Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Elements backyard garden is moving!

Elements backyard garden is moving to its own host and changing formats to wordpress! Please visit the new site and make a comment. How do you guys like it? Right now I will keep both sites open and posting regularly to both. Should have the same content at least for now!

Yesterday I did my First Staining project.

Late yesterday, I decided to stain my porch screen door. Originally when we rented the house it had a nice screened in porch but it did not have a screen door or any type door so it was pointless to have a screened in porch and do to the mosquitoes we could not use the porch.


One day my wife and I went to one of the big box stores and purchased a cheap unfinished screen door and had it cut down to the correct size. We also bought a fancy screen door brushed nickel door handles and hook lock. The next day I installed the hardware and put the door up. About two years later, the door started to look kinda shabby. I was also worried that the door would start to rot since the door was not treated for the weather.

So late yesterday evening, I decided to remove the hardware, the screen, and sand down the old wood. Once that was that was completed, cleaned and prepped the area for staining. I then got a cheap set of all purpose paint brushes and small can of stain. All together it took about 2 hours to complete the project. Tonight after work, I will inspect my handy work and decide if it needs another coat. If it does this time I will pull out the trusty saw horses and remove the door and hinges and add another coat.

Maybe tomorrow I will post a picture of the door once it has had time to dry.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Veggie Garden Plot Phase 1

Over the last few months, I have been working on several new flower beds. One of those flower beds was originally setup for in ground plantings for Tomatoes and Peppers. But due the heat and other factors I lost most of the seedlings. So this year we purchased our veggies from several different places and planted in three and five gallon buckets. Because of the heat some of the younger tomatoes are not doing so well. A couple of them were hidden and did not get water for a couple of days. But they will come back and should produce some tomatoes in a few months.

This bed is a 20ft x 8ft bed. Half this bed is setup for in ground close proximity plantings and the other is setup for five to eight gallon container veggie gardening. The container section can be converted to in ground planting if we decide we want to commit to a veggie plot.

As for the soil conditioning, I mixed in homemade compost, worm compost, donkey manure, leaf mulch and landscaping mix.Then weed screen was layed across the entire bed followed by hardwood mulch.

Phase 1 Almost complete - Need to organize and tie everything up
Tomato Pot - That brown stick is a blackberry cane I haven't gotten around to removing.
Candy Striped Tomatoes - Can't wait till theire ready to eat!

Sunday, June 14, 2009

The Worm Factory

3 weeks ago my wife bought me an early birthday gift. She got me The Worm Factory and I love it. I put it together in about 20 minutes. The first steps are to take it out of the shipping box and assemble it. The instructions were simple and easy to understand. I will not bore you with the instructions but, I will show some pictures of the install process.


The next step is to prepare the bedding for the worms. This kit comes with coconut coir and strips of newspaper. All that is needed is a layer of newspaper sheets unfolded and enough to cover the bottom of the tray. Next I soaked the coir in warm water for about 20 minutes. After the coir was ready, I mixed in the newspaper and some compost from my bins. Once mixed in I added this mix to the tray. I then added tow large handfuls of rotten vegetable matter and covered with several more sheets of water.


Once the worms arrive, I added them to the worm factory. Once I added the worms to the factory I then added a cup of water to the bin.

When you are ready to close up the bin, add several more sheets on top of the worms. The worms will look small and skinny, but once they are refrigerated and had some time to much on the debris in the bin they will fatten back up. In about a week, check on your worms and make sure they are doing okay. If the worms are doing well, most of the food will be gone and add food as needed. Once a week add a cup of water to the bin.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

blog is moving!

Sorry its been a while since I have last updated. As before I just haven't much time to work on the garden and post new updates. But I promise to update you soon. I have several projects I am working on and hopefully I will post up soon.

As the title says, elements backyard garedn is moving! I finally got around to moving to my own host. I am still working on the templates and it looks like I have to manually import since wordpress to blogger is does not seem to work on my host. Anyways take a look at my new site. Once its open and running I will post up here and let everyone know again.

The site is elements backyard garden

Monday, June 1, 2009

Just an update

Just an update. Sorry about not updating my blog in a while. I have been to busy to work in the garden and with all the rain, I haven't worked that much in the garden. I will post some new pictures soon