Landscaping, Part 3

So I got to the point where I wanted to put edging around the trees and shrubs in the front yard.  The point was to prevent lawn grass from invading and to give a visual edge to the beds.  Well, the stuff is pretty much useless!

The widest I found was 6".  And 3" above ground is "ok" but 3" inches below ground won't hold in place.  Mowers push it loose and frost heaves it up.  It really has to be 12" and I couldn't find any.  I've gotten tired of going around the edging with a spade to push it back in again.

My lot is slightly sloped.  It is 100' wide and 200' front to back.  The front to back slope is about 6-8'.  Not enough to cause any rainfall problem, but enough to make edging awkward.  My cross-street neighbors have several nice inter-locking pavers set 3 high in tan and red.  Looks great.

But of course I don't want to copy them.  So I had the idea of buying 12" pavers to lay down around the curved edging around the Saucer Magnolia tree and then add a single layer of interlocking bricks on top to define the area.  I ordered both.  They arrived last October.

Then I discovered a problem.  Now, I am good at geometry, but I sure didn't think it right this time!  Square pavers leave gaps around a curved bed...  Where grass can grow...  Which is what the pavers were supposed to prevent.  😭

So I have another idea in mind.  I built a step-down shadow-box fence around the backyard a few years after I moved in.  You can see the "step-down" (for the sloping yard), and the alternating inside/outside "shadow box" boards here...

The point is that most of the boards had to be cut to length (variously above and less than 6').  And that left pieces.

I saved them of course...

So it occurs to me that I could make an edging using those pressure treated wood pieces (cut at random heights.  They can all go down 6" for stability and still stick up 6-10" high (to define the edges).  The boards will touch edge to edge to form a good curve.  And I can further stabilize them by using exterior construction adhesive to attach the old plastic edging on the inside of the boards.

Sometimes, it takes a while to figure out a good solution to a problem.  I think I've found it.  Then it will be on to other problems...  😁

Landscaping, Part 2

So there I was without a garden.  At the time, the neighborhood was mostly treeless except my West neighbor's yard.  So I had a lot of sunlight.  But the soil was terrible; all sand and gravel.  The first thing I tried was to dig 5 gallon holes and fill them with soil from the woody half.  I read about that in a gardening magazine.

The idea was that you would do that one year, then do it again in new spots between them the next.  Gradual improvement.  The next year, I decided the digging was just too hard.  Ever dig a twenty 5 gallon buckets of dirt?

So I tried something else.  The County offers free mulch.  Residents bring in all the tree/shrub debris, they pile it up for a year, bulldoze it around into new piles and 2 years later - something close to compost!  And if you bring a trailer to the place on a Saturday, they load it up for free!

I covered the area in 4" of the stuff one Fall.  And then bought a roto-tiller and turned into the soil.  And did it again the next Spring.  I planted tomatoes and corn there.  And built a few small raised beds for smaller crops like beans, broccoli, carrots, etc.  Worked well.

Not the exact model, but representative...  But well worth the cost.  I used it a lot.  Lowered some ridges, flattened some mounds of gravel, dug down almost 6' along 60' of the fence for a flowerbed.

It needs some professional maintenance now though.  I stupidly left old gas in it for 2 years 😱 and gas engines are bit of a problem for me to clean or fix.  

Tomorrow, "Edging"...

Landscaping, Part 1

This post starts with memories.  It will move the present during the week...

A few decades ago, when I first moved here, half the backyard was a sandy gravelly field and the other half was overgrown junk.  Wild grape vines, 10' thorny locust trees, poison ivy.  I eventually cleared it (took 2 years).  

I decided to dig out a 10'x 2'deep pond for goldfish and waterplants.  But the dirt had to go somewhere.  So I built a raised 12" high pressure-treated wood frame in the front yard.  The brick front and cement steps made 2 sides of it, the wood on the other two.  The soil from the pond hole filled that perfectly!  I planted hostas and Japanese Painted Ferns there.

Later, while visiting my parents in NH, I saw their woods were filled with a variegated ivy-looking plant.  The called it "Snow on The Mountain".  I took a dozen home.  No loss as there was nearly an acre of them.

Then I bought a heavy plastic pond-liner and dug a 25' water runway up the slope to make a "creek" flowing into the pond.  Big pump, more plastic.  It was beautiful.  Bought Sweet Flag and waterlilies to grow in it and added some fancy (but cheap) goldfish.  The hostas and ferns in front thrived.

So being young and strong and ambitious, I planted some small specimen trees.   Two Golden Rain Trees and the end of the driveway, 2 Sourwood trees, and 3 Burning Bush shrubs.

The front yard looked great, I had a pond in the wooded back.  So there was a garden to establish in the field half with the bad soil.

That's the next post...

Adventures With Computers

 The "better" computers get, the harder it is for me sometimes.  One year, it is software issues.  Lately, it has been the printer.  

I got so tired of the increasing cost of inkjet cartridges that I bought a Canon color toner printer 2 years ago.  And it worked great!  Toner lasts forever, so no more $50 inkjet cartridges every few months.

And then suddenly it didn't.  My surge/backup battery started beeping at me everytime I tried to print and shut down.  I assumed it was the battery backup, and tried everything I could think of to get it working.  Nothing seemed wrong.

So maybe it was the printer.  I called the help number.  Some changes worked.  And then they didn't.  I called the help number again, and they couldn't fix the problem.  I became so frustrated I bought a Brother color toner printer.

And it worked great for a month.  Then the battery backup started screaming at me again.  Brother could not solve my problem, so I was about to buy a new battery backup.

But I decided to try to find the problem online.  Duh, should have done that from the start.  But I finally found the right way to phrase my problem.   The top search result discussed electrical demands of "fusers".  I almost skipped that, but the site description mention color toner printers.

Apparently, the industry term for color toner printers is "fusers".  So I opened the site.  Lots of stuff I didn't understand.  But one part caught my attention.  Fusers demand a lot of power (amps, watts?) at startup.  And the backup battery can detect that as a surge and shut down.

The solution was to plug the printer into a different electrical outlet.  I tried that.  It didn't work.  But I thought about it for a day until an idea hit me.  Sometimes techies are casual about language.  The "different electrical outlet" was still on the same circuit.  What if the site meant "different circuit"?  

So I visited the circuit breaker box in the basement.  

Each individual circuit is labeled on the side as to which rooms they control (not shown).  They are initially labelled by the installing electrician, but sometimes they are a bit vague about that.  For example, there is not circuit breaker labelled to control the Master Bedroom.

So I spent yesterday tested the accuracy of the labels.  Fun, fun, fun...  I have a list of corrections to the original ones.  😖

The idea was to find the nearest electrical outlet to the computer room that wasn't on the same circuit breaker.  I needed to test the "different outlet" idea from the site.  And because there is evidently a heavy electrical draw for the "fuser" warm-up, I used a medium-duty extension cord (better than household extension cords but less than appliance cords or outdoors use).  

Fortunately, the master bedroom circuit has very little routine draw, mostly just a clock, a radio, and a bed-lamp.  So I ran the extension cord from the printer to the bedroom.  Restarted everything.  

Sent a test document to print.  No beeps from the backup battery.  3 pages printed are pretty as you please!  I think I've solved the problem.  "Oh Joy, Rapture"!

A problem is that I have a thick extension cord going through 2 doors.  The doors pinch the wire.  I'll figure out a solution for that...