Day Lily.

Wild Cherry.

One of a basketful of wild cherries we got off the trees in the side yard, after getting smart and wrapping branches in netting to fend off the birds.

This is How We Renovate…In the Ghetto.

My original intent, when I began the front porch renovation, was to keep the costs low by using off-the-shelf materials to replace the crap I was tearing out. I’d looked at stuff at the local superstores and found inexpensive candidates, but I knew I’d have to special-order certain things (windows) because nothing in this house is standard size.

With that in mind, I’ve been hemming and hawing over the replacement windows for weeks now, unsure of my plans. The window openings on the porch were all framed in by drunks, so their heights all vary by as much as an inch, and the horizontal level is off by at least a half-inch. In order to figure out what I was going to do (and what shape the framing was in), I pulled all three of the front-facing jalousie windows out on Monday to see what I was dealing with. The base of the frame on the far right was in terrible shape, and I had to pull the entire thing out in order to see what I was dealing with. For a temporary fix, I cut sheets of plywood down and nailed them up until we got our new windows delivered.

Aaaaaaand, here’s where things go south.

Returning to Lowe’s Tuesday with my 10% off coupon, Jen and I looked at the off-the-shelf offerings, and she helped me realize how shitty they look. The mullions (crossbars on the top window) were inside the glass, which looks funny from the outside, and the entire window is covered with a screen, which is ugly. After some discussion, we got a quote for better quality replacement windows which turned out to be about three times as much as I was originally expecting—not what I was hoping for. With the coupon and a firm quote I figure it will go down to about twice my original budget, but this is still putting a major dent in our plans. I’ve got a couple calls in to the better window companies to see what decent replacement windows will cost; I’m not expecting miracles but I’m hoping for one. The hard part will be getting a quote for the windows minus installation fees; I’m pretty sure that’s where their markup lives.

Meanwhile, eating our breakfast in the upstairs bedroom has gotten more exciting due to the looks of shock and awe of the passers-by as they crane their necks trying to figure out what happened to the front of the house.

Outside, we wrapped a couple of branches of the cherry trees so that we might be able to enjoy some of the fruit this spring. With the exception of the Year of the Locust (when plentiful, if earthy-flavored food was burrowing out of the ground all summer), the birds have cleaned out all of the ripening red cherries before we’ve been able to taste it. The grape arbor also got wrapped on Monday to keep the bunches protected for the season (and to keep the vines off the stairwell).

* * *

In other strange news, I had a dream last night where I was asked by Daft Punk to sit in on one of their concerts. I knew all the parts to the songs, but the “instrument” they stood me in front of was like no other I had ever seen, and made no sense. They got pissed at me when I couldn’t figure out how to play it (it was like a vibraphone stood on its side, with lots of added glowing sampler buttons that made no sense), yelled at me in French, and kicked me off the stage. I was so psyched to put on a helmet and a jumpsuit and rock out, too.

Spring Around The Corner.

This morning, waiting for coffee to brew, I was sleepily cleaning the dishes in the sink when I spied the first three dirty yellow male finches of the season on our thistle feeders, munching away. By the time I was able to get to my camera and put the long lens on, they were gone.

From the Garden

Jen came upstairs as I was hunched over the computer to show me this. With the exception of the basket, everything in there came out of our garden, and there’s a lot more to come. We have a ton of corn coming in, the squirrels seem to have left the second wave of beans alone, and there are several eggplant growing larger. The green peppers are getting pretty big, too. Plus, we’ve already used a couple bushels of basil leaves.

Grape Arbor.

Our grape arbor is covered with bunches of fruit, a far cry from last year, when whatever it produced was devoured by birds in one afternoon. The lack of water and steady heat has been perfect for growing grapes, along with Jen’s judicious pruning earlier this year; now we just have to figure out how to protect them from varmints (a large bird net has been purchased already) and when to harvest them properly.

From The Back 40

Because it’s a downright sucky day for Baltimore, I figured I’d post a picture of yesterday’s yield from the vegetable garden in the hopes that it would brighten things up a little. Seriously, we pulled about 5 lbs. of tomatoes off the vines yesterday, adding to the 5 lbs. we have on the counter in the kitchen already. We’re going to bust out the pots and cook us up some more sauce this weekend.

Morning Glories

Jen planted a morning glory vine under our dining room window. It’s going absolutely insane this week.

the triplets below are new buds.

Green Thumbs and Open Spaces.

Hurricane Ernesto is going to dump a few gallons of water on us this weekend, so we took some time after lunch to shore up the plants in our garden. The cucumbers, which were coming on strong in the early part of the year, are getting long in the tooth and not producing as much (they were averaging about four cukes a week). However, the tomatoes are now in their prime and absolutely bursting with fruit—a rough count of six plants totalled at least 150 tomatoes in various states of completion. The basil Jen planted among the tomatoes is now waist-height and full with leaves.

We’re already planning the addition to the current garden—I’m thinking it will roughly double in size. We’re adding eggplant, red peppers, more soybeans, and pole beans to this year’s lineup, as we know that it’ll all do well here.

Further to the west, our neighbors engaged a landscaping company to wrestle control of their yard back from the weeds, brush, and poison ivy that have slowly been choking it to death. This week two men have used chainsaws, trimmers, clippers, chippers, and a Bobcat to haul off at least four trailers worth of yard debris, including the majority of our shared treeline. What was once a tangled “hedgerow” running the length of our west property line is now an open plain of dirt punctuated with a few startled-looking trees. Our cherry trees are intact, as well as a few sugar maples on their side of the line (and not the ones I’d have picked—I prefer trees that grow straight up and down), but all the ivy on both sides of the law has been scraped off with the blade of the Bobcat.

(August, 2003)

What was once a private, enclosed (and somewhat untidy) side yard is now a public space, visible and audible from the road, which has us concerned. Because the driveway side is less than aesthetically pleasing, we’ve been using the west side as our outdoor getaway, but that’s a thing of the past. It’s looking now like our plans to add a fence along the treeline just got bumped up in priority…

(April, 2005)

(August, 2006)

One Benefit of the Heat.

This is our garden as of this morning, before the blast wave hit us. It’s 100+ degrees out there now, and our cucumbers and tomatoes are love-love-loving it. The two plants up front are Big Boy tomatoes, the huge round beefy ones you see for $3/lb. at the store. The next two plants back are “Health Kick” tomatoes, which are low-to-the-ground Italian style tomatoes—long and dry, good for stuff like guacamole. Behind the tomatoes are four cucumber plants, which are going apeshit and climbing the ladders I built for them at the rate of about 6″/day. Each plant is throwing off blooms like crazy, and they have about 20 fruit between the three of them. Behind the cukes are four forlorn soybean plants, the ones the squirrels didn’t dig up. We had dreams of growing our own edamame, but obviously the yard critters love Japanese food as well. (that freaky cat statue is supposed to be some kind of deterrent, but I think it’s mainly serving as a perch for the local bird population, who seem to like to poop on its head.) Finally, in the far corner, we have two tomato plants grown from seed in our basement, which are finally coming into their own and putting off fruit.

Yesterday I made some hummus and we had cucumber-tomato-hummus sandwiches for dinner. While it wasn’t the most filling thing we could have eaten, it sure was tasty.