Firestarter

I got this wood over a month ago from Emily's farm, but nevertheless haven't had a fire since last year. Next cold snap--maybe tomorrow night!--I'll see if I can get a fire going without the help of the biker guy next door (who's been known to start a fire for us at 2 a.m. in a pinch).

My woodpile-covering--surprise!--has been pretty slack. I put the wood on a tarp to keep it off the wet leaf-humus layer under the magnolia tree, but it doesn't stretch all the way around the top of the pile.

Then, in my usual haphazard fashion, I got this piece of heavy-duty black plastic free from the local feed-and-seed--the guy who gave it to me actually said, "If it don't have four legs I don't know nothin' 'bout it"--but that keeps blowing off in rainstorms. So basically I'm hoping that the wood was already pre-dried enough to withstand the various soakings it's accumulated.

Otherwise, back to the biker. He seems to know what's what when it comes to fires.

Fire Pit in Use!

I've been looking for an inexpensive way to get some wood for the fire pit. So when Tom mentioned he was having nine trees removed from his property, I asked him if I could have some of the resulting logs. He agreed! Last weekend I went to his house and loaded up my hatchback. He had the most amazing wood pile I have ever seen.


Here's the bones of an old fire.


I had another picture of a roaring fire from the other night but I accidentally deleted it. Doh!

Yard Round-up

I got some yardwork done this week, finally. The new place is shaping up nicely.

The first thing I did was create a compost heap. I didn't ask my landlady about this, but the nice thing about a composter is that it can always be removed later with little to no impact on the yard. Of course, my ideal would be that it stay after I leave, with the next resident continuing to compost. Then again, right now I don't ever want to move again, so that might not come to pass.

I got the composter--basically a roll of chicken wire-type stuff--from the Alachua County Waste Management office:

They don't advertise it, but they give these things away for free. I only called them because I knew that many cities have similar programs. They also give away free air-tight compost buckets for the kitchen, and they sell these other compost bins for $30. I'm on the waiting list for one of those, but I don't know if I'll get one when they come in. I don't use my compost for garden fertilizer, so I don't really need a high-tech system. It's just a way for me to reduce waste, and sometimes get free plants.

It's lined with cardboard to keep heat and moisture in, and to reduce the chance that raccoons will get into it when I forget to stir it up. (Properly maintained compost should not stink or attract pests.) I know it looks ugly, so I planted my new passion flower and a native honeysuckle vine up against it. The hope is that the compost will feed the plants and they'll vine up all prettily onto the wire, thus concealing the cardboard from sight.

There are admittedly some flaws in this plan, however: 1) I may have waited too long to transplant the honeysuckle from the pot where I placed it this spring--and it's not looking so hot right now--and 2) passion flower dies back in the winter. Well, call it an experiment.

Yesterday my duplex-mate and I built a massive fire pit:

The thing is about four feet across and represents some serious sweat equity on both of our parts (my back is killing me today). Don't ask me where my neighbor got the cement, because it may be borderline misdemeanor-y. We created a pile of dirt that was mind-boggling. Our lot seems to stretch back another half-acre or so. There's grass, and then there's a line at which a weedy, forested wilderness begins. So we threw the dirt back there.

I don't know about anywhere else, but in Gainesville, people go nuts for backyard fires in the fall. So that's pretty exciting.

We also scavenged some wood:

This morning I took some photos of some other aspects of my landscape. Here is my sad little collection of vegetables (and strawberries):

You can see I have a bowl of seed packets there waiting, nay, begging, to be planted. It's been a busy fall, so I'm trying to give myself a break and not get too upset about being a lame-o slacker veggie gardener this season. There's always spring, summer, and next fall to grow vegetables.

I'm still trying to figure out what the light's like in my yard. The recent time change didn't help my observations. So right now I have most of my plants edging my driveway:

I try to look at them every day to see if any look like they're suffering from too much exposure to sun. I have a few more lining the pathway to the back door:

I also placed a few plants on my old rickety plant stand under the magnolia tree:

Those are the shadelovers, and I'm banking that that area is pretty shady. But it's hard to tell. (When did I get so many plants?)

The only other thing I'd like to point out about my landscape is these horrid shrubs that edge the back and sides of the house. I really, really, really don't like these plants. I think they're ugly and they make getting to the hose annoying. (I have to say that I'm not a shrub person in general.) I'm going to ask my landlady if I can rip these particular ones out and make a flower bed. I've actually never had a flower bed before, so I'm kind of excited about the possibilities. (It would help if I knew how much light that area gets.)

That's about all that's going on in the landscape right now. Oh, wait--I did plant those winter annuals (dianthus, snapdragon, pansy, etc.), but forgot to take photos of the pots.