Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Cash for Grass, check, government, milkweed, pile, plant, Roseville, seeds
We got the check from the city of Roseville this weekend. $700 to put in the bank. That sure feels good. Who would ever have guessed you could get a government check without having something really unfortunate happen to you first, or being in Congress!
That conlcudes our relationship with the City of Roseville for the time being, but the project continues to evolve. None of the plants have died yet.
As for the seeds, not one of the milkweed seeds has sprouted yet of any type. They have been in the dirt for about 8 weeks so far, so I expected at least a few of the early seeds to have started by now. Maybe the “cold stratification” outside failed and I killed them all. Of the wildflowers, the lupine and poppies have started coming up, some of them are a couple inches tall. The lupine were large seeds, with only a few in the pack. I think I got about 50% of them to start. Plenty of poppies. The yarrow and monkeyflower have also sprouted, and they are numerous but very tiny. Nothing yet of the bluebells, blue-eyed grass, or yellow-eyed grass.
Some of the other plants in the front are starting to show new growth. Others look like they are barely hanging on. My sod pile is also gradually decreasing in volume every couple of weeks. I’ll post more pictures soon.
Filed under: Cash for Grass | Tags: budget, cash, Cash for Grass, kids, lawn, milkweed, plants, rock, Roseville, seeds, wildflowers
main front ex-lawn
gate to street stepping stones
- driveway strip
- driveway strip from driveway
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Filed under: Cash for Grass | Tags: bird, border, Cash for Grass, feeder, finch, garden, landscape, mulch, netting, plants, rock, seeds, silence, wildflower, Zen, Zen rock garden
Much work done on the project over the long weekend. First, Rose and Calvin planted a couple hundred wildflower seeds carefully in seed trays in the backyard, which turned out to be a very labor intensive way to feed premium seeds to finches.
For round two, I protected the seeds with plastic netting, and also hung a bird feeder with finch seed nearby to try to distract them. ($27 for netting, feeder, and seeds, not counting wildflower seed losses)
Seeds with finch fence
I also managed to get all the rock mulch spread. Phase 1 is almost complete. All that is left is to put in the last handful of small plants, and finish the border, which will require about 20 linear feet of additional border rock.
The down side to buying all very small plants to save money is that they are so small at this point that it is hard to see them among the rock. The yard looks more like a zen rock garden than a living landscape. (If you are a zen master, I understand that a rock garden is also alive in its way, but it is not, therefore it remains noisily in silence.) I hope the plants not only survive but will fill in by late spring and give the appearance that I knew what I was doing.
Can you count the plants in the area which used to be lawn in the photo below?
Zen Rock Garden Replaces Lawn
Wrong. The correct answer is way more than that, and two of the ones you counted were actually boulders…
No, not quite that many, I still have to buy some, and the wildflowers are hopefully going to grow in the seed trays to be put in later…
Yes, that’s about right. Nicely figured.
Filed under: Cash for Grass | Tags: blue, cash, Cash for Grass, grass, pickaxe, pipe, PVC, repair, sage, water
Remember the pickaxe and water line thing? Apparently the broken line was to the drip system I still need. I know this because not long after turning it on the other day, a river bubbled up from underneath the blue sage I planted over the obviously unsuccessful repair.
Today was the first day I have worked on the yard since getting sick. My one task today was to do a full repair with no short cuts. This involved removing all the rock I had laid over a few square yards, unplanting the blue sage, and digging a hole big enough to bury a Honda Civic around the break so I could cut away the failed repair and inset a new piece of PVC.
Repaired pipe
After repair (looks same as before, but without river bubbling up from beneath)
Filed under: Cash for Grass | Tags: assembly, desks, floor, IKEA, leaves, sitting, upright, yard
The kids all wanted desks to use for doing homework so they don’t have to do homework on the floor. I don’t know where this comes from because when I was their age I had a desk, but I hated strenuous activities like sitting upright and always did my homework on the floor. Also there was usually too much stuff on my desk to use it for studying.
What does this have to do with the yard, you may ask. Well, we went to IKEA and bought desks. There was some assembly required. I made a deal. I would assemble the desks today, if the kids would go out and clean up all the leaves in the yard, now that the leaves are finally done falling. With all three kids working, I figured it to be a fifteen or twenty minute job. Not a bad deal.
I turns out that kids only like doing yardwork when they don’t have to. And if they don’t like it, it takes much longer. Calvin suffered in courageous silence, and finished his section first, in about an hour. Sabrina methodically worked her section, around the edges first, then spiraling towards the middle and finishing about a half hour after Calvin. Rose came in sobbing thirty minutes after that, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task before her. She had picked up three leaves so far.
After a brief conversation and a snack, I sent her back out. Another hour or so later, she finished (or close enough, I judged). The yard is free of leaves and looking pretty nice for being only 3/4 complete, and the kids have desks.
