i've been so distracted lately with so many things going on that i forgot to get some pictures posted. will do eventually. not sure when.
today will be the first day i am able to get back to trying to finish up the big project, i hope i can get it done in the next two and a half days. we'll see.
i have to pull the drain tube from under one garden, move it to the house drain ditch where the pallets used to be and then move all the pea gravel and pile in all the wood with the nails in it that i can fit and put the pea gravel over it so it can rot and rust in pieces. it will not be gardened or disturbed again so any risk from rusty nails should be minimal, but in the future if i really become in need of busy work i can easily (hahaha, right) go back through, dig them all up and remove all the rotted wood and nails. what i'm really hoping is that instead it all just turns into some mushrooms and bits of rotted wood and rust that won't need to be touched again in my lifetime.
otherwise, strawberries are blooming, most of the fence is up that i needed to get done ASAP, still some work to do but that is not critical.
the flash flooding did not wash out much of the end of The River Nile (along the berm i put in years ago) and the grass held the upper part in place as it should have so i think i can ignore that for another year. the plan for that is to get back to it next year to put some large chunks of concrete in place to do the step downs to the large drainage ditch and that will help keep the erosion from getting worse. it's been a mess all along, but made worse by Mom spraying weed killer and then the dirt gets washed away. once i got her to stop spraying it has been much more stable and not eroding as much. through hard clay. only the end is a problem... next year, not this one...
getting garden transplants hardened off and ready to plant. can plant some of them at any time, but i'm not doing that the next few days. i really need to get this large garden area done so i'm not wasting that space this whole season. it is normally a bean garden. tulips were blooming in there so they will somewhat be disturbed. they will likely survive and some will get moved. now isn't the best time, but it just has to be done.
this large garden is a bit raised up and sandy soil that was brought in to see how the tulips would do. the soil was also intentionally made poor in nutrients to see if that made any difference in how well the tulips would survive our more general conditions. some are ok and others have faded or rotted away. botrytis (sometimes called tulip fire) is not a fun disease but the tulips that survive both that and our conditions can be pretty hardy in the end. i just wish i had other places to grow them where the critters won't eat them besides inside the fenced gardens where they are now. almost all that i've moved to other places around the yard are now gone due to being repeatedly eaten (not me, but just in case you ever need emergency food tulip bulbs are edible as long as you don't overdo it, they are a rather wimpy onion flavor (according to my brother who thought a bag of onion bulbs i dropped off for him to plant were onions)) by deer, etc.
in other news, new washer/dryer was delivered and installed yesterday - new hook up valves for that were redone last week by plumber. will be interesting to adjust to this new device for Mom. at least so far it works and is not leaking... i'll have to redo the exhaust tube under the house in the crawlspace some time but that is not an emergency issue. i'll save that for some other day when i have to get down there to change the furnace/AC filter.
roofing people have not gotten back to me yet. i'm going to try some heavy flat slabs over the vents on the upside to see if that is the issue. it may be. something we have not tried yet. will not hurt. some evidence points to this be a possible cause. would be nice to just be able to scope the roof when leaks happen to track them back to the sources, but that means getting up pretty high on a ladder for me and not something i really want to do. climbing a ladder to get up on the roof is much much easier. alas, that's the wrong side to see where the water is coming through.
ok, breakfast time. ramble time is done for this morning.
