"Nicely wooded lot in quiet subdivision."  A great selling point for a home in the heartland of Wisconsin.  But they were also famous last words.  The first summer after we bought our house, we looked out into the back yard to find orange dots painted on what seemed to be every other tree in our backyard.  What the? 

We soon learned that every year the city sends a forester to identify trees with symptoms of oak wilt in residents' yards.  They then give you a nasty letter that says if you don't cut down these trees and properly dispose of the wood, you will be considered a public nuisance and subject to fines. 

The first year was the worst, with more than a dozen trees having to come down.  The next year there were a couple more.  Then last summer, I met the forester as he came on my property.  He took a look in the back yard and he said, "You know which ones they are, don't you?" 

I agreed it was pretty obvious.  The biggest oak tree, in the center of our yard, was completely dead.  The one next to it was mostly dead. 

The one next to the big one was not so large, and my husband was able to cut it down himself. My sister hauled away the wood in her trailer to be burned on her land out in the country.  But that big tree was going to be a problem. We would not be able to do it ourselves.  We got a couple of quotes from tree removal people.  We were talking hundreds of dollars.  

Then one day we had friends over, and someone mentioned her husband might want the wood, but if the tree was too big for him to cut down, he knew someone who was an expert at cutting trees down who also could use the firewood and would cut it down for the privelege of taking the wood.  

The upshot is, one night the expert guy showed up with his son and his wife, and our other friend came to help, and they took down the huge oak tree.

I was amazed at the tree cutting expert.  He had this rickety-looking wooden extension latter that he propped against the tree trunk, then he crawled up there and started cutting off one of the gigantic limbs. He also tied a rope to the main trunk.

 

Then it was time to cut down the main trunk.  I was amazed as he made a few cuts on the side of the tree it was supposed to fall towards, then made a few on the other side and pounded in a few wedges.  In the meantime, all his helpers stood off to the side holding the rope.  I learned they were supposed to keep the tree from falling the wrong direction (like on top of the shed, or our deck, or our house, or our friend). 

It finally fell with a mighty crash, on top of our neighbor's chainlink fence.  It trimmed off a few branches from their trees on the lot line too, but no major damage.

 

He did a great job finishing off the stump with his chain saw, too.  All that remains of the mighty oak tree is this:

 

Our other friend, who had helped out in order to learn from the expert, was up for more tree cutting so he could get some firewood too.  And were happy to be done with this oak wilt business, so we identified the rest of the oak trees along the side of our property, and another night he and my husband cut trees until they coudn't see anymore and the chainsaws had quit anyway.  My husband finished up the last branches the other day, so this is it for the oaks now:

 

Logs are awaiting pick-up, and the rest of the debris has almost all been hauled out by my sister.  

Of course, there is still the front yard.  Next year.  

Posted by Caeli at 07:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today's lesson in gardening was to be teaching the kids how to weed, preparing a nice bed in which to plant peas.  The proposed pea patch will be on one side of what is an eye-shaped garden (I think it was supposed to be more rounded but it needs re-edging), where it will hopefully get enough sun at least part of the day to grow peas.  If we get to eat some of these peas that will be great, but I also have in mind using this method to enrich the soil in that area to plant something later (yet to be determined).  I had read somewhere that peas put nitrogen into the soil.

Here are pictures of my little helpers.  Unfortunately, agreeing to pose for a picture was about all the help they were willing to give, and Mommy did most of the weeding.

 

They all have their own kid-friendly garden tools now, even the 16-month-old:

 

Those plastic hand-held cultivators (which I usually just call "claws") are useless for weeding even when trying to pull out something as close to the surface as Creeping Charlie, of which we have way more than our fair share.

This little "helper" was no help at all, but sat and posed right on cue when I said smile:

 

Actually, my son was helpful by dumping pail-fulls of weeds into the compost pile.  He just refused to get into the actually pulling of them, though.  And my 4 year old is in a phase where she will do almost nothing I ask.  Well, whatever the lack of assistance and questionable learning to weed that went on, we had a nice day together.

There is a lot of work to do out there.  But I think we may actually be able to get a start on planting that pea patch tomorrow.  I bought some yellow plastic tent stakes from Wal-Mart for just over $2 which should be great for helping mark the rows with string.  I can't decide, though, if we should do plain old straight rows, or something more in keeping with the curved shape of the bed.  Maybe a slightly curving straight row or two.  (Depends how many peas I have to plant.)

One thing I can say for sure:  it was great to get outside.  Not too much insect life out there yet, no mosquitos until the sun started setting.  By weeding this bed (which we had barely touched last year), I even discovered some little shoots of Hostas emerging beneath the carpet of Creeping Charlie.   There may be hope for my perennials yet!

Posted by Caeli at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Gardening for the brown-thumbed busy homeschooling mom, should be the title of this inaugural post in the gardening category of the Home Remodeling Help blog.  Our refrain has always been, if you're going to do something, check if we've done it first to learn from our mistakes.  I'm sure there will be plenty to learn from as I share my gardening experiences yet to come.

I've always wanted to have nice gardens.  My mother has beautiful perennials beds under ancient trees around her Victorian home.   Many of her perennials and bulbs have made their way to my yard: hostas, sedum, chives, irises, and I can't remember what all.  The first year we were inspired by having to somehow fill in what used to be a wooded part of our yard - denuded by oak wilt.  Our neighbors complimented our efforts, "It's starting to look good!"  Their hopes were dashed the following year when we let everything get overgrown with weeds, having no time whatsoever to garden.

