Photo Update

Since I'm so lazy, you get the photos from the previous post all stuck in here. Plus, they're not even particularly good photos.

Enjoy then!

Way back when we removed the big tree from the side yard, we put up these lattice panels to grow some privacy-bringing vines on. We planted some Orange Trumpet Vine, with the promise that it would go great guns. As you can see, it hasn't done real well. What HAS done well is the cucumber vines that we planted only 4-odd weeks ago.

Despite getting watered pretty much every day, the trumpet vine isn't going so great. So much for restoring the lost privacy. The cucumber vines, however, are growing really well, and we've even got a couple of baby cucumbers starting to grow:

Where the big tree was, we've put down a lot of crusher dust, and made a nice smooth ramp from the side yard up to the back yard. Realistically, it could still do with some more dust to smooth out the bumps and high spots, but I figure we'll leave it until the grass gets established, then top dress it and fill in the low spots.

The grass is growing well, but it's taking longer than I'd like.

It's a bit patchy in spots, no doubt due to the fact that Badger finds the grass seed quite tasty, and that the crusher dust seems to be a fine place to bury a bone. So we often end up with "freshly tilled" patches, shall we say, and that's not good for the grass that was growing there. But some spots of it are coming up nice and thick and tall (over near the fence, say) - I just wish the rest of it would follow suit. It's certainly not for lack of water, since they whole area has been watered every night for the past month.

The grass on the flat section in the back yard is going well:

But there's a lot of weeds and other miscellaneous garbage growing amongst it. It needs a spray with my good weed-killer solution, but I'm afraid that it would kill the young grass as well. I'll give it a mow this week - hopefully that will take care of the higher/larger weeds, and give the grass a chance.

As you can see, the blue paint on the fence is holding up nicely, and as the grass start to encroach on the reclaimed dirt, the whole lot looks better and better.

We tackled this back corner a few weeks ago now, and turned what was jungle into a clean, if unimpressive and wasted corner space. But at least we can get in there now and keep it cleaned out. And not having 2 feet deep of rotting palm fronds on the ground makes it much more pleasant for everyone, Badger included.

Since this is eventually where my shed is going, I don't really care that it's currently wasted space - it doesn't really lend itself to anything, so we'll just keep it as clean and tidy as possible for now, and worry about what to do with it later.

All in all the backyard's looking a fair bit different than it did 6 months ago! Once the grass comes on and we manage to level out all the bumps and ditches in the yard, it'll be a much nicer place to spend time and easier to keep tidy. By having the car access into the back yard now, we can bring in ute-loads of mulch for the gardens, which will help to keep the weeds down.

The other big job from this weekend just gone was to sort out the fountain in the front yard. The base was full of rotten water, and the mozzie people were concerned that it was breeding dengue mozzies. Whether that was right or not, it still had to go, just because it was disgusting.

We pulled it all apart (after discovering it wasn't made out of styrofoam or hebel block, but actually cast concrete) with the help of a couple of litres of bleach to kill all the strange and gross "things" living in the permernantly-wet spots, and drained the tub by belting a hole in it with the fencing bar (best tool I've ever bought). A couple of hundred litres of black, stinking water drained out, and let us then remove the submersible pump and the besser-blocks that was supporting the structure.

After getting it all apart, we decided to re-assemble the top part of the fountain back in the garden, and just keep it as some garden art.

It doesn't look bad, and adds some interest to the garden. All that's left to do is shape the dirt around the base so that it won't collect water there, and to use some expanding foam to seal up the ex-fountain-outlets on the top of the concrete balls, so they don't fill up with rain in the wet season. The big tub base has been thoroughly washed (it still stinks), and is living around the side of the house until I can arrange to get it to the dump.

We salvaged the besser blocks (no, we didn't just leave them in the front garden like that!), and after being thoroughly washed down and left in the sun to dry, they'll come in handy some other day.

Now, all we need to do is get a spare weekend to clean out the remainder of the front garden, and make it all presentable, and we'll be laughing. Maybe in late September, at this rate...

Renovating Tip #74 - Fresh Paint Fixes Everything

Following on from this:

As of last weekend, we now have this:


Isn't it pretty! It's a removable hills hoist - the top folds down and you can pull it out of the ground, and hide it away. Helpful for:
A) cyclones, and
B) driving over it to get into the back yard.

