Ahh… time is here to start planting stuff 🙂 My favorite time, I think! Gonna be busy as hell at home for a bit – there’s just so much fun stuff to do 🙂
Bought the new grass plugs for the yard – gonna be using Zoysia grass. It doesn’t mind lots of shade, lots of sunlight, high temperatures, low temperatures, dought. It chokes out crabgrass and weeds, and is low maintance. Cost Heabo and I about $90 grand total for all the grass – should be here in two or three weeks I’m guessin’. I’m finally going to have a nice, beautiful GREEN front lawn!
I’ve never been someone who obsessed over what my front lawn looks like – too damned much effort when there’s so much else to be done. But now that the front of the house is almost done painting and detailing wise, and Heabo is starting her new gardens in the front, it’s time for the lawn to shape up. If this stuff performs half as well as all the literature I looked at the other night (I hit a couple of sites to look it up) it should be awsome and I don’t have to do squat to it!
The only downside to it is that it’s SOOO good at chocking out weeds that I have to buy tons of 6″ deep border to keep it from taking over the front and back gardens. Oh well, it’s worth it 🙂
Bought more toys last night – a nice set of lights to work on the backyard or house with. Dual halogen lamps on a stand, so I am no longer limited to when the sun is up 🙂 May seem like a simple thing, but, it’s already proved it’s usefullness. After we got back from the store, I managed to finish the last little bit of gutter painting, so the front of the house only has a couple of touch up areas left to do and it’s complete. Yet another of Heabo and I’s projects done 🙂 (In the process I got some of our dusty rust red paint in my moustache. Don’t ask.)
And tonight Sears should call – my new baby cultivator / rototiller should be in. Should make keeping the veggie garden in shape much easier this year. I’m not LAZY, but, I’ve got so much to do that spending hours every week with a hoe in the garden never seems to work out. This is small enough to fit between the rows easily, so keeping the garden in shape should take about 15 minutes a week if I’m right. It was a somewhat expensive toy ($200) but I think we’ll get alot of use out of it.
And on tonights agenda, I’ll start mixing concrete and pooring the front path. I don’t think Heabo will be helping much on this one – it’s pretty much a one man job after it’s started. Which probably means she’ll go plant the new roses 🙂
Did I mention I love this time of year? 😉 Getting the garden started is always a wonderful thing. Something full of hope and promise. Unluckly every year towards fall the reality sets in – the effort that went into planting it isn’t followed up with enough effort to maintain it properly. I always get at least SOME stuff harvested out of the garden, but never quite as much as I’d like to. This year I hope to finally have the big breakover point where I finally get the stupid garden under control 🙂 (One other problem with it has been that the garden is in an area that’s been grass and weed filled for so long that it’s hard to kill off all the grass. I’ve been planting in the same area for three(?) years now, so it should finally be ‘trained’ to be a garden now. I’ll have alot less grass problems – now I only have JUST the weeds to contend with, which are actually easier to kill off than grass most of the time!)
One strike against the garden this year – I started my seedlings too late. Heabo and I started them last week. Here in KS, they should have been planted almost a month ago. My plan is that I’ll go ahead and plant them late, and have a late harvest, but I’ll cheat and buy a couple of plants from Dillons or where ever and plant them first to get a good spread of harvest times. If all the seedlings we started take, then we’ve got 144 various seedlings to contend with in 8 to 14 weeks. Eeks! I’ve never really had much problems with getting the seedlings to start, it’s the transplant process to kills ’em. But, I’ve found two new tricks to help that out, and Heabo looked up more information on the tomatoe plants and Dad provided me with similar info. I think I’ll have it down pat this year.
And if that’s that case, um… Hey Darlene, if you want to come visit about August, we’ll load your car up with fresh tomatoes and peppers. 144 plants is ALOT of peppers and tomatoes to contend with! We’ve got roma and beafstake tomatoes. Then we have cayenne, hungarian wax, jalapano, sweet bannana, and four other varieties of peppers. That’s not including the various things I’m planting in the garden without doing as seedlings first – like corn (that’s probably my most successful crop, but, I had problems with smut fungus on them last year. Need to do some research on how to cure that problem.)
If this year’s garden succeeds worth a damned, I’m really gonna have to start canning stuff 🙂 (Which would mean yet another family tradition gets carried on to a new generation 😉
I’m definitly long winded today. Must be lack of sleep. I’m a person who has a very dangerious combination of attributes – I’m naturally long winded about stuff, and I’m a fast typist. It’s dangerous ’cause I can type a LOT of stuff without realizing how much I’m babbling 😉
Heabo and I worked on Gremlin Panic! last night – until about 2 AM. I showed her some of the tools I have been playing with, the most important being Poser. Poser is like having an anatomically correct Barbie (or Ken) doll on screen that you can modify any way that you want. When I started playing with Poser, I created a Gremlin character for the game, but, I lacked ANY clothes for her to wear. Remember I said the models were anatomically correct? Well, that pretty much means I’m NOT going to ship using the work I had done so far 😉 Heabo figured out some almost perfect hair for her, and then we started talking about clothing, the big thing I lacked. I don’t have the $2500(!) tools nessisary to create the clothing, etc. nessisary. So we did the obvious thing that happens when clothes are nessiary and a female is involed…
We went clothes shopping.
You have no idea how disturbed I was when I realized that I just spent $15 online for a new tunic for creature that doesn’t even exist. And it didn’t even fit ‘perfectly’ when whe first tried it. We spent a couple of hours tweaking things out, trying to get a set of really cool usable ideas for the main character for Gremlin Panic! It was actually really fun working together with her – I normally spend hours alone hacking on things like that. Have to do more of this in the future.
(Note – this was actually entered over the span of 4 hours. I started the entry early, then would type a little in it, and go back to working on something else, come back, etc. I type fast, but sometimes I just don’t have much extra available time 😉
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visit darn 2002-03-15 06:21 pm UTC (from 216.17.193.57) (link) Select |
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welll ..I will be there….or send you bucks to come deliver them yourself….. I am so jealous!!! there is 5 inches of snow outside my window all over my plot of dirt!!! but at least it is not all ice anymore…….mud and snow instead.. on second thought I want to see this house…with all its improvements……..is that august or later??/hmmm |
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Re: visit 2002-03-15 08:41 pm UTC (from 65.30.22.76) (link) Select |
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Drop in on us anytime ya want – just call ahead so I know to block my travel schedule if possible 🙂 By August, we should have a LOT of our projects complete, and the new grass should be fairly well grown in, etc. The new front and side paths should be poured, the front garden should have grown in a bit, the should should be MOSTLY painted (right now only the front is done 🙂 and who knows WHAT else will be done by then. I think this will be a very productive year for Heabo and I when it comes to getting things done on the house! |