Coffee

Gardening with Rabbits

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DS and I had pancakes and bacon. We rarely have either. Relaxing and having coffee now and deciding what I should do besides be lazy. Did all my running around shopping yesterday. Went to DD's house and tried dresses on the girls and they fit. Making a romper for grandson today. DD and I went to Joann's and we took Wes with us. He LOVES to go to stores. He likes riding in the cart but even carrying him he is so excited to see things. He is like his mother. When she was little and still today she loves to go shopping. When she was about this same age, DH was carrying her around a store and I was one aisle over and I heard this crazy almost squealing sound and went to look and she was talking to a Raggedy Ann doll which we bought for her of course. lol I bought a small sack of potty soil and I still need to make a seed order. Kind of got out of the mood when I saw the weather report for this week. Single digits and teens for lows and then back into the 30s with clouds and on and off light snow.
 

flowerbug

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You are scraping soil off of pavement?

scraping snow/slush/ice off the driveway. as the days were warm enough and sunny to almost melt everything it worked out mostly ok, but there is still some icy spots out there now this morning when i took the trash out.


Not as heavy as @Phaedra 's material, I've placed 2 dozen bricks just off the concrete pad at the base of the back steps. Over the years, the ground has just sunk more and more. A half dozen bricks need to be added but soil is needed, also. I'd like to take a few shovelfuls from the garden paths but it is frozen, muddy on top but frozen. Better look elsewhere as temperatures are soon supposed to sink into single digitS'

as we were out running an errand yesterday i was seeing the sidewalks full of water and sunken down below grade. seems that they need to be a bit more permiable to allow the water to soak in, but perhaps that would not work very well either.

my initial design for a nearly weed free gravel pathway includes a lined dug out trench with a raised grate that could hold the gravel but would allow the dirt and water (and weed seeds) to fall through, then once a year you'd have to rinse out the trench to get the dirt and other stuff out of there. a lot easier than having to lift the gravel and rinse it out and then put it back... but i suppose if you had a uniform path width you could have a gizmo come along and suck the gravel up and rinse it off and then put it back down for you. i like to dream... :)
 

Country Homesteader

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Good MARVELOUS Monday Morning to all my wonderful new people!
Yesterday I did a LOT of work outside seeing how it was so nice. Think I may have over did it a little seeing how having a tough time getting started. Right now it's 49 suppose to get to almost 60 here today but it's very cloudy. On Thurs according to the weather it's suppose to be as high as 80 (which is quite surprising for FEB).
 

digitS'

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We have the opposite weather pattern, @Country Homesteader . Cold is coming and it should start off with snow. Cloudy this morning and I, once again, activated the motion detection light on my way to the garage to move the garbage can to the road.

@flowerbug , my sidewalk is a wreck. I can point out that the deepest collapse is where the utility department must have put in a new water line, or somebody did before we moved here. The concrete is "newer" but the depression is kinda serious.

How about a machine that just skims along and cleans out your pathside drainage? One of Mom's cousins made himself and his family wealthy by coming up with a patented self-leveling mechanism for combines while he was still in his early 20's. He went on from there to design machines that were used to build canals around the world. A skimmer, you can do it!

Steve
 

flowerbug

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...
How about a machine that just skims along and cleans out your pathside drainage? One of Mom's cousins made himself and his family wealthy by coming up with a patented self-leveling mechanism for combines while he was still in his early 20's. He went on from there to design machines that were used to build canals around the world. A skimmer, you can do it!

haha, do you know that for every planned project i do around here almost 90% of the work involved is in dealing with the past mistakes of the initial design or more accurately utter lack of planning...

the pathways here that have the fewest weeds (and the decorative areas) are those that are furthest away from trees or any edges. the closer you get to a low spot or dirt of any kind the more likely it will now have weeds. still, overall there are many hundreds of square feet here that do not have very many weeds at all. that's because they're also devoid of life in general.

agents of mayhem though, are the real pain. for ground structures, gardens and edges, deer trample things and break things with their hooves, moles come through and destroy neat edges and create tunnels that water can flow through and erode a carefully designed structure, etc. even something as simple as a worm can cause issues (see what in some places has happened because worms were introduced - it makes terracing much harder)...

but back to gravel pathways. as long as they don't take too much effort for me to weed they get to stay, once they take too much work i try to remove them and turn them into gardens where at least my work gives me food in return (or flowers or minimally a nice ground cover).

pathside drainage is what i call a garden. if the garden is too tall for the surrounding pathways then i have to dig out some area around the edge of the garden so the soil stays in there more than washes out...

also must consider the effects of flash floods which make the issue of really clean pathways a bit moot at times. :)
 

Country Homesteader

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Good Morning to all my fellow gardeners!
Coffee is hot and ready but sadly have to report there's only about 1/2 pot remaining and I have only had 1 cup so far.
Hope everyone has a good Tuesday just remember we ALL survived the latest MONDAY so we have a great start to a wonderful week.
 
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