Welcome to our garden...

Our garden is giving us so much....here's a little photo tribute to our amazing space this summer. 

  

Jethro Bodine Salad, A Summer Favorite

For those of you with fond memories of The Beverly Hillbillies, here's our twist on Jethro Bodine's humongous bowl of cereal: a Jethro Bodine-sized salad - we use our second-to-largest Pyrex bowl and fill it at least 3/4's full of greens, cucumbers, tomatoes, radishes, carrots, sunflower seeds, Parmesan cheese and dressing. There's no holding back during summer gardening abundance! Hope we are not alone in this...

Some recent cool nature sightings

There is so much happening and so little time to write our blog.  We are spending most of our time outdoors tending the garden, hiking and playing croquet with our new antique set. Yes, we're old school, but it's so fun!  Here's some of our recent nature sightings.

One of the haploa moths...

Turbulent phosphila caterpillars...

White-dotted prominent caterpillar...

Bumblebee on cosmos...

Peck's Skipper...

Gray treefrog on Cup Plant...so cute!

Another gray treefrog on goldenrod...

Fly pollinating a sneezeweed...

We so LOVE summertime.  Just last week we traveled up to Toledo, OH to visit Kitty Todd Nature Preserve and saw our first Karner blue butterflies, a federally endangered species.  Fantastic!  We forgot the memory card to our camera so can't share but that's the way it goes sometimes. 

Next up - a garden update...it's growing, growing!

Liability or Asset: Another "Junk" Building?

Our little green shed originally looked like all of the other structures at our place - surrounded by, and filled with, junk. We could have just hired somebody to dumpster the whole mess, building and all, but we decide to give this neglected shed a fighting chance so we removed the junk, inside and out.

It looks a lot better now, and is nicely centered between our garden and orchard.

The remaining question was the north side which was rotted out at the base due to people piling junk and soil on both sides of it. The sill plate was completely gone and the lower portion of siding was rotted away. Here you can see that the vertical supports are literally swinging in the breeze.

All of this resulted in a huge sag in the roof on that side. Can't find a good picture of the sag but here you can see the rotted siding from the outside. Believe it or not, soil was piled up to the rot-line!

So here's what I did...

Installed new sill plate:

Jacked the roof up using some post jacks (you can see the sag if you look at the bend in the top plate of the wall):

Repaired vertical supports (2x4's on either side and 4x4 spacer under):

Removed/replaced the rotten siding:

Note the roof line - pretty darn straight! The door to the left of the plywood patching needs replaced but that's a quick job compared with this roof jacking job.

Now to organize the inside (it will be used for material storage for Steve's woodworking creations)...

We will probably paint the metal roof green and the siding red! No longer neglected, this little building will serve us well.