March 20th, 2010
We’ve started planning our vegetable/herb/flower garden for this year, and we’ve already made some progress on getting better at the whole process. Last year, we basically just dug up a pretty large plot in our yard and filled it with plants that we bought from Menards and Lowe’s. We had a particularly wet growing season, and ended up with a moderately bad case of blight in our tomato section. NPR says that blight was widespread last year, both because of the excessive rain and because so many people purchased their plants from the big box stores, which allowed a ton of diseased plants to be spread all across the country.
We weren’t going to be so naive this year, so we ended up ordering heirloom seeds from Baker Creek Seed Company, a business specializing in heirloom seeds out of Missouri. We definitely wanted to go heirloom, since we’re not into Frankenfoods and we like doing things the old-fashioned way.
We ended up ordering a metric ton of seeds (after teasing our friend JoAnn about the amount she wanted, we ordered at least 25% MORE than she did), and last weekend we embarked on the process of sprouting the little bastards. We had no idea what we were doing, but we went to Menards and bought a bunch of setups for growing seedlings, including peat pellets and little biodegradable pots, and we got to work winging it. It’s less than a full week later, and as you can see, we’ve already got growth!
Too bad Mother Nature is taunting our progress.
Sad face.
Garden, Yard | 
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March 12th, 2010
You know you want it. Here are some more examples of the flooring that I’d like to put in the house (in the living room, at least):
Design, Inspiration | No Comments »
February 25th, 2010
Let’s start with wood floors, since I really think that this is the second-most pressing issue in the house, after the basement walls. And to be clear, this is NOT just about the, erm, aesthetically displeasing carpeting that spreads around the main floor of the house like a fuzzy disease. Since we’ve started living in this house, we’ve been sick. It’s not the mold, since we have that under control through careful tinkering with the house’s humidity levels. It’s not the cats, since we’ve had them all along without (mostly) ill effects. I’m pretty sure it’s the carpeting.
The current carpeting has been in place in the house since somewhere around 1988, and in the intervening 22 years, it’s been exposed to who-knows-what, including dangerously toxic mold/mildew levels, pet dander, dead skin cells, and whatever has been spilled on it over the years. The result is that I’ve had to start taking my allergy medicine year-round, and most of the time while he is home, Kevin can’t breathe without a very heavy, wheezing crackle. It’s scary, and it needs to be resolved. And if it’s something other than the cruddy carpeting? Well, we’ll move on to the next possible solution with glorious new flooring.
Here is where the herringbone comes in: I’m obsessed with hardwood floors in this pattern. Lookie here, and you will be, too:
Inspiration | 1 Comment »
