Me and My JUNK!

 Still waiting for a working oven. Funny how everything I want to eat needs an oven! I am staying busy in the meantime.

The weather is glorious and I have spent many hours outside with my gardens. HeWho builds has been occuppied with another deck. It is just an extensin of the very small front porch that leads you into my tiny abode. The one that sufficed for I don't know how many years was okay, but when trying to enter, it was tight. We now have an 8X12' "porch with rails like a deck. The back side looks straight down into the ravine.

I left him doing the build while I was cleaning out the vegetable garden. Maybe I should have done more supervising, since he chose to leave the post of the previous porch about a third of the way to the end of the new porch proudly standing in place. I expressed my thoughts about it quite gently and suggested it would be better if he had cut it off BEFORE he put the decking down. He says he didn't "notice" it until I pointed it out. I found that funny since he had cut the decking board to go around it. 

Later that day he said he figured out what to do with that post that would not involve redoing the decking. He said we should drill a hole in it and put up an unbrella to keep the sun away. One was ordered, along with a simple set of outdoor chairs and a bench. He has been putting the chairs together and taking them apart to correct things and was busy when the unbrella arrived.

This is when I proved his idea to be unrealistic. In his mind (truly a scary place) he would simply drill a hole about 10" or so and put the unbrella in said hole. His wife held the umbrella and showed him that the diameter of the proposed hole would have to be sunstantial and that this hole would impair the integrity of the post, being onlt a 4X4 and the hole would need to be at least an inch and 3/4 in diameter and that unless the hole was the entire 5' length of the post, the umbrella would be like 12' tall sticky up and out of it. A gust of wind would be the end of it. I did not get a cheap umbrella. It has a tilt and solar lights and I would be so upset should it be gone with the wind!

He agreed and I left it at that, since I had stuff to do. Prior to the foundation of the deck began (oops, front porch) I had carefully sliced the sod up and put it in bare spots of the front yard. It took hold quite well and I will have a nice full yard next season, but there was more to dig up as I planned to plant the outskirts of the deck and grass isn't part of that plan. I finished that task, took a break and painted some flowers and hummingbirds on the cement wall that is holding the embankment at bay.

Keeping the hieght of the deck in mind, I decided to plant Hollyhock there so I will have something to tie it to when it begins to shoot upwards to the sky. The one plant I had this year was gorgeous and was supported by a fence. It had what seemed like thousands of beautiful pink blooms and was easily 9' tall. Since then I discovered three more smaller plants in some of the oddest places and I have ordered some blue seeds to add to the gardens. The plants were growing in the rocky driveway where I park my car! Volunteer plants are the best, because they are resilient. I planted two of them and potted one for my niece, Whitney, the mother of the twin babies. She will need some spots of happy in her devasted yard. Helene took down a lot of trees in her yard.

In anticipation of deck railing and the need for it, I found some used cedar ones that had been removed by someone in favor of wire. I was happy to take them off her hands for a mere pittance. HeWho was loading them was not nearly as happy as his wife. Grumbling about my tendancy to gather "junk". That junk is now proudly serving as a barrier between the porch and diving into the ravine.

You may recall all those sawmill ends I also got for cheap and built my raised beds out of. The unused pieces have been languishing next to woods near my She Shed. The bark is coming off now in huge chunks. HeWho wanted to put it all in the burn barrel. His wife pitched a fit and prevented that from happening ......

For the past 3 days I have been busy hauling chunks of bark down from the upper portion of our property in my wagon. I dump it out on the ground and take my shovel and using the end I chop it up into BARK MULCH! After I finished planting shrubs and plants, then bulbs, I had enough to mulch the entire area. "Make fun of my "junk" now!" I said to HeWho was cursing the two seater bench that he had just tightened the legs on .... backwards.

I am now slurping up some soup and gathering my paints to get back to my mural. Bees, I think it needs bees and more flowers. Mabe some clouds and some grasses at the bottom. Caterpillars and frogs and turtles, too!