I was in a picture taking mood.

It’s nice to see the bones of the backyard now that most of the plants and weeds are gone. We are letting the chickens free-range the entire backyard, which is working out well.

A better shot of the dead hedge. I love this little project still.

Front door, all decked up for Christmas. We really need to redo the concrete stain. It didn’t bug me that much until we redid the door.

This herb spiral is looking pretty good for December.

This is in the kitchen. We painted it this weekend. It was yellow. I didn’t mind the yellow until I painted over it, and then I realized the yellow really didn’t work. I like this green instead.

We had a bunch of extra branches. So many…

(Horrible picture. I couldn’t find a good picture and didn’t think to take one, so this is a screen shot from a video.)

The pile is gone. Or rather moved. We made a dead hedge out of them.

It has the following function:

• Screen from neighbor
• Future source of firewood
• Place to put yard clippings
• Wildlife habitat
• Used up old branches

It was a fun build and went faster than anticipated. We simply used eight t-posts as a border, and filled it with sticks.

I like how it looks better than, say a white vinyl fence. But it is a bit wild. It does do what we wanted and screen the neighbor’s yard, and it only cost $50 for the t-posts.

We finished the inside of the house. After getting done with the remodel, I tidied up everywhere. And now we’ve turned our sights outside to the garden. My goal right now is to get all the hardscape, edges, and mulch or groundcover in. Plants will come next.

We have a lot of projects out there that have been ignored. This path needed a couple of hours to get installed. It has been like that for about two years. Now it is a path, not random stones.

Here’s another project that didn’t take that long. We had grass here when we moved in. It hadn’t been watered for two years. It looked pretty bad. Now it is a beautiful clean slate, I want to fill it up with plants soon.

The tramp just off this picture was leveled out. I attempted to seed more clover back here this spring, but it failed. The weeds outcompeted it. I’ve done it before successfully, and I will try again next year, this time with a little more work beforehand to get rid of the weeds. And I really want to get rid of that huge pile of sticks!

Here’s a glory shot of one late afternoon’s work. If you notice, I prefer to freeze things and not can. It seems to be much easier and I’m also not worried as much about food poisoning. Shredded zucchini, salsa, tomatoes, refrigerator pickles, and peach jam. Oh, and if you want to make jam, this product makes it super easy.

When I was in college, I did some research on strawberry varieties. I was pretty well informed when I went to buy some. I have two patches of strawberries. One patch I don’t even check, it doesn’t produce. I’m not sure on the variety, I got them from a friend. This is just one day’s pick from the other patch, and my variety that beats all others is Evie 2. It might be harder to find and more expensive but double or more production is worth it!

I had yarrow growing in the front, and it started to get a bit overgrown and scraggly. So I employed one very good tip for perennials: Cut back after flowering. Not all perennials need this but it makes a huge difference for the ones that do. (If you want to know what perennials need what, read The Well-Tended Perennial Garden.)

It’s a simple matter of hacking back the perennial to withing a few inches of the ground. It feels a bit like you are trying to kill the plant. But don’t worry. Within a few weeks, the plant regrows. Instead of a scraggly eyesore, you will have a nicely tended perennial. In addition, it helps prevent the plant from reseeding, if that’s a problem.

 In this picture, the yarrow in the foreground was cut back two weeks ago. The one behind that was cut back minutes before the picture was taken.

Now I also have my lettuce, which I purposely did not cut back, even though it is a common practice to rip it out after it starts bolting. Lettuce will usually re-seed if it is allowed to mature. I quite enjoy free lettuce. 

We have lots of veggies right now. It is fun to have dinners filled with vegetables from my garden again. I haven’t bought any from the store for a few weeks now. Lately, I’ve harvested potatoes, squash, carrots, turnips, rutabaga, tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers, swiss chard, beans, and a single melon.

We completely derailed all our plans on Saturday to clean out the garage. We found all the cabinets at a yard sale that day for a bargain price, and immediately put them to use in our funky garage. I don’t think you can have too much storage in someplace like this!

It was very, very dirty though. The garage has had some flooding issues, which meant that there were buckets of dirt and debris in there. So dirty…but now it’s not!