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Category Archives: Backyard

A Garden Story

12 Sunday Jul 2015

Posted by SaraS in Backyard, Memories

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Chile Peppers, Gardening, Plants, wildlife

Many years ago, when I still lived in Illinois and owned a house in Aurora, Cricket found a nest of baby bunnies in the back yard. They were in a little hole, under a small picnic table. Cricket was much younger then (probably around 4 or 5 or so) and very much wanted to chase and eat the rabbits.

Newly Born Bunnies

Newly Born Bunnies

Laura (my partner at the time) and I had to go to a bit of effort to supervise Cricket and keep her from tearing up the nest. Later, as they became more mobile, I remember her chasing one across the yard. The bunny made it across the yard and hid behind the fence post. It squeaked while it ran, which for some reason surprised me.

Baby bunny hiding behind a fence post

Baby bunny hiding behind a fence post

Recently, I have been thinking about those baby rabbits. Back in May, we planted some pepper seedlings in several big pots (I’m a big fan of container gardening). Anaheim, banana peppers, and one variety of bell peppers. The pots all congregated in a sunny corner by the deck stairs.

Freshly-planted peppers!

Freshly-planted peppers!

A few days later, I was in the kitchen when Renee went down the deck steps and I heard her gasp. I followed her down the steps and discovered that some of the new plants were chopped down to just stems! All the leaves and most of the stem, completely gone!

This is one of the pots that was especially hard hit:

Pepper plants have been decimated!

Pepper plants have been decimated!

After some research, we decided that the pepper plant eating fiend was most likely a rabbit. Which made me think of those baby bunnies whose lives I saved back in 2005.

You’d think I earned some good bunny karma. But apparently not.

Anyway, we moved the pots up onto a table and out of reach of marauding rabbits. The untouched peppers continued to thrive, and, much to my surprise, the stubby stems of the eaten peppers began to grow back. After a few weeks, they looked like seedlings again, full of new leaves. By today, they had tiny buds just waiting to open up. They are pretty far behind the plants that were spared (we already harvested a couple small anaheims), but hopefully the growing season is long enough that we might get a few peppers out of them.

Today, Renee built a nice new garden bed, replacing some shaggy bushes that used to live along the garage. We used cool decorative brackets for the ends, and Renee stained the wood a nice red color. We had a minor glitch when the boards holding up the upper level bowed a bit; had to fix that with an emergency cross-brace. But otherwise it turned out great.

We went ahead and transplanted the recovered plants. Hopefully, having more room to spread their roots will help them catch up! Supposedly bunnies are less interested in more mature pepper plants, but we will be keeping an eye on these…if the thieving rabbit returns, we’ll put up some sort of fencing around the new bed.

Some of the peppers, nearly two months after being a meal for rabbits:

These peppers grew back from bare little stems

These peppers grew back from bare little stems

The new planting bed

The new planting bed

I love our new planting bed – and I love the fact that this garden story may have a happy ending after all.

Pippin’s Halloween

31 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by SaraS in Backyard, Cats

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

cat condo, danger cat

Several weeks ago, we replaced a section of fence in the back yard. There were two main reasons for this:

the old fence with Pippin perched on top

the old fence with Pippin perched on top

  1. It was a strange, old, ugly fence built out of logs, and it was starting to fall down in spots.
  2. Pippin had started escaping the back yard at night. However he was getting out, he couldn’t get back in, so he’d sit on the front porch and cry (loudly) in the middle of the night till we woke up and let him back in. We suspected he was using the concrete wall we added for the waterfall this past summer to jump the fence (he has no front claws so he couldn’t be climbing out).

Anyway, we replaced the fence with a more normal-looking fence, complete with a custom trellis to make it tall enough (hopefully) keep Pippin in. We finished it up back in mid-October.

new fence from the outside

new fence from the outside

Pippin stayed in the yard for several nights so we thought we solved the problem. We had several cold nights, so on those evenings we locked both cats up in the cat room to keep the heat in, so he didn’t have any opportunity escape for a while.

This past weekend, we finally setup the cat door in the cat room so that they could go outside when they wanted. All was fine for a few nights…

Until this morning (October 31), around 7 am when we heard Pippin crying at the front door again! At least this time he waited till morning instead of yelling in the middle of the night.

Hmm…a black cat with amazing escape artist abilities…and he waited until Halloween to demonstrate that he could still overcome the fence.

So…from now on, that cat is getting locked up at night.

