Mid-summer yard update

This is the year of the great squash experiment. Not knowing a blessed thing about the plants we were planting (as in, did you know that pumpkin vines can grow to be 35-40 feet in length? I didn't!), we have overloaded our tiny backyard garden box with two pumpkin vines, a yellow squash vine/bush, a zucchini plant, four cucumber plants and two broccoli plants.

The overall effect:


Up close with squash overload. Zucchini in the top right and one of the pumpkin vines in the bottom left:


Produce! This is so far the only pumpkin we have produced for our pains. It is ripe, beautiful and lovely. So now we have a pumpkin in August.


These pumpkin vine tendrils wrapped themselves around patches of grass in the backyard, holding on for dear life. I think they're gorgeous on their own, though.


The broccoli...that we're hoping will turn into something edible one of these days:


The cucumber vines and our nascent basil plant:


Fresh cucumbers from the garden are our top delight this summer:


Pepperoncini, for which I have my doubts, mostly due to serious overshadowing by pumpkin leaves:


That's all in one garden box. In the other backyard box, we planted a couple of varieties of carrots (Danvers, Nantes, Little Finger and Carnival Blend -- Carnival was the least successful).


And this is what happens when you get a radish packet from Matthew Moore at Sundance and figure, eh? Why not? But then realize that neither of you like radishes (nasty little things):


Then, we have a third garden box (clearly in over our heads) by the kitchen. By and large it has been scorched by the heat and exposure of our site, but a few things have survived. Namely, the tomato plants that I didn't kill are now threatening to take over the house:


And this is the end of a fight with arugala. It started out so lovely, with spring greens that we added to salads and quiches. It ended with an insane patch of flowering plants that crowded out everything else. So I hacked it back:



...and made room for a watermelon vine that has showed its appreciation for the extra space by doubling in size over the last few days. I'm still hoping that this will produce something before the first frost.


In the rest of the yard, our front yard on the south side was not getting full coverage from the sprinklers. So now that Tai is a pro, he added a few extra heads to hit our borders:


But the best thing about the summer has been slowing down and enjoying the results of all our hard work over the last 18 months. It's a bit surreal to think of where we were a year ago and where we are now. That was a lifetime ago.

New moderns

Just a hat tip to all the folks in our area doing new modern projects -- it's great to see a swell of infill modern homes. Grassroots Modern is keeping tabs on a few, including the one we drive past every day: ul[1] on 900 East around 700 South.

We like the lines, suspect the architect is the son of a former neighbor in our original slc202 condo building by the University of Utah, and love the privacy walls in the outdoor spaces (can you tell we still haven't built our fence yet?).


But this was our favorite:

"We had been looking for a lot in the up and coming neighborhood of the Salt Lake 9th and 9th area for a period of 3 years. This area is extremely competitive for vacant land and building small modern homes is beginning to be the trend. This has been going on in other metropolitan areas for years but we are seeing an increasing demand for this type of product in SLC for which there is few to choose from. I believe we are raising the standard for this building type in the area and am very excited to see it being constructed." (emphasis mine)

We also loved this gem (in a non-sarcastic sense):

"The house achieved Gold LEED standards but the owner opted for spending the additional 5-6 thousand in other areas instead of the LEED testing and registration fees."

Amen.

Cedar siding

We knew when we agreed to this design that our cedar siding would take some upkeep if we wanted to retain its color. Without a yearly coat of sealant, the wood will fade and eventually gray, and we want to keep it looking fresh as long as possible.

Even though the cedar was sealed with two spray coats before it was installed, we could tell that it needed a refresh after the winter weather and Utah sun.


It took both of us about eight hours total to seal, with the majority of that time spent maneuvering very tall and heavy ladders.


We love the red look and can tell that the wood was due for a fresh coat -- it nearly glows now. So even though it will be kind of a pain, we'll spend the time once a year to re-seal the wood.

