Spring Plantingpalooza

https://beau.blog/2017/04/spring-plantingpalooza/

Last year, Erika and I planted our first ever vegetable garden. We quickly became obsessed with it, and this year we’ve upgraded from 2 beds with approximately 50 square feet, to a total of 6 beds, with over 285 square feet (more than 5x the growing space)! We’re pretty psyched to see what we can produce this year, and will be trying a bunch of new vegetables, in addition to more of the varieties we liked from last year.

Here in Denver (as with most areas that have hard winters), one of the most important dates for growing is our last frost date. Typically for us, that’s May 2nd. Most of our planting needs to be done relative to that date (either before or after, a certain amount of time). We decided that this weekend was when we would get in the bulk of what we’re growing (cooler season crops), so we had a planting party.

Since I’m a bit OCD, I like to plan things out pretty heavily, and figuring out the logistics of when to plant things and where/how is pretty fun. I now have plans in my head for a calendar-generator, where you can tell it where you are, and what you want to plant, and it’ll generate a calendar for you, telling you when to do everything 🙂

In the meantime, I’m manually creating garden maps and planting schedules, which will have to do for this year at least.

I’ll be sure to post some updates once things are growing, and hopefully overflowing their beds.

Backyard Makeover

When we bought our house in Denver, we intentionally got one that didn’t really need any work done on the house itself. That didn’t entirely work out (yay emergency bathroom remodeling!), but most of our attentions have been focused on our yard, and particularly our back yard. We wanted a “livable” space, that we could spend a bunch of time in and really enjoy. It’s fun to look back at where we started, and where we are now.

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Major Fence Project

When we moved into our new house, the yard was a mess. That’s definitely still the case in some areas, but we’ve made a lot of progress with cleaning things up, and turning it into a real “livable” yard. One of the pieces of that journey was getting a real fence installed down the side/back of the property. Here’s what we had when we first bought the house:

As you can see, it was a hip-high chainlink fence. Not only was it pretty ugly, but our neighbor has a dog, and our terror of an animal, Bambi, would just go insane trying to attack him through this fence. To replace it though, we had to get all those trees out of there, because they were all literally grown into the fence. That was a massive project on its own, but we got it done:

With that out of the way, we needed to get our new fence in. We opted for a horizontal-picket style, which is pretty trendy, and “modernizes” the house a little bit, without getting too crazy. I had never built a fence, but Erika’s family-friend Joe came and helped, so I learned pretty quickly. We got the back/side section done together in a few days:

We stopped there because both of us were busy, and it was a good stopping point anyway. That was towards the end of Summer, so the weather started turning a bit, but I managed to grab some good days in between snow and whatnot (Denver’s weather is crazy), and managed to get the rest of it done, down the side of our house, all the way to the front:

I’m pretty happy with how it all turned out (everyone keeps saying it’s more of a wall than a fence!), and now I know how to make one if I ever need to do it again. Nothing too complicated, just taking your time and thinking it through. The biggest mental hurdle for me was getting over thinking of the posts as being relevant to the position of the ends of the pickets. The posts just provide the structure/foundation, and then the framing that you put in is what handles the pickets (and attaches to the posts).

At least I know if this internet thing doesn’t work out I’ve got an alternate job to fall back on 😉