Obsessed with Embellishment

We love using rain barrels - it cuts down on our water bill, plus we can water whenever we want during water restrictions, which happen just about every summer in our town.  During even a moderate rainfall so much water comes off of our garage these two barrels fill up in no time.

One thing we quickly discovered with this method is that water pressure counts, so we really needed to get the barrels up off the ground in order to get every last drop.  John designed and built the stand above in one afternoon with 4 x 4 pressure treated lumber and the galvanized clips you see here.  Everything came from Home Depot.  The biggest consideration was weight; each full barrel weighs 500 lbs. and this set-up is plenty strong enough to hold two more full barrels.  This stand will eventually hold four barrels - we’ll order two more next spring when our town announces the subsidy program.

I have convinced John that chickens are a good idea!

It pretty much came down to this: we have been thinking of getting a pet for DD1 - she desperately wants a dog, but we both work full time.   Plus, she and her twin DD2 are super busy kids four nights a week, so a puppy would be sadly neglected.  I’m also allergic to cats, so after giving it some thought and remembering that I have past experience raising baby pet birds, it seemed that chickens that will satisfy my gardening/sustainability instinct, her pet instinct, and big bonus - chickens live outside year round.  Plus we get those beautiful eggs. 

That works for me! 

John’s thrifty Scots heritage did kick in and he quickly nixed the Eglu ($800 avec chickens), so I had to do some internet searching on chicken coop plans.  One thing I quickly learned is that there are two schools of thought on coop design: people who scavange materials from virtually anything (a total no-go in my toney neighborhood) and people who aspire to the gentleman-farmer-high-end-solution (lovely but there are no prices quoted on that web site - what does that tell ‘ya?)

Here is the coop of my dreams:

Pretty yes?  This design has all the feaures required for healthy birds, the plans are not expensive, we can build it ourselves, and it’s wicked adorable to boot. I actually love the goofy window box, and if you watch the ebay video (scroll down) you’ll see a hen sitting inside the window!  I’m such a sucker…

 Next challenge: where to buy day old chicks.  The big mail order hatcheries sell every breed but they have minimum orders  - 25 chicks(!) - and the Boston metropolitan area is not exactly teeming with Agway stores….stay tuned.

This may sound crazy but it’s true - I love chickens.  Years ago a coworker who lived in Pembroke MA gave me some eggs from his Plymoth Rock hens, and they were the most delicious and beautiful things I’d ever seen.  The yolks were so fresh they were dome-shaped in the pan, and the whites were thick and shapely.  Plus, when we paid him a visit I discovered that chickens are hysterically funny to watch, and ever since I’ve wanted my own, but we live in suburban Boston next to Route 128, which is not exactly farm country.  My neighbors are more likely to have tennis courts and in-ground pools over henhouses. We also have a mid-century modern house, and the coop designs I’ve seen are squarely vintage farmhouse.

However, the Eglu might be just the ticket.  It’s got a cool design, sort of an iMac for fowl and like an iMac is comes in different colors.  A late night search on my town bylaws indicates that residents are allowed to keep chickens for a modest fee ($10 a year), and I only want two - just enough for eggs.  A rooster is not in the equation because they are too noisy, have only one thing on their minds anyway and we don’t need to breed chicks.   All I need to do is talk John into it!

My husband’s big project this summer has been building raised beds for our yard. He’s been working on this for almost a month; he designed the layout and beds himself and I think it looks great!  Before our renovation three years ago we did a lot of vegetable gardening, and we got away from that while the house was being done over.  But that project is finished now, so we can get back into veggie gardening, which we both love.

 

Our yard has very little turf, just enough for the girls to use as a play area.  Grass is a water and fertilizer hog, and in my town it’s common to see people watering a HUGE lawn that no one ever sets foot on during the summer, and this is just wasteful.  So most of our property is landscaped with native plants and now the side yard will be filled with raised beds.  And what isn’t landscaped is just left natural.

 

Here’s a view of the project, there are two L-Shaped beds facing each other, with another large square bed in the corner near the garage.  The inside area will be paved and used for seating, and I think it will make a nice alfresco dinning area.

  

 

That’s John on the left inspecting his work.  The beds are about 18 inches high, and the top and sides are made from Trex, a wood composite material used for decks.  It doesn’t rot, and it doesn’t need to be painted.  The 4 x 4 posts are pressure treated, but our research indicates that the amount of chemicals that will leach into the beds will be negligible.  Below is the one finished bed, the corners will be dressed up with a metal edging and the white material is PVC tubing that will support row covers. We’ll be able to plant these beds this fall with cool weather crops like lettuces, parsnips, carrots and radishes, and also for fall planting for crops like shallots and garlic that need to be planted in the fall for early spring harvest.

 

 

I think many vegetables are beautiful and ornamental in their own right, and the pretty ones like swiss chard, cabbages, kale and squashes will be interplanted with herbs and annual flowers such as nasturtiums, zinnias, and petunias to make the beds more decorative.  The theory of vegetables in straight rows is not really needed in a project like ours – we’re not doing vegetable commercial production.

 

 

This is a view of the PVC tubes that will hold the row cover hoops, which are necessary to keep out animals and pests.  We’ll be doing organic practices in these beds, and a barrier method is preferable to me over insecticides.  The 2nd PVC tube is an inlet for irrigation. The bottom of the beds are open, and we’ll need to install wire mesh to prevent critters like voles and bunnies from burrowing underneath the Trex.

 

We also have two rain barrels to catch water that runs off of the garage.  Our town sells these to residents with a subsidy to encourage less use of town water.  John will add an irrigation inlet to each bed, and then we’ll hook up a pump get the rainwater into the beds.

 

 

We also have peppers, chillis and basil growing in front of our house this year.  This view is the courtyard right by the front door, which is on right, and the big windows are the living room.  On the left is the home office, which is part of our master suite wing, and the two tiny windows right in the middle are for the master bath.  The peppers and basil are on the right, and the left bed is celosia (not looking too good.  Next year I’m just doing zinnias there.)

The right bed has pepper, chili and basil plants and all are actually attractive bedding plants, unlike tomatoes, which start looking really raggedy once the plants start to bear fruit (those will be in the Trex beds!)  These concrete beds face south, and they work only for annuals because of extra heat and protection coming off the house and windows creates a microclimate that throws perennials and spring bulbs totally out of wack.  This spring we had to dig up 200 bulbs from the front beds because the left sides of the beds were blooming about 7-10 days head of the right side of the bed, and it looked really weird!   We seasoned the bulbs on the north side of the house, which is dry and shady.  The bulbs are Ice Follies daffodils, and we’ll re-plant them elsewhere in the fall.

 

 

In the courtyard I like using tropicals and tender perennials as container plants.  They grow fast, look good with our modern house, and are inexpensive and widely available.  I throw them out after the first hard frost because these are all zone 7 or higher plants and won’t survive our zone 6 Boston climate.  The plants are Cannas (the banana leave plants, not blooming yet), Imopeas (the black and lime green plants, also called Sweet Potato Vine), Dahlias (the dark maroon flower), Caladium (the white and green leaved plant, much nicer in person that it looks in photos), and Alocasia (the big green heart shaped leaves).

 

This has been a great year for gardening!