Oh well, it is still a really nice fence and I’m glad that project is done – one less thing to worry about next spring.

panoramic photo from the inside

panoramic view of the fence from the inside

Image

Photo of the Day: November Snow

01 Tuesday Nov 2011

Tags

Snow, Winter

DSC_0161 by SaraS
DSC_0161, a photo by SaraS on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
Snow in the backyard on the first day of November. At least it waited till October was done!

Posted by SaraS | Filed under Backyard, Photo of the Day, Photography

≈ Leave a comment

Twas the Night Before NaNoWriMo

31 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by SaraS in Backyard, NaNoWriMo, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween

Today's Forecast with snow coming

Today's forecast showing snow later in the week!

Today is October 31. Over the past few weeks we have done a bunch of work out in the backyard, getting things ready for winter. The patio furniture is all tucked away, either in the shed or stashed under the gazebo where it should be protected for the winter. The greenhouse is stuffed full of plants and the heaters are chugging away keeping everything warm. The pool is winterized and dozing beneath its heavy blue cover. The forecast calls for possible snow, even here in the valley, by the end of the week.

NaNoWriMo LogoThis also means that the start of NaNoWriMo is just one day away!

Yikes!

Did I really say I was going to do NaNoWriMo this year?

Am I ready?

I’ve made a few notes and done a little brainstorming.

Here is an example of a mind map I created a while ago while brainstorming:

Mind Map

Brainstorming

I started out with a few key ideas for the story and just jotted down everything I thought of from that…looking over it now, I’m not sure how useful these ideas will be for the actual plot.

I still haven’t settled on a name for my main character, although I do have a few ideas in mind. I’ll need to just pick one and plan on doing a big find/replace later.

I’ve also set up a project in Scrivener, which is the software I’m using to plan and write my novel. I’ve been using Scrivener to plan and write some of my longer blog posts and it is great for organizing thoughts. You can chunk up the writing into small topics and rearrange them using a corkboard view.

It also has a spot for storing research and ideas, so over the last month I’ve been adding my ideas in as they come up, so they’re all in one place when it is time to write.

I like sometimes writing by hand (even though I have awful handwriting), so I also scan my handwritten notes into the computer and drag them into the Scrivener project as well.

Project Targets

Project Targets


It also has a nifty “targets” feature, which I’ve already set up with a target of 50,000 words by the end of November. This automatically calculates the number of words I need to write per day to make the goal.

That’s about it on my current progress. Tomorrow I actually need to sit down and start writing and see what happens!

The Indoor Pond

22 Saturday Oct 2011

Posted by SaraS in Backyard

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Building Projects, Gardening, Plants, Ponds

pond-this-fall-oct2011.jpg

The pond this fall

birds-eye-view-july2011.jpg

A bird's eye view of the pond when Renee was painting

One of my favorite features in our backyard is our cool pond. Renee built it years ago (she dug it out by hand!) before I met her. We have a cool little bridge that goes across it, and lots of plants and fish. We mostly just put varieties of goldfish in there, although we’ve lost a few here and there (several to a heron this past summer! Dang heron!)

pond-in-springtime-may2010.jpg

Pond in springtime

We also have a really nice variety of plants in there — lilies (the lily pads always make me think that we should have a few frogs), parrot’s feather, water celery, and many more. I think I drive Renee a little nuts sometimes because I’m always forgetting the names of the plants and asking her what they are — usually when her mind is busy on some project or another so she can’t remember.

blooming-lily-july2010.jpg

One of my favorite pictures of our lilies

Anyway, the fish can actually hunker down and live through the winter as long as we keep the water filter running. The top of the pond freezes up, and long icicles form around the filter / waterfall, but the pond is deep enough that the fish can semi-hibernate and make it through the winter. We do have to keep the water level up; I find it a little odd to be out there with the hose topping it off in the middle of January!

lily-pads-and-fish-sept2010.jpg

Lily pads and fish

water-ripples-may2011.jpg

The plants, on the other hand, cannot survive the winter. In past years, Renee just bought new ones every spring to restock it. This year in particular we ordered a few varieties online because PetSmart stopped stocking them. Several of these plants are tropical or semi-tropical, so they don’t much care for Montana winters.

Last Year: Saved a Few Plants

Last year, we came up with a plan to save some of our pond plants over the winter in the greenhouse area. This is the little extra room back behind the cats’ apartment that has semi-transparent roofing and walls to let in lots of light.

It was a fairly simple setup: two large plastic tubs (one taller than the other) full of water in the greenhouse area. But the water needs to circulate, since sitting in stagnant water would not be good for the plants.

