Beds in progress

So, we decided to replace the bulk of our front yard with raised beds. Our target model was the English cottage garden. It's the gardening equivalent of an Impressionist painting. There is organization but it's kinda smeared out with one thing bleeding into the next. We began by marking out the borders of the beds. I looked at the lines of sight so as not to block them. Then I took the mower and mowed paths through the yard. I wanted to make sure that no bed was so wide that you couldn't reach deep into into it from the paths and that the mower would fit between all of the beds. I then took bricks and marked out the edges of the beds. Next, I used old packing paper to cover the grass and spread 3-6 inches of dirt onto of the paper. I finished each bed with a covering of paper and mulch.

In the beginning...

In the beginning there was grass. Well, not really grass but a dirt covering of short green plants. I would spend several hours every couple of weeks or so making it shorter with no personal joy what-so-ever. I came to view my lawn with loathing and resentment. The only obvious option was to hire a lawn service which seemed...like a waste of money. I have a hard time paying someone to do something that I can do myself for free. Kelly thought I was nuts.

I began to wonder about the time and money that people put into their yards. I have a neighbor who is doing something to his grass several times a week. He fertilizes it. He aerates it. He re-seeds it. He mows and edges it. Most of my neighbors have lawn services. They roll up about once a week with a truck full of gear and swarm out like ants at a picnic. It's an impressive sight.

As per my idiom, I started doing the research. To be sure, there is no recognized body of knowledge on this subject of which I am aware but I did stumble across the work of Cristina Milesi, a researcher at NASA who has used a combination of census data, satellite images, and aerial photos to create a very interesting picture of the American lawn craze. Every year we burn 800 million gallons of gas in our 50 million (or so) lawn mowers. One of the staggering finds that I came across several times related to the water that Americans use to keep their lawns perfect. Milesi's research (see Could the Grass be Greener? and Looking for Lawns in the links at the end of this article) discovered that we devote more water and land to our lawns than we do to growing food.

Acre-feet of water used in a year in millions

Lawns	59.6
Alfalfa/alfalfa mixtures	14.3
Corn	11.7
Orchards, vineyards, nut trees	9.0
Rice	6.9

Source

Some other interesting facts:

• We spend nearly 10 times more on lawn care than on school books
• In the Western states, up to 60% of a households water is used to keep the grass green
• Of the 18 most commonly used herbicides, seven cause cancer, six cause reproductive defects, eight are neuro-toxic, nine are damaging to the kidneys and liver (This adds up to more than 18 because some fall into multiple categories)
• Americans use more pesticides a year in home gardens than we use in agriculture.

Bibliography:
Could the Grass be Greener?. U.S. News and World Report, May 2005
Looking for Lawns. NASA'a Earth Observatory, November 2005
Lawns vs. Crops in the Continental U.S. ScienceLine, July 2011
Lose the Lawn. Middlebrooke Gardens, 2012
Study of Lawn in Our Gardens. Landscape Resource, Februrary 2010

Lawn to garden.

As some of you know, I'm not much on mowing. I know some people love it. Nothing like walking around sweating behind a loud, little machine while you get coated in tiny bits of grass knowing that in the end you will have shorter grass. Nah. Not my bag. I've been threatening to do this since last fall but it is now underway.

We are converting our front yard into a cottage garden. A cottage garden is, in actual fact, a romantic fiction invented about 200

years ago that idealized the happy peasant toiling in the earth who was able to produce everything that they needed from their surrounding fields and gardens. People--who were not peasants--imagined a green space surrounding the house filled with decorative plants, minor food crops, and medicinal/culinary herbs all planted in a nearly random jumble. The end effect being something like those opening scenes from the Lord of the Rings movies with Gandolf riding though the Shire. I will soon begin posting pics of the process but to date, I have converted about 60% of the yard into flower beds. Because I didn't begin work on this project last year, I am attempting to create beds and kill lawn at the same time. This mandates that the beds begin somewhat sparse due to my having to use lots of grass/weed barrier and mulch. Over time, however, I will begin to fill them in until they reach a critical mass.

