Living

The first task in this winter dig out was to spread the leaves around evenly. Weird you might think? Well perhaps but when you can't purchase a few yards of mulch and you don't have a traditional composting site, composting in place and ammending your soil in a non traditional manner become your only hope!

While I was busy spreading the wealth on the opposite side of the yard, the Mr. and the Boy got to work clearing our 'not so successful' food growing planter. Some of you might remember the year I planted millions of seeds (ok slight exaggeration) and only 2 things grew which I couldn't even identify.... *sigh* so goes the life of a brown thumbed gardener! Then there was the ginormous tomato plant that grew last year that I actually never planted. So this year required some clearing of rocks and, run away tomatoes that managed to get away from us once the cold set in (for a day).

**I would just like to note that it's a rare day when the Mr actually joins in with the DIY movement I have single handedly decided we were joining and promoting in this household. He is not the DIY type (just not his thing) and so this was a very special treat... that probably won't have a repeat affair. 

Once the rocks were out and the tomatoes picked over, we actually set our makeshift perimeter into place a bit better. We just used untreated 2x4 scraps I had in my 'lumber yard' and didn't even bother to connect or attach them to each other. We are renters in this house, so anything we do must be of the non permanent type. Since the perimeter is really only to raise the bed a tad and keep toddler toes from trampling, this works fabulously.

To continue along that path of non permanent changes, we switched out the head on the single drip line for this section, to a sprinkling variety. This is not the best solution for watering but is the only solution when you need to water a larger area than a single plant and you aren't able to do actual 'yard construction'. To change out the head you simply remove and replace, it's so simple. Once the watering was set we added a left over bag of seeding soil (typically meant for grass starter, but it's what we had on hand) to the mix and a partial bag of manure (super nutritious and definitely cheap!) and we were ready to roll for planting any seeds or vegetables (which probably won't grow anyhow) and in the meantime the bed looks clean and neat!

Meanwhile on the other side of the yard (all 30 feet away), I brought out my scrap paper from a project I worked on earlier in the week and put it to good use laying it over the top of the leaves. This will degrade in a couple of weeks and add some much needed organic matter to my very clay filled soil, and in the meantime it will provide a bit of weed prevention! Win win... You can also use newspaper or cardboard for this purpose and it's a fabulous way to prep your beds for future function. Mine has killed 8 plants in the period of a year due to complete and utter suffocation so amending this clay is an absolute must! Not to mention it's the pits trying to weed dry clay hard soil. It would be easier bulldoze the whole area and begin again. Of course that isn't an option so paper layering it shall have to be! 

Once the paper was generally spread and moderately even throughout, I covered it with a layer of manure and a bit of top soil. This top layer will help hold the paper in place and also act to help it compost well by breaking it down more quickly. 

While we were testing the drip line to be sure the spray was set properly in the vegetable bed, we noticed a bit of a leak in another bed. Eek! 

The Mr had the genius idea of digging it out and inserting a drip line into the leaking section of the main line (so smart...) and of course switching the head to.... wait for it.... a sprinkling head so I don't have to water by hand! Yahoo... and while he was at it, he swapped out the adjacent head as well so now the entire bed is well covered and automatic! I couldn't tell you how happy I am to have a self watering section of the yard that is in full crazy hot sun. I kill plants on a regular basis  here because I forget to water them... oops! I'm a terrible plant mom. 

Now I just need to amend the soil in this bed and the perimeter beds and tidy them up a bit (aka replace the stuff I've killed) and we are in pretty good shape for a few months (I hope).

You can see how out of hand the surrounding grass became and how well the sandbox did away with the grass underneath. Mr. TDC got to work with the weed whacker… One battery charge later we had taken the grass down to a short layer.

Monster Mash can’t pass up an opportunity to get in on the projecting action… like mommy like son! Mr. TDC could quite frankly live a very happy life without any projecting at all, but not us…MM and I, we need a few projects in the works at all times… And boy oh boy does he love to get some use out of his “measure”! He’s just so good at it too, and always lets me know that the item weighs 60 pounds according to his measure.

Off to the store we went to figure out how to finish this project without spending any money. Of course the answer to that is always no… and so we opted for the least expensive route instead. The edging shown in the image below blended best with the existing edging in the yard and came with all of the stakes required and the shortest amount of the edging that was purchasable, since we only needed 8’ of it. I used my Miter Saw to cut it in half down to the 8’ I needed which leaves me 8’ left over for another project in the future!

The directions suggest unrolling and flattening it out. As you can see MM found another use for it in the process since flattening this stuff out was not really going to happen, at least not that I could tell. The perfect racetrack for his racing cars!

Using your shovel you need to make a V shaped small trench. In my yard the soil/clay is usually moist so digging isn’t tough, but there is a high frequency of rock to be found so occasionally you hit a rough patch, literally. This adventure was no exception, every 2 feet a rock would throw a wrench in the plans, but all told this portion took maybe 20 minutes, not bad at all. Like I said, this stuff had no desire to do what it was told, regardless of how much flattening was attempted!

Using the stakes included, you simply pin down the edging and hammer down into place. With the circular nature of this stuff it became easier to force it into a relatively straight line if we staggered the pins back and forth, placing every other pin in the opposite direction… one on the right, one on the left, one on the right, one on the left, you get the picture. This helped keep it from bowing in an arc like it secretly wanted to do. Filling the dirt mud in on either side of the edging is ultimately what kept it straight and upright. All that weight transference and counter pressure stuff, you know!

After pricing out materials to cover this area with, we concluded that since most of the sand in the sandbox ends up outside the box anyhow, that perhaps when you can’t beat em’ you should join em’ and so sand around the box was the best solution for us. This was also hands down the least expensive solution and one that wouldn’t cause a problem with scraped knees or bug infestations like bark has a tendency to do in these parts with our friend the ant. For the sandbox itself, we use Play Sand which is cleaned and carefully packaged to provide a safe and clean sand castle building environment for the kiddos, but for the surrounding area this would begin to add up in cost since a bag of play sand is a bit over $4 per bag. The All Purpose sand however is under $3 per bag and has a more coarse consistency which would help it stay put and was perfect for our needs!

5 bags later we were back in business and while we knew it would settle a ton after the first rain it lives through, and that we would likely need to replenish it then, we were finished for the most part, with this simple little fix! We just poured the bags in a willy nilly kind of pattern and raked it into place. We really needed another bag or 2 to fill in a few areas that were a bit lower to allow for draining in it’s former life as part of our lawn, but since rain was on the horizon for the next day, we figured it could wait and we would save ourselves some time by filling in once we knew how much it would settle and how many total bags we would need! The image below is an update on the sand after the first rain, you can see that the edges nearest the patio settled quite a bit and we will need to fill in there now, but overall this has actually made a huge impact on the yard and how ‘put together’ it seems now. Strange…I didn’t expect that result but there you have it! The total cost of this quick little project was around $25 and with 2 more bags of sand needed to fill in a bit, that puts our grand total at under $30 for this transformation. I have to say the beachy feel it’s given the yard is rather exciting and I can’t wait to show you pictures of how this fits into my plans for the yard as a whole! I have many more projects on my outdoor to do list, and I will share my progress with you along the way. One small step a time and my house will become a home!