So one chilly evening we ran around to a couple different stores, describing what we were looking for. I should say, Renee described what we were looking for, because she already had a picture in her head of how to set this up. I was just sort of along for the ride. It took trips to both Home Depot and then Quality Supply to find the right-sized pipe fitting.

plastic-tub-winter-2011.jpg

Lily pads hanging in there in a makeshift winter home

We drilled a hole in the larger tub and installed the fitting so that it sort of stuck out over the smaller tub. Then we filled the tubs up with water and used a small pump to send water from the smaller tub back to the larger tub. So the water in the larger tub would drain out into the smaller, then flow back in via the pump. As long as we kept the water levels up, we had a nice little waterfall keeping the water circulating.

This mostly worked, and in the springtime we moved the plants back into the pond. Not all of them made it, so we still needed to buy more, but at least some of them did survive the winter.

Problems

We did run into a few problems with this solution.

Cheap Plastic Storage Tubs are Not Meant to Store Water!

For one, the plastic tubs were not designed to withstand the weight of many gallons of water. The larger tub started to bow out, which over time might have sent water sloshing over the sides. Renee fixed this in a temporary fashion with some scrap wood; she built a sort of rough frame around it to hold it in its original shape.

Frozen Plants!

weather-nov-23-2010.jpg

Cold!!

Our other problem happened on November 22. That night, we had cold, cold weather with blizzard-like winds. The next day the weather forecast was for more cold (a high of 8). When we checked on the plants, the water in the tub was all frozen up.

We got a small portable heater to warm up the greenhouse (similar to the one we use in the cats’ apartment). This thawed out the frozen water. Some of the plants didn’t make it, but most of the lilies and some of the parrot’s feather did survive.

This Year’s Goals: Save Even More!

So this year, we wanted to improve on this and hopefully save more of the pond plants and some of the other non-water plants. We already had the heater ready to go, and we had cleared a lot of stuff out of the greenhouse area while working on the cat’s room before. The greenhouse also had the same new roof that the cats have. We had planned on this by using the semi-transparent skylight panels over nearly the entire greenhouse. The panels made it nice and bright in there.

The Solution

indoor-pond1.jpg

The indoor pond in progress

So this year, Renee took indoor pond to the next level and built a great winter home for the pond plants. She used more scrap lumber (although she did have to buy a few 2×8’s) and constructed a nice big wooden box. The box is sized to just fit on the counter in the greenhouse room. In fact, we had to get an extension cord with a flat plug on it to plug in the water filter; she didn’t leave enough room to allow a normal plug to stick out.
indoor-pond.jpg

The next question is, how do you make a wooden box watertight? This part was simpler than I imagined. She used a large sheet of pond liner material. This material feels sort of like heavy inner tube material. It is the same material you use when you actually construct an outdoor pond.

She also added a shelf in the box to elevate some of the plants that prefer shallower water.

She setup the filter within the large box so it draws water to one end, sends it back in a hose, and re-enters the box at the other end.

parrots-feather.jpg

Parrot's Feather

the-shallow-box.jpg

The shallow box of water plants

Once she started filling this with plants, she realized she needed even more room. So she built a second box for the other counter in the room (the counters form an “L” shape). This one is also a bit shallower. We still need to put in a second filter to circulate the water in this one as well.

geraniums-by-heater.jpg

Geraniums soaking in the heat

It is now a little crowded in the room, because we have some non-water plants temporarily hanging out on the floor. The second room of the greenhouse is also currently crammed full of plants.

non-water-plants.jpg

More non-water plants taking up all the room!

But, overall, the end result is much nicer than last year. It reminds me a bit of the displays we’ve seen at the pond supply store here in town where we’ve bought plants before. So far, the pond plants look happy in their winter digs. Hopefully this year, more of the plants will survive for “transplanting” back into the pond in the springtime.

Video of the Tree Coming Down

20 Thursday Oct 2011

Posted by SaraS in Backyard

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Trees

I have a few thoughts on some longer posts to write, but my brain is currently a little tired. So instead, here is a video of the tree across the alley being removed yesterday (as shown in my photo of the day).

There is a little bit of commentary here and there since Renee has experience with working way up high like that (she worked as a lineman for the phone company in the past, and has been way up on telephone poles before).

The lack of the tree isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The sky doesn’t look quite as empty as I expected, at least so far since the other tree back there still has a view. I’m wondering how it is for our neighbors, though, to lose such a huge tree in their yard. They probably lost a significant source of summertime shade.

I couldn’t find any really good pictures of this tree from before this day. This was from earlier in the day, when they were still working out of the bucket truck:

Tree Across the Alley

The tree before it came down

It really was a huge tree.

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