New Trees, Dirty Fingernails

Listening to Factory...I love that song "Gone".

There is a guy in our neighborhood who organizes our yearly tree planting program. Something like 400 trees have been planted in our 'hood over the last 12 years. Pretty amazing. This year we joined up and got two Burr Oak trees (are young trees called saplings?) for only 40 bucks. He dropped them off a couple of days ago and today I planted them. I had never planted trees before but the guy left detailed instructions and it wasn't too bad. It took me about 2 hours to plant both trees and a Pride Of Barbados plant.

Here are the trees. They will grow to be about 20 feet if I do not kill them.

We decided to get the trees because during the 9 months of Texas summer we boil in the house from the evil merciless sunshine that beats down from the west starting midday and not letting up until 9pm. The trees will give us the shade we crave in 10 to 15 years.

Here is one of the holes I dug and here is a picture of the compost and mulch I used. It's from Texas.




















Texas Native mulch and compost!








Here is a picture of our cat Burton Cummings. He sat and watched. He never helps and is a camera hog.



Here is a picture of my lawn flamingos, and a picture of my lawn gnome. Will I ever stop liking these things?



















Hole as deep as the root ball and twice as wide. Compost 1/3, dirt 2/3's. Here are the trees all planted and mulched. And here, too, is the Pride Of Barbados plant. These things get really pretty orange and yellow flowers in the dreadful 103 degree summers. Gotta wait a year which is fine with me.





















I need a manicure. Maybe someday I will learn to wear gloves and take off my rings when I do this kind of stuff.
We are punk rock martha stewart !

The Day Dan Made A Box Of Dirt

Listening to The Dogs from Detroit. They rock!

Dan is the vegetable gardener here at the Casa Concordia. We have been growing tomatoes each year since we moved in to the house but this spring Dan decided it was time to plant a real vegetable garden behind the cottage apartment. And we started composting. Things did pretty well and we were looking forward to home grown organic corn, tomatoes, carrots, beets, green peppers and cantaloupe. We also have a fig tree behind the cottage. I don't like figs at all but I was impressed with the hundreds of tiny green figs that were emerging. I do like squirrels. In fact I love squirrels. If I was an animal I would want to be a squirrel. Squirrels love vegetable gardens. They really loved ours and they loved all those figs, too. It was so hot, dry and dreadful this summer that the squirrels were starving and eating anything that had a little moisture in them like geraniums and succulents in hanging pots on the front porch as well as corn, tomatoes, carrots, etc. We didn't get a lot from the vegetable garden but the squirrels did and I guess we did our part in helping them survive the hottest summer since the invention of the wheel. Now that it's cooled off and rained the squirrels are not so stressed out and Dan will now try his hand at a winter veggie garden.















We have a really ugly backyard and don't want more yard maintenance (the front yard is plenty for us), so we figured we would use the backyard for veggies. See the box of dirt above that Dan made? It is our first raised vegetable planter! We figured a raised bed would be hella easy to make and we wouldn't have to do all that rototilling and digging in the nasty hard rocky alkaline soil. Dan layed landscape fabric down on the ground (to stop weeds) and made the planter out of four pre-sized 12 inch x 8 foot boards. Very clever, Dan. No cutting, less labor! This is always good! He then took a 2x4 and cut it into 1 ft chunks to brace the planter in the corners. So there you have it: a very sturdy and lovely 64 sq ft planter. It took him about 20 minutes to make this thing!

What about the soil, you may ask. If you have ever tried to plant anything in Austin you have found that the natural soil in these parts is pretty nasty and rocky and needs lots of amending with pH corrective stuff. We decided to detour this little problem with our new raised bed planter. To fill it Dan made 5 trips to the Home Depot garden shop (you may have noticed we shop there a lot because it's about half a mile from our house...no other reason) and brought home a total of 72 bags of Texas Friendly Top Soil and Texas Friendly Manure. Here is a picture of Dan in the midst of moving all those bags from the car to the backyard. He is my he-man!
In addition he added all that rich, delicious, home made compost that has been churning away in containers in the backyard for the last few months. So, our recipe for the planter soil is pretty simple and easy - except for all that lifting and horrifying back pain!
















The icing on the cake: Plants! Dan planted veggies that are good for Fall/Winter in Central Texas: Lettuce, carrots, beets and broccoli. He planted everything from seeds except for the broccoli. We shall see what happens.
Stay tuned.....

We are punk rock martha stewart

Desk Overhaul: Stencils!

I have not been a huge fan of stenciling. My dear mom was decorating her house in a country cottage style (appropriate because she lived in a country cottage) and started stenciling everything in site and before you could say "enough already!" she had a row of grapevines wrapping around the bedroom wall and a blue checkerboard in the kitchen. All though her handiwork looked great in her cutesy cottage house, it was simply not my thing, and I had never considered stenciling anything, ever, because to my eyes stencils look for homely and homespun.

But then I saw the light thanks to a stencil project in Better Homes and Gardens of a really lovely repeated design on a wall over a bed, sort of resembling a headboard, but adding subtle pattern and texture to an otherwise boring wall, giving it a that oh-so-right bit of bling the wall needed.

Cut to the the desk I have been working on. Our home office is in make over mode and we wanted to revamp a cool 1950's desk my brother gave us and scrap our old clunky Ikea desk that was too big and had seen better days. We have decided to paint the office walls charcoal gray (Behr in "Sled"), a rather bold and dark color, almost black, that has me a little nervous. To make it not feel too goth we figured we would add a lot of white contrast to play against the dark walls, and as far as I'm concerned there is no such thing as too much of the black/white combo. The window woodwork, doors, ceiling and trim will be painted white, a wall of bookcases will be white, the drapes will be white, and most of the furniture will be white. And those 4 windows bring in lots of natural daylight so I think we will be okay with the dark walls without creating a cave room in our house!

The way to rehab my brothers desk was, of course, to paint it! Man, do I love paint! This desk had seen better days so a few dents were filled with wood patch and it got a good sanding. I then primed, painted with 3 coats of high gloss white paint, and lastly applied 2 coats of clear Verathane. I also recycled our old Ikea rolling cart so it could continue to house all our computer stuff. I removed the drawers, sanded and painted in the same process as the desk. Voila! It actually looks like it goes with the desk!

And, to spruce up the top of the desk, I succumbed to a stencil pattern I found in a magazine. I blew it up to a size I liked on a copy machine, traced it out with a felt pen on a piece of plastic and cut it out with an X-Acto knife. I thought a cream or tan color would be pale but still visible. I think it turned out great and gives the desk a little interest.

This computer has lots of extra stuff attached to it, like a music hard drive, a remote wireless thing that allows us to play our mp3's on our living room stereo, a printer, another box that Dan uses for his laptop, 3 speakers, a gadget for the wireless mouse, and a cable box. Keeping all these wires and cables in order, off the floor, and tucked away out of site is not easy! Yesterday I spent 2 hours trying to make sense out of all of them and came up with a solution using plastic tubing and a metal desk basket thingie from Ikea. So now, the wires are at least enclosed in a tube of indestructible plastic and are off the floor!


So, here is our revamped computer table! We are very happy with it and think the stenciled desk top looks ooh la la, not oh no no!

Next projects in this room to come:
Rehabilitate a couple of chairs, new bookcases, and all that paint to come with lots of white trim....but only after we strip it down to the bare wood. I would like to kiss whoever invented the amazing heat gun. Ingenious! And see the dark gray splotch on the wall to the right of the computer, below? Yep, that's our wall color!


We are punk rock martha stewart