Dan bought this thing called a "weed dragon" which is basically a small flame thrower - you attach a hose to a can of gas, light the end, and torch away. It is wonderful tool for weed control if you have areas like gravel where weeds, moss, etc... like to grow. (Note: dandelions will die when you torch them, but they come back unless you remove the root manually, we've discovered) Dan also uses it for around the edges of our yard where we don't have stuff planted, but weeds cross over from the neighbor's yards. It's also great if you want to burn a pile of debris but can't get it lit because it's somewhat damp.
Yes, I'm positive several of the neighbors HATE us for the smoke, but we don't do it on days where burning is banned, and the next door neighbors (thankfully) do the same thing (sans the weed dragon, they use a match the old fashioned way) so at least the rest of the 'hood can't quite tell who to blame. Unless they read this. And we always have the hose out next to him so he doesn't, you know... burn the place down.
Anyway, Dan has used it in spotty areas in the lawn where the weeds were really concentrated, but it will torch the grass too... so unless you want to live with burn marks until you over seed the grass, it's not all that great for the middle of lawns. For my garden bed, Dan torched the grass in an outline of where the bed would go so it would be easier to remove. That's the other thing, if you plan on making a patio or something, the torch is great for burning down the greenery so it's easier to remove.
On to this weekend's adventures! Two whole days of fun in the dirt!
First off... digging up sod with a garden fork really sucks. My back and shoulders were terribly sore last week, so I went and bought myself a garden claw. I *LOVE* the garden claw... poke, twist, and the sod is ripped up... then poke, twist and a good 6 inches of hard earth are broken up. I like to dig deep, so after running the claw over a section of hard earth I come back with the garden fork
and get down about 18 inches. After having broken the surface with the claw, the fork slides in (with a little push and shove) and breaks chunks off like sections of polar ice caps. A distance that took me 2 hours with the fork alone took me 1 hour with the combination of tools.
I'm not editing the photos today, so if they seem a bit dull it's because I took them last night when it was starting to turn dusk.
Here's the garden beds today. I finished digging up the new beds, and on Dan's advice finished the wall with cinder blocks. His original thought was to cap off the blocks with wood so the beds look prettier... I'm all for it, I just don't think it'll happen anytime soon anyway. I moved some boulders around to create more of an official entrance to the garden area (on either side of the path in the middle) and mulched the path so it's soft mulch to walk on instead of hard mud/weeds. I rebuilt the interior walls of the beds with downed trees from the storm, and also opened up the fence end of the path (rather than have it end abruptly with cinder blocks) The smoke you see in the background is from Dan's burn pile in the far corner of the yard, he's been clearing the line where we'll be putting in a fence.
Here's the other side of the garden beds. As I said, I opened this side of the path and on either side of the opening sits our big pots from Ikea that we bought on a whim last year. I'm not sure what will end up living in those pots, but it'll likely be tomatoes... unless something else catches my eye.
The trellis - this one will be for cherry tomato plants of various type, and I'm happy to say it turned out exactly as I pictured (although the neighbor keeps asking me when we're having the badminton tournament) I know I'm ambitious making them 6 feet tall, but I really want the plants to have room to grow this year. The netting is called Gardeneer Trellis Netting - I read about it online and I'm excited to get a chance to use it this year. I was concerned about how sturdy the sticks might be in the ground, but Dan came up with the idea of creating cement bases for the sticks using quick set cement and old plastic gallon flower pots.
I'm excited not ony that I made them myself, but that I'm recycling those plastic pots that we keep stacking up every time we buy plants.
Here's a shot of the finished garden bed. The interior walls, like I said, are made up of downed trees from the storm. Dan cut up a few branches to make stakes for me and I pounded them into the ground to hold the trunks in place. The leftover space I filled in with rocks that I dug up (oh yeah... the new garden bed yielded an entire wheelbarrow full of rocks. I think digging wouldn't take so damn long if I didn't stop to examine them to see if any were worth polishing. I have a bucket of rocks to polish now) Anyway... the path is MUCH more comfortable to walk on and kneel on now that it's mulched... and again, I'm super excited to be recycling things from the yard to make the garden beds.
Ongoing projects... I'm not getting a truckload of dirt, because we don't have a trailer yet... so I'll make do with probably 10 or so bags of compost added to the new bed. I think the old beds have enough soil in them, and staking the interior walls this year will help keep the logs from rolling, and the good soil from traveling into the path (like it did last year) This is the reason I haven't buried the other posts for the next two trellis structures... I need to dump compost in the new bed and I might add a little to that old portion. Anyway, I need to buy more trellis stuff for those.
The hanging baskets - Dan decided (wisely) that putting them on the wooden portion of the fence over the fire pit is a bad idea, since there is absolutely no sunlight in that portion of the yard. Hanging them on the chain link would be easier and less permanent (and cause less damage, since it's not our fence I'm not inclined to hang anything on the wood portion) He also said I can plant whatever I want, so trailing tomato vines are again a reality. Woo!
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