...creating a wee bit of paradise...: Around the farm

Updates seem to be few and far between here on our blog.

There's not been a lot of new planting this summer on the property. We've had an extremely dry summer. Living on catchment has been very interesting with the nearly arid conditions we've had. Up until the last couple of weeks, a HUGE percentage of our water was going into filling the pool-- which can lose sometimes a whole inch of surface water to evaporation on a bright and sunny day. I've rigged up an ugly, but effective solution, in the form of some thick, black, bendy, inexpensive corrugated pipe that goes from one of the downspouts on the house, right into the pool. So far it's making a huge difference in filling up the pool, and I think that we can mostly stop using the tank water on the pool.

So we haven't wanted to really plant a lot of new stuff, since that would require lots of watering. But like all summers, there's a lot of maintenance in the form of mowing, weedwacking and pulling weeds.

The rains (or at least a little bit of rain) seem to have started, so we're going today to a bamboo festival to look for some large and spiky bamboo.

We did manage to get the property line surveyed between us and the mean neighbor. GB and I went out yesterday and put T-posts into the ground to mark the points on line that the surveyors marked with little wooden sticks. Now we'll see about plants for there (see above reference to spiky bamboo).

Some photos from yesterday afternoon:

GB has been working hard on fixing up this formerly very very messy with lame grass area. That's a lime tree in the center.

The Biermans gave us some clumps of their good grass when they planted some trees last week. GB and Ra'am went over there yesterday and dug out a portion of their front lawn and brought it over to cover more area around the lime tree. Apparently it was hard work and the grass was heavy. I wouldn't know... I was sewing.