(Also, we were sitting in church a little while ago and noticed this Bible verse from 1 Kings 6:9: "So he built the house, and finished it; and covered the house with beams and boards of cedar." We had a good laugh.)

Barter

What do you do when you're flat broke but have an enormous living room wall that cries for art?

You barter away an old red couch...


...call your friends over for an evening of watching you bicker over leveling a huge sheet of painted Tyvek...


...watch your husband do death-defying stunts 13 feet off the ground...


...and replace the old couch with one you've spent two years saving for! (Found here.)


Many, many thanks to our generous friend and artist Benjamin Wiemeyer for taking pity on us and doing the barter. We love the painting and the view from the sidewalk:


(And so does the neighbor kid who just rode past and shouted, "I love your painting!")

More yard

We got the sprinklers in, got the sod down and basically stopped doing landscaping work. There are a few things we have to worry about still, though, including our parking strip:


Those used to be full of knee-high weeds, then we spent Memorial Day digging them out. The effort was so great, evidently, that we haven't done anything since then. Eventually, we plan to put in some weed fabric, plants and maybe some mulch or gravel to top it all off.

This is on our south side, just east of our patio. The drain runs to the gravel pit buried in our backyard. The white pipe is a stubbed sprinkler line for drip irrigation, which we hope will someday water a few trees and other plants in that spot. Our next project, though, is to put some more paving stones in that space to create a landing pad for our garbage/recycling/yard waste cans.


And here we're hoping to place mulch and a bunch of plants down here. But for now (because we don't have the scratch for plants) we are growing a couple of pumpkin vines, which is what the flags marked.

Yard photos

The last post was a little long on words and short on photos, so here's a few pictures to prove that we still love you all:

The Yard

Wow. Where to start...

...perhaps the best place is with my/our massive underestimation of the time, expense and good humor our landscaping would require. Admittedly, I know nothing of these things, but I now foolishly remember saying things like, "yeah, Tai will get the sprinklers laid in a couple of days, then we'll get the sod in right after. It shouldn't take us more than a few weekends."

HA.

With the first tease of spring in mid March we started planning and talking logistics. I think we made our first trip to the Sprinkler Supply Company in early April for a system design. And even though we are a teensy bit broke after building a house, sprinklers were something we wanted to spend the money on this year, knowing that this was really our only chance to do it well. Once we got a system designed and saw how much trenching this was going to take, we followed the company's suggestion and hired a trencher. Along the way, you realize that you really need another, different tool or you need five more of that one thing or it would be so much simpler if you had that other thing and all of a sudden all the charges on your account point to Lowe's. So it goes.

Then, the dirt. Oh, the dirt. If we were mud flats before the trenching, we became mud topographies after -- trenches, vales, swales, sinks, mounds, and plains all made it look as though an army of burrowing rodents invaded Lincoln Street. It wouldn't have been so bad if not for the relentlessly precipitative weather this spring. It's hard to lay sprinkler pipe when the trench is under two inches of water.

Anybody remember this incident? I remember the trauma of being 800 miles away and getting his text: "what's our insurance number?" During this sprinkler process I lived in fear (FEAR!) of getting a similar text or worse. Tai did nothing to assuage this fear.

The first night he worked on installation I walked up to the front yard to ask him a question in time to watch a 3-foot length of pipe explode from our water supply line with a terrifying WHOP, rocket 30 feet into the air, drop onto the sidewalk across the street in front of two alarmed pedestrians, and give way to a six-foot geyser. The next night's performance featured the end cap of that same pipe exploding off into Tai's face -- without, thankfully, injury to anything other than his manly pride. The following night involved several iterations of "hey, babe, do you think you might want a little professional help?" conversations.

But, dear readers, Tai is a total champ. These were not setbacks!, he claimed, these were learning experiences! He soldiered on in the face of my sideline skepticism. And, then, four weeks later, we had a functioning sprinkler system. Well, four weeks, many blisters, an incident involving pipe primer and eyeballs, and A LOT of bending-over back cleavage later.

This is what we see now:


And life is good.