Chez Wortham, 2011 season

Tonight we had our first dinner on the deck. We grilled asparagus, peppers, hot dogs, and steak. The night was beautiful and the bugs were scarce.

Unpacking

Well, today will be our first full week of living in the house. We arrived in the Springfield area on Saturday, April 24. From Saturday through Monday the Springfield area got nearly 12 inches of rain. After we dropped Jacob off at his school that Monday, we drove by the house. There was water pouring into the basement from a window, a crawlspace door, and several cracks. At that time the floor drain in the basement was still keeping up with it. Unfortunately, by that afternoon the sewers in our neighborhood could no longer handle the water. All over the city basements began to fill up and manhole covers started gushing water. If you want to watch our basement fill with water, you can click here. We have had a whole crew of plumbers and handy men through the house. We are now significantly more flood resistant.

Now we have the task of turning our house into a home. Right now it looks like the back stage of a life-sized Tetris game.

We've got the boys room looking pretty good. All of their books and most of their toys are still in boxes. We have enough of Kelly's office put together so that she can work. We have the kitchen passable and the basement is dry enough that we have the washer and dryer hooked up. Well, I need to get back to work.

Coming soon: The walk to Jacob's school.

Full car and many miles

We finished getting the house packed. Friday morning a very large truck pulled up in front of our old house and three fellows loaded all we own. We stayed at Grandma & Grandpa's last night. Today, with our car packed full, we've set out for our new house.

Farewell

We've packed boxes, loaded trucks, and cleaned an empty house. The boys have said goodbye to their school.

It is time now for our trek to the new house.

Moving

Welcome to the blog. For Jacob and Geoffrey's friends, I can safely assume that you got the cards that we sent. I wonder if you noticed that I (Jacob and Geoff's dad) accidentally printed the picture upside down?

As I mentioned in the card, we will be sad to leave all of our friends. We are, however, very excited about our next adventure. We will do our best to post pictures of things as we get settled in to our new city, home, and school. You can leave us a message by clicking on the word "Leave a Comment" below. We look forward to hearing from you.

House pics

As of Friday, April 15th we are home owners. We bought a lovely mid-20s bungalow just east of Missouri State University campus.

Tennessee

We we at our second stop. This is a pic of the boys blowin' off a little steam in an outdoor sculpture group.

Wortham's House of Pestilence.

This as from yesterday. We were driving to the pediatrician and the boys were almost completely silent. I looked back to check on them and they were just staring out the windows blankly. I took this video with my phone (sorry for the poor quality) because they just looked so miserable.

For the record, Jacob is doing better. Still has some...symptoms. Geoff is, shall we say, a bit snotty. As I type this he is watching Backyardigans next to me. Check out the photo. Notice the blue box of tissue on the desktop and the waste basket next to him in the floor. This was not staged, I swear.

Beautiful sky

This sky was somewhere over Southern Indiana. It was like those skies you see in those old Romantic era paintings.

Quick note

I will post more later, but this is just a quick note to say that I have put up pictures for June and July I have a lot to catch up on. Weddings and birthdays not the least of it.

Clay sculpture and literal conversations

I would like to apologize. I was preparing to write a fresh post. When I logged in and looked at the previous posts, I noticed that the following post was never published. Sorry.

The above is a really tiny clay sculpture that Jacob did of a couple of ants, a father and son at a cook out. They are cooking a pie on the grill. This was totally Jacob. He got the idea from a picture he saw on the box of clay. After he finished this little clay sculpture, he took it to our new neighbors as a house warming gift. As the second photo shows, it was very tiny.

Kids are very literal. I made a braised chicken dish a week ago. I told the boys that the meat will just fall off of the bones. At one point, Geoffrey grabbed a drum stick and held it up, giving it a shake. He turns to Kelly and says to her, "It won't fall off?!?"

At the zoo

For Field Trip Friday, we went to the zoo today. It was hot and the boys about fell out but there were a few highlights. Unfortunately, the batteries in my camera were dead, so the only images I have are from my cell phone. Below is a video of Geoffrey and an orangutan. At one point, I was rooting around in my backpack looking for water and Geoffrey jumped up next to the glass. I looked up just in time to see one of the orangutans climbing toward him. By the time I got ready, they were checking each other out.

