Bottles: Phase Two

Slowly but surely we are inching towards finally finishing our first bottle boarder flower bed around the house- and you know what that means!  Almost time to start the second one...

But first things first.  When I last shared our bottle boarder update it looked like this:

Bottles a plenty, yes, but top soil, prettiness, weed control??  Not so much.  Well it was about time I did something about that.  So on top of adding another 18 bottles to the end of the line (still about 4 dozen short, just need to get out there and do that already!) I also installed some free weed control.

I had a bunch of newspaper left over from a recon I did for the neighborhood (you can read about that here at OxfordHandmade), so I unfolded it and laid it out over my flower bed.  I tore holes/left space so that my plants could peak through, but I covered the weeds with two solid layers.  I went back every few minutes and sprayed everything with water to help hold it down.  Soon, my flowerbeds looked like this:

Classy right?  Well I didn't intend for it to stay that way.  I've actually read about this process several times online and several people swear by it.  The newspaper is supposed to suppress the weeds, then break down and just become one with the earth.  I'm so tired of weeds choking up my flowers I'd try just about anything, and this idea was free and easy- I figured it was worth a shot.

Well I added my newspapers, sprayed them with water, and then waited around for Marco.  He had spent all morning going back and forth from our house to the "free mulch place."  This place is for real here in Oxford- and most towns and cities have similar set ups.  Basically, when the city cuts down branches or trees, either from storm damage or power line maintenance, they mulch them up and pile it high.  The mulch is free to get, it just takes a little muscle power and you have to bring your own containers.  Well we had plenty of containers, so six trips later, we had plenty of mulch.  One of those trips went straight onto my newspapers until the entire bed looked like this:

Huzza.  We buried just about everything in mulch. Most things had died for winter anyway, but if it was still kicking, we went back and unearthed it a little.  There was plenty of great topsoil already composted in there, and it will settle with rain and time.  Now we just have to wait for spring when we can pour on a few bags of garden soil, toss in some of our own worm compost and watch it grow!  

Who else is excited for spring planting already??

Winter Yard Work

I spent the first weekend of December in the traditional fashion- outside in a t shirt doing yard work.

In fact, we had one of the most productive yard work weekends of the year except for that time we dug up a 100 square foot raised garden bed, poured in a ton of soil, tilled it and planted our 75 baby plants... so we are felling really good about this one.

Our to do list looked like such:

1. Clean garden beds (which means remove all of the old plants that were still hanging around, clean out the netting that was holding them up, hoe the rows and level)
2. Stir compost (especially important after adding a ton of new material, like all of the stuff we got out of the garden)
3. Clean out potted plants (mostly on the front porch and in the front flower beds)
4. Clean up trash near the deck/air conditioner/pallet storage
5. Clean up the second dresser we found on the street (more about the dressers on OxfordHandmade)
6. Fix the second dresser we found on the street
7. Paint the second dresser we found on the street
8. Fix the stairs that lead to the deck (there was a weird mini step at the top and the bottom, we needed to fix that ASAP)
9. Mulch the flower beds in the front
10. Split and divide all of the mint/spearmint/peppermint that had outgrown their containers
11. Transplant thyme plants from their beginner planters to new big plant planters
12. Paint the newspaper stand that has been hanging around out backyard for months
13. Relocate newspaper stand to be better used by the community 
14. Work on bottle boarder in the front of the house (hopefully this project will be D-O-N-E soon!)
15. Take a nap

Well I can assure you all has been done except paint the dresser- which needs to be done soon because it's supposed to rain this afternoon.  So I'll be back all this week showing off sharing pictures  and taking about dirt.

And p.s. we also did this on Saturday:

Congratulations Marco and Audi on a wonderful race at the Santa Run in Tupelo!!