Projects Old and New

I took this video [which, alas, won't upload, booo] by the pond earlier in August. Nothing is really "happening" - the intense birdsong of spring is over, and even the bullfrogs have calmed down. But gently, almost imperceptibly, the "island" is drifting across the pond in the breeze. I find it so calming to watch when it does that! 

Calling it an island is kind of a misnomer; it's a giant floating mass of reeds, which occasionally seems to anchor itself in place for weeks, and then will wind up floating about. Lately it's often been in the shallower end in the morning, but somehow it always seems to find its way back to its "home" in the back corner of the pond. There's an actual island over there, likewise covered in reeds, but durable enough to have actual trees on it. If you go around the back of the pond, the edge of the island is only about 10 feet away - but it's 10 feet of quite deceptively deep water. I'd never be able to get the rowboat back there - it's too hemmed in on the sides with vegetation. Maybe one day I'll borrow a kayak and use that as a pontoon bridge! 

I did take the boat out for its third and final "sail" of the summer last weekend. This time my goal was to clean up some floating bits of plant debris, so I just brought a Home Depot bucket that I could fill up with muck, then pull alongside the shallow end and hand off to Sean to empty. Another reason I wouldn't go into the water, aside from the deepness...it's so full of bugs, Jesus Christ. I mean, I'm happy that the ecosystem's happy, but nothing like pulling a mass of pond weed into the boat and having tons of mite-sized bugs spill off it onto your legs. There are also bugs that look like beetles or crickets but live underwater. This did not fill me with joy. Nor did Sean's unexpected announcement that the island was floating toward me! I was in the middle of the pond, I turn around, and the wind was indeed pushing it my way. It was sort of freaky - for one thing, it's a lot BIGGER when you're looking up at it from a boat. 

 

Since none of the pond turtles want to be my friends, I had to buy one. This "little" guy is 56 lbs of concrete, but he was only $35! He lives in the front mulch bed now. He hasn't been officially named, but I'm using "The Great Turtle" as a placeholder. 

This Home Depot visit was in preparation for another long-delayed intended project: splitting the irises in the front garden bed. Supposedly they're supposed to be split every 3-5 years. Now, I don't know who planted them (was it the people who sold to us, who were barely here a year? Or the lady who lived here since the house was built in 1960?), but they definitely haven't been split since 2020 at least. The rhizomes were huge and heavy, and I was thinking of Archimedes' "I could move the whole world, with a lever big enough" as I levered my shovel parallel to the ground trying to bring the clumps up. Then you start snapping them apart, separating each turnip-looking rhizome with a little leaf frond from its compatriots, and piling them up in stacks like in this picture:

I wound up with more than 70 individual rhizomes - and I wound up leaving one half of the iris plantings intact (partially "for science" and partially out of exhaustion). The only problem is that planting guidance says to replant each individual rhizome with 18 inches of clearance. Who has that kind of space? I crammed a few into where the plantings had been originally:

and then added a dozen or so alongside the house where the mulch bed had been empty. You're supposed to bury them so shallowly that the top of the rhizome is visible, which I think I did okayish at, but we'll see what happens with all of these in the spring.

The other task last weekend was spreading those bags of soil on top of the empty area by the pond that I've been solarizing all summer! We took the plastic off and spread out four bags of soil. Then this morning, I mixed up all of my seeds from these lovely envelopes:

and shook them up in a mason jar. They barely amounted to a tablespoon:

So I added some sand to make it easier to spread, and did my best to spread it around evenly. Then I tamped them in a little by walking over the bed (always slightly dicey because it's on a slope and there are two bunny burrows at the edge just begging to roll your ankle!), added a little water, and then covered it all up with gardening burlap. Now, in theory, we wait for spring! I know that wildflower patches usually don't produce actual flowers until the 2nd or 3rd season, so it's going to be kind of a challenge figuring out if something is a weed that I should pull or a seedling, but...fingers crossed!

Between the irises and the wildflower patch, I feel like I've wrapped up two projects that have been in the back of my mind for a couple of years. I was also able to cross off "add ventilation to shed roof" at long last (something that was advised by the inspector when we considering buying the house), with a local carpenter Josh Leetes, who was recommended by the guy who did our pest control. To actually redo the shed - replace all the rotting trim and some side boards - he quoted us $5k, which is hilariously out of budget. Inserting a pair of gable vents, though, was a mere $500. Sold! But now the vents sit unpainted, so my next project, and sort of a stop-gap "keep the shed looking decent/prevent mouse entry" thing, is to 1) replace the rotted trim myself with new wood, and 2) scrape/repaint the trim on the front when I paint the vents. I'm planning to go to the lumberyard this week to talk to someone about the costs. There are fancy recycled composite boards that come pre-primed, but we'll see how that compares to "basic bitch" wood.