We have an unexpected rooster. Legally, we are not allowed to have roosters, nor did we ever plan on keeping one. But now that he’s here…he beautiful, and actually one of the friendliest of the flock. It’s been fun seeing his crow change from what I first thought was my toddler crying to a pretty nice cockle-doodle-do. He actually has great timing to be our alarm clock in the morning. His fate is still undecided: butchering or giving away are both still options. But for now he can stay.

The chickens feeder and water got updated to this homemade version made out of 3″ PVC pipe. It’s been very easy to use and keep clean, and cost us about $20 in supplies.

Finally in chicken news: we got new chicks. They are are a fun batch that love to eat right out my hand.

The veggies are doing just fine. At the end of the cool season crops, I had some expected surprises.

Flowers. The yellow is broccoli raab and the purple is radish. Radish has a surprising pretty flower, and its nearly three feet tall. These particular plants never really bulbed up well, so the flowers were a good consolation prize.

That was a bit over a a week ago, and with increasing temperatures, my front garden is in need of a makeover. The heat is punishing the cool-season crops and aphids have moved in. But I want to get some seeds before I change it to a warm season garden, so it’ll look a bit bad for a while

The tomatoes are doing better than hoped for, and my zucchini was yet to die. The asparagus transplants that were almost dead when I planted them are bouncing back. And I’m now enjoying snap peas. I never pick enough to actually get them inside, they just make a delicious snack out in the garden.

Here are the tomatoes:

And just a week later:

I’ve called this year our demolition year, and it definitely has been. We’ve ripped out enough 50 year old shrubs to make a pile big enough for someone to live in. Good thing about ripping stuff out is it is cheap, even if it is labor intensive. Landscape installation can get quite expensive fast, and we do not have an adequate budget. As a guideline, total landscape installation can cost 10-30% of the value of the house.. It’s not a crazy amount: although doing it yourself and over time will reduce the cost. Hopefully, for a fraction of the cost and a lot of labor we’ll still get some good results.

This fence line had a ton of volunteer maples, and half-dead bridal wreath spireas.

After lots of pruning: I wouldn’t mind if some of the spireas came back, but I don’t care if they don’t too.

Right now thought, the landscape is a bundle of hopeful dreams and currently a lot of projects in the making. It looks awful. I’m letting weeds grow and grass die. But I think the difference between what I’m doing and a neglected landscape is that I have a vision for mine, and I’m letting weeds grow and grass die because I’m working toward something that will be better. I understand that weeds are better than bare soil, that I don’t want to waste the valuable resource of water on a non-wanted lawn. The landscape is progressing, even if it is nowhere close to where I want it to be. And we finally got rid of all the garbage that had piling in the backyard.

In the middle of mowing the back half of our yard. Everything growing here is weeds.

All done. Notice the big pile of shrubs on the left, and the old shed that has transformed into a storage area–now with stuff we want instead of garbage. Much better than before.

In the massive weed patch that makes up our backyard, I did want to grow squash and other large plants. After I mowed, Joe tilled, we laid down a soaker hose and black plastic mulch. Today, I went to go water the squash and discovered that the hose had a hole and wouldn’t work. So I had to pull up the plastic mulch, get a new soaker hose, and then put everything back together. Hopefully the hose doesn’t break again. I do like using soaker hoses and plastic mulch on curcurbits, they do really well and there isn’t a lot of weeding.

Later update:

Turns out I haven’t even been using the soaker hoses. I found it isn’t too hard to just hand water with the water turn, and that’s how I’ve been irrigating everything. The only problem is there is only a small, less important part of my yard that is effectively irrigated by the irrigation turn, and I’m getting tire of having to water so much by hand. The worst is the lawn. I actually don’t mind watering the edibles and flowers. But I hate grass. I feel like it is a status symbol of how your landscape is doing, and mine is dry. I irrigated the park strip yesterday, for the first time this year. Even thought I don’t want grass there, I decided I better not kill it off until I’m ready to put something else out there.

Lawn only needs to be deeply irrigated once a month to not die. It needs a lot more water to stay green, but  I am not yet ready to give my nemesis that pleasure. I have decided to kill the lawn in my front yard though. No irrigation, and because it is a high traffic area, it is decomposing fast. It’ll look a lot better with whatever ends up there.