck projects, either.  The goal is to get it to a good starting point for the future, in which we'll mostly just let the forest be the forest, but where we have existing planting beds we want to keep we'll work on adding native, xeroscapic, deer-resistant plants.

It has started with about eight Tara-hours of raking pine needles off the driveway and out some of the planting beds and a tiny bit of the rest of the yard; I guess that's what you get when you skip a year.  I'll keep you posted on how that goes.

Plus one of the wild strawberries that grow in the yard.

Piles and piles of pine needles.

Next, trying to reclaim the vegetable garden after one-and-a-half years of neglect.  Eric is in charge of that project and he has mowed and tilled the space and started picking up starts from one of the local farmers markets.


Yup. A couple of little mountain fruit trees.

Tomatoes, peppers, other stuffs.

I took charge of removing the last owners' lath "trellis" on the south-west side of the house and replaced it with my own trellis-in-quotes: "re-mesh" wire grids.  They should continue rusting and be hardly noticeable.

BEFORE: Of course, once I decided to put down the rake and go at the lath "trellis" I didn't think to stop and get a photo. AND of course, I assumed that there would be one in all the photos of the snow or dogs or what have you.  This is the only one I found; it's from our first few weeks here. You can see them in the back ground, but you can't quite see how slipshod they looked.


Small, subtle, and sturdy-enough.  Also attached with cup hooks, so easy to remove when it comes time to re-stain the house - something they didn't do with all of the lath.  Sigh.  


Next up:
1. More raking
2. Tree guy taking down a couple of dead trees
3. Giant drop box delivered to get rid of trash left by last owners (pft!)
4. More vegetable starts
5. Taking metal and cardboard for recycling in Missoula or Hamilton



2 comments:

  1. Thanks for the update! Can't wait to see all the pretty veggies harvested this summer and fall. Always a treat to see your hard work pay off. I would like to grow veggies on the property again, I just can't seem to find the energy and ambition to do it.
    I found some wild strawberries on the East side of my property. They had the tiniest berries, almost the size of currants. I'd never seen them that small. I always seem to forget how early they ripen each year.

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  2. Eric is in charge of the veggies. So far he's bought several on non-GMO starts that are sitting in our greenhouse waiting for the threat of frost to be gone; probably another couple of weeks. I've found lots of little wild strawberry plants around this year, but they still have flowers. Everything is later here; the lilacs are just opening!

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