This year, verily I say, will be different.   It already is.  We're starting much earlier than usual.  However it is later than we should be starting, at least one of our projects: starting seeds for the vegetable garden.

My son is in first grade, and part of his science this year is learning about plant life through having a garden.  He loves tomatoes, so we are trying to start tomato seeds indoors to later transplant to the garden (or at least outdoor containers, I haven't decided about that yet).  My mom tells me it's kind of late to be starting the seeds.  But I am optimistic that there will be enough summer left for us to get some tomatoes off these plants.  If not, I do have a back-up plan, more on that another day.

My son's science book is, ironically enough in my case, called Green Thumbs - A Kid's Activity Guide to Indoor and Outdoor Gardening by Laurie Carlson.

 

In it there was a cute little project, making seedling pots out of paper.  In theory, you can fill the little paper pots with potting mix, plant your seed, grow a little sproutlet, then when it's time to plant it outside, pop it into the ground, pot and all (preferably after removing the piece of scotch tape on the bottom, which will let the roots out).  It sounded fun.  Unfortunately I knew my six year-old would not be up for making these little pots.  They do require some dexterity.

So I made them myself.

Here are my materials.  I used cubes from my son's math manipulatives to measure with since the dog ate his ruler and I was too lazy to go around the house and find a tape measure or other measuring implement.  You can even see a couple of my first attempts, before I started measuring the paper.

 

To make the seedling pots from paper, I used construction paper and cut 4" x 6" rectangles out.  You fold over 1/2" on the long side, then roll it into a cylinder.  Tape it.  Flatten the cylindar so the taped seam is in the middle.  Cut a 1/2" slit in the folded over part at the bottom, all the way through all layers.  Make it back into a cylinder and flatten it the other direction.  Cut another slit, same thing.  I then folded the bottom part over (as far as the slit went).  Then I opened the cylindar again, now more rectangular actually, and folded the tabs made by cutting the slits onto each other, and put a piece of tape there to hold it.  Voila!

 

 

Now just repeat a 100 times...  well, actually there were only 30 tomato seeds in the first packet, so that was how many pots I made the first time out.

I hope to show you the progress in future entries.  They are actually all filled now and planted with tomato seeds.  I didn't take a picture of that yet.  But I hope to!  Yes, my hopes are high that my homeschooling motivation will carry out into the garden and bear much fruit this season.

And here they are - actual tomato seedlings sprouting in the little paper seedling pots.  (They don't have the best structural integrity when wet, so I tried to pack them in so they won't fall apart.)

 

Posted by Caeli at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After we finished remodeling our kitchen, we had to decide what to do about the room below it.  You see, we basically moved our kitchen from the center of the house to the corner, so we had to move or install new electrical, plumbing supplies, drain lines, and a gas line for the stove.  That meant that we removed the old drywall ceiling from room below, clearing the way to install the new utilities in the exposed ceiling joists.  The time finally arrived to put up a new ceiling in that room to make it functional again.  

We opted for a suspended ceiling really by necessity.  I suppose in theory we could have installed drywall over most of the ceiling, but the slope of the drain line meant that we'd need to install a soffit around that area of the ceiling if we wanted to gain the few inches of height.  Also, and this is an important tip/warning-- we installed the utilities without thinking of the eventual ceiling, so some items ended up below the joists and our hand was forced.  If we had to do this again, perhaps we'd think more about the cleanup afterwards and try to get all the utilities in the cavities.

So, suspended it was.  The concept is fairly simple.  Just screw in a level bracket around the ceiling perimeter; fasten the main lines to the ceiling with wire, form up the squares or rectangles for the ceiling panels, and slap them in.  In practice, there were a few things to watch out for.

The perimeter border was fairly easy.  We chose the vinyl option because it's easier to cut and easier to screw into the wall when compared to metal.  The border is a 9/16 inch L bracket.  One side is screwed into the wall with drywall screws, forming a ledge to rest the celing grid upon.  The only odd thing we ran in to was that we had a air duct running into the room.  We could have drywalled around it, but that would have taken forever and wasn't worth it for this room.  So we were left with glueing the channel to the duct, or screwing into the duct itself.  Neither were very appealing and we ended up doing a bit of both, depending in what was easier.  

Once that was done, we had to hang the main lines from the ceiling joists above the room, making them level with the perimeter.  This was a little frustrating because you need to align the suspension wire connection points with the ceiling joists.  We had the joists running perpendicular to the mains, so we had a joists every 16 inches on center.  But the main line had a spot for the wire to run through it every two feet.  Thus, for an 8 foot main, it can be hung at foot 1 and 5, or 2 and 6, etc..  If I had to to this over again, maybe we'd run the main parallel to the joists.  In any event, that's step 2.

From there, the grid formation is basically an exercise in assembling a giant puzzle.  The pieces that connect two mains together to form squares or rectangles are called "T-s" and the ones we had were notched to snap securely to the mains.  Finally, the panels hit right in.

One final point-- don't get the cheapest panels you can find.  They tend to be rather fragile.  I got lucky in that I needed to cut many of them down anyway to make them fit along the perimeter, so I was able to cut off the crushed corners that plagued an entire box.  

Pictures to follow soon!

Posted by Caeli at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)