Here is a direct link to the video in case you are reading this from your email.

I'll post more about our week later, just thought I would share this while it was still fresh.

Rainbow pt. 2

Getting bigger.

rainbow

Nice rainbow on the indiana/illinois border.

Road trip

We are headed out shortly to drive to Arkansas. My Dad is getting married Saturday. You can follow our progress on Twitter. Have a good weekend and we will see some of you soon.

First week

Well, week one of our stay-at-home experiment is done. I need to get better at timing but over all, not too bad.

Tuesday (library day) we went to the Matthews branch of the Louisville Free Public Library. About six years ago several small suburbs of Louisville and most of Jefferson County merged with the old city to form Louisville Metro. The Matthews branch once served the city of Matthews and is in the former city hall. For the space available, it is a nice branch. I would call it cozy. The boys had a good time and we wound up taking a couple of books on dinosaurs and a Mo Willems book, There is a Bird on Your Head. Mo Willems rocks!

Wednesday it rained. We were supposed to go to a water park (water Wednesdays) but we had lunch with Mom instead.

It was also forecast to rain on Thursday, our day to visit a new park, so we switched it with field trip Friday. Thursday we went to the Frazier History Museum. As per the suggestion of the lady at the ticket desk, we started with the third floor and worked our way down. The museum has a pretty strong martial bent, focusing mostly on arms and armor. The third floor is lots of armor and medieval, European weapons. The lower two floors are pretty much guns (I lost the boys interest soon after about the 25th or 30th gun). The museum also has some interpretive shows. We got to see Arming the Knight: 1460-1480. This was a gentleman who donned, with the aid of his squire, a suit of armor while he explained a bit about each piece. We all enjoyed that a bit although the boys got a bit rattled when our knight whacked himself with a sword to demonstrate the effectiveness of the armor. He looked a good bit like this when he was done.

The picture for this post is the boys playing in the wet grass, in their socks, after nap on Thursday. They did this while I was making dinner. Oi!

Friday we got to see a tiny bit of Cherokee Park. The park is massive but we only went to one of the play grounds. It is a nice park with a lot of semi-wild space.

In other news, Kelly is taking to her new job like a fish to water. She is learning the specialized tools of her new job and is quickly developing a network of colleagues to help her grow in her position.

I check the various library related job sites just about daily. The financial crunch has hurt the sector that would employ someone like myself, governments and universities. Things are improving though and it wont be long. I'll keep you posted.

As always, you can click here for older posts. To go straight to our pics click here and here for videos.

My Kentucky book report

Well, we are nearly completely unpacked and becoming acclimatized to Louisville. Kentucky is, according to the lady at the Louisville tourist center, known for three things: beautiful horses, fast women, and bourbon whiskey. I've been researching the last one. A long and interesting history there. Bourbon has been distilled here since shortly after America won Independence and this area was considered the far western portion of Virginia. Over 95% of the world's bourbon is distilled and aged in Kentucky to this day. By the way, whiskey is any alcohol made from distilled grain mash. Bourbon whiskey is made of 51%+ of corn. Straight whiskey is aged in a new, charred, oak barrel for at least 2 years. You often see these two combined on labels. The photo that I included in this post is actually pretty typical of most of rural Kentucky. It looks like a Microsoft Windows desktop, all green and pristine. Kentucky grows beautiful grass without even trying. In Virginia, the soil is so hostile, that you have to expend a great deal of effort to get a mediocre lawn (it is no wonder that those poor suckers in Jamestown starved). Louisville is the 42 largest metropolitan area with just over 1.2 million people (Richmond was the 43 largest). I learned something new just today. It would seem that there is a deep rivalry between fans of the University of Louisville Cardinals and the University of Kentucky Wildcats.

The boys are out for summer and since I can not seem to get a job it looks like we will have more opportunities to get to know the area. I have put together a schedule that includes a field trip every Friday. This Friday we went to see where Col. Saunders is buried, Cave Hill Cemetery. I expect to upload lots of pictures of those excursions.

I finally finished the video of our trip. It changed from my original idea. Check it out.


Click here for older posts. To go straight to our pics click here and here for videos.