Thursday, June 28, 2012

Outdoor Projects

We've been busy with some outdoor projects.  We had our old asphalt drive tore out and had a new one put in.  We toyed with the idea of doing some of the work ourselves - specifically, tearing out the old one. But boy, am I glad we just went ahead and dropped a large chunk of change and had someone else do it.  This company worked crazy hard. They showed up at almost 5 pm on a Friday and they worked until 9:30 pm....but our entire driveway had been tore out, leveled, and hauled away. I imagine that job would have taken us WEEKS to do on our own. And on Monday they showed up and layed new asphalt. It's lovely. Absolutely lovely. Who knew I could feel so fond of a driveway?! The boys love being able to finally ride their bikes and run around on it. It had so many holes, dips, and areas that were worn down that it was not conducive for little boys running around. No pics taken though. You'll have to come and visit us.

The old sidewalk, from the driveway to the front door, had been asphalt as well. We had it tore out, but decided to pave it with bricks.  Adam and his cousin worked on this last weekend. We're really happy with the results. It looks sharp!

And since the garden is outdoors, I'll talk about that too.  The woodland creatures are NOT my friends these days.   We've never had any trouble until this year with them. Please just let me enjoy my little crops of fruits and veggies!  So, I caught a bunny nibbling on my broccoli leaves and suspected they were also eating my strawberries.   I put out some big bunches of human hair and Adam tried to hunt them a few times.  I then discovered it was not ground attacks that were taking out my strawberries, but aerial attacks! No, not flying bunnies, but ROBINS!  They completely obliterated my strawberries. They were present in hordes and showed up at all hours of the day.  I tried to detract them with shiny homemade pinwheel things that were said to (maybe) scare them away.  Didn't work. I did not taste even one from my garden. Since the season is short and now over (although, strawberries are perennials - meaning they come back every year), I thought about ripping them all out and planting another crop of something else in this year, but Adam wants to take the robins on next summer and we'll try to put a netting or cage around them.  And tonight I discovered that DEER were nibbling not only on the strawberry plant leaves that I could care less about at this point...but also on my delicious green bean plants. I didn't catch them in the act, but it was obvious it was deer. Grrrrrr.  The situation did allow for a brief interaction with our minimally-English speaking neighbor who saw us contemplating our garden and she showed us what they did to her garden and shared her "liquid fence" product with us. We like to make connections with our neighbors...but would prefer not to do this over frustrations regarding animals eating our gardens.