Filed under: Cash for Grass | Tags: busted, cash, confined, drill, flood, grass, hoosegow, narcotics, pots, seeds, sick, two-by-four
I was up off the couch for a few minutes to take my medicines, and I saw out the window that it was raining again, and the plastic pots where the milkweed seeds have been contentedly enjoying the required cold were flooding over. Ack! I had planted in pots with no drainage holes in them! The instructions said “moist”, not flooded! What if the seeds washed out of the pots altogether! Almost $20 could be wasted!
I am sick, I should forget it, and go back to bed.
No! I can handle this crisis. I’m still on prescription narcotics! And Jennifer is upstairs working and will never know. I grabbed my wool hat, gloves, and heavy coat, shuffled to the garage, got my drill and went out back, in the rain, to the pots to drill holes in the bottom to try to drain the excess water and save the seeds.
It only took a minute or two. I was almost done when I heard a loud angry knock on the inside of the nearest window. I looked up and sure enough, there was Jennifer standing at the window with a look that might as well have been another two-by-four to the head. Her face said quite clearly, “The first time you get off the damn couch in a week is to go out in the cold and rain and drill holes in flower pots!?!? You could be doing dishes, or taking out trash like that bag of blood-soaked cotton balls, tissues, and pill packs next to the couch that has filled to overflowing over the last week.” I was busted. Caught red-handed. Headed for the hoosegow. Confined to quarters. Under house arrest. I tried to plead poor judgment, but that was already rather apparent.
Filed under: Cash for Grass | Tags: blood, cash, Christmas, college, drugs, ear, ER, football, God, grass, landscape, narcotics, oozing, pain, playoffs, prescription, sinuses, Wii
Sometimes it seems that life just slaps you upside the head with a two-by-four.
Christmas Eve my sinuses got all stuffed up, and so did my ear. I thought I was OK and didn’t worry about it much. Late at night it starting hurting. By Christmas morning I was rocking, moaning and holding my head in my hands in pain with blood oozing out my ear. The family was fairly unanimous that this was not a good sign, and I was off to the ER. I was diagnosed with a raging infection and ruptured eardrum, and have been out of commission since. No landscaping for the last week, or likely for the next week or two. So much for the productive vacation plans. I haven’t even had the energy to play with my kids on the new Wii.
On the bright side, I have watched about 198 hours of college football, which I enjoy though I still want a playoff system. I guess this is God’s way of telling me that vacation is supposed to be for laying on the couch watching TV, not attacking a list of ambitious projects, and like it or not that is what I am going to do even if God has to get me all woozy with prescription narcotics to get me to do it.
Ow. OK, God, I’ll go back to the couch and turn the TV on again.
Filed under: Cash for Grass | Tags: blue, break, cash, clevelandii, compression, coupling, grass, pickaxe, pipe, PVC, sage, salvia, sprinkler, water
AAARGH!
I was carefully digging one little hole for my last salvia clevelandii (blue sage), when a PVC water line snuck into my hole and jumped in front of my pickaxe. I had to carefully excavate a large hole around it without breaking it further in order to get to the damage. There were actually three parallel water lines all next to each other. Fortunately only one decided to commit suicide. I don’t know if the broken line feeds the drip irrigation systems I still need in the side or back of the house, or the sprinklers I don’t care about anymore. I decided not to cause a geyser to find out.
I went out and bought a compression coupling to try to fix it. The coupling looked barely long enough for the break, which was about 2 inches wide, but it seemed to work. I turned the water on, and nothing exploded, so either the break was to a disabled sprinkler system and I don’t care, or I actually fixed it. I filled it all back in and planted the sage on top of the “repair”. Since I didn’t start until noon today, the incident basically cost me all progress for the day and any possibility of finishing before Christmas, plus $4 for the coupling.
Filed under: Cash for Grass | Tags: cash, Christmas, grass, planting, plants, rock, seeds, yard
Getting closer
Filed under: Cash for Grass | Tags: butterfly, Butterfly Encounters, cash, cold, front, germinate, grass, kids, milkweed, rain, refrigerator, seeds
I did plant the five beautiful types of milkweed seeds we ordered from Butterfly Encounters. Strangely, the kids did not volunteer to go out in the backyard in the rain to help me. The instructions say the seeds need to sit in a cold, moist environment for several weeks before they will germinate. This being Central California, we rarely get “weeks” of cold weather, so either I plant them now or I will have to follow the “alternate instructions” and put them in bags of sand in the refigerator for a few weeks. I’m not sure the last idea would go over well with Jennifer, and I think I would have a tough time hiding a half-dozen bags of sand and seeds in the refrigerator without her noticing.
Milkweed Seeds Planted