I've also learnt that I'm only marginally better at concreting than I am at paving, and I suck pretty bad at paving. Still, with 5 x 10kg bags of concrete holding it in, it shouldn't be going anywhere any time soon. I'm a bit concerned with how plastic-y the new hoist is - doesn't really seem built to last. But considering that the old one was *completely* galvanised (even the crank handle), and even ran wire rope for the clothesline part, anything even slightly younger is probably going to use more modern materials in it's construction. Still, I'm not going to guess how old the old one is, and it still works perfectly...

The line itself is slightly smaller than the old one, which suits us fine. We didn't have that much space to put it in, so this size lets us keep it down the side near the laundry, but without cutting the garden back too badly so clothes don't snag on trees. It's the smallest one they make, in fact. It wasn't until the concrete was all set three days later that I realised that it might not be long enough along the sides for drying queen-sized bed sheets. I still don't know if it will be - I guess I'll find out on the weekend.

Also, on the weekend, we painted the back fence. It's still dangerously decrepit, but at least now it looks less hideous. As Stevie would say - "Good from Far, Far from Good".

What it used to look like:


What it now looks like:


$25 worth of fence paint well spent! We've obviously only painted till just behind the second palm tree - as we uncover more of the garden we'll paint the exposed fence as we go. Hey - I already said it wasn't a good job! We painted everything - the fence, the sheet of iron we attached 3 years ago to cover a large gaping hole, star pickets which hold the iron up, as well as other star pickets that hold the fence itself up - everything got a coat of Ironbark Blue. Trees near the fence and creepers growing on it simply got brushed aside for long enough to slap some paint underneath them, then they got moved back. It's hard to tell from my dodgy photo, but it's really made it so much nicer than it was.

Talking about fences - we've got a visitor for a couple of days:


Max is up staying with us while Trev & Kelli get a new fence put it along the back of their place. Badger's kinda ready for him to go home already though. They mostly get on well, except if there's food involved. Max doesn't particularly want to eat the food, but he'll be damned if he lets Badger eat any. Meal times usually involve dragging each dog to opposite ends of the patio to feed them (something which confuses Badger greatly, as he's a little OCD about where he should have his dinner), and then standing guard in the middle. It's good fun. That said, he's no problem to have, and it's nice to be able to repay our dog-sitting debt, after BAdger has spent so long living at their place every time we're away.

Garden Attack!!!

This weekend saw the latest instalment in the popular and exciting not-made-for-TV series Garden Attack!!!. Today's episode focuses on our backyard, where, bucking popular trends, we didn't install a water feature or a dry creek bed. Crazy, I know.

What we did do was cut the garden back by about 2m. The original gardens were around 4m deep at their narrowest point, and well overgrown. By cutting them back we'll gain more lawn area, and be able to keep the actual garden beds clear of junk (fallen palm fronds, dead trees, etc). Another good benefit from reducing the size of this garden is that eventually we'll gain vehicle access into the back yard. Which has the knock-on effects of making gardening easier, as we can load the crap straight onto the ute, as well as keeping the gardens easier to maintain, since we can dump a load of mulch straight off the ute and into the garden beds.

Here's a dodgy photo stolen from when we had the trees removed. You can see how deep the gardens were, and you can't see the (extremely dodgy) back fence at all:


You can clearly see here how far we chopped it back - the dirt/grass edge used to be the edge of the garden:


As you can see from the "Before" photo above, the garden was really quite thick and overgrown. All in all, we took two very-well-loaded ute loads to the dump. Some nice plants unfortunately had to go, we now have the opportunity to plant the gardens up how we want them. As as previously mentioned, the ability to dump mulch onto the gardens should keep them looking nice.

We still have a bit of work to do with this side garden - there's a couple more golden cane palms that I want to chop down before they get much bigger, and there's a medium sized fishtail palm in there as well that needs to go - this is what they look like when they get big, and then they cost heaps to get cut down (as we learnt two months ago):


You can see the stump that that big tree left on the far right-hand side of this photo, and the medium-sized fishtail on the left:


With those bigger palms gone, however, the maintenance of the yard will be so much easier, and we won't be constantly taking old rotten palm fronds to the dump. Part of the impetus for doing this work was a notice we had left in our mailbox from the Dengue Patrol people advising us that we had water collecting in palm fronds out the back, and that we needed to clean it up before they came back.

For those who don't know, Cairns had a very bad season this summer for Dengue Fever. It's quite a debilitating disease, and if you catch it twice, you're at high risk of it developing to Haemorrhagic Fever, which really is just as nasty as it sounds. People can, and do, die from it, often quite quickly. Dengue itself is pretty nasty, and is one of those things that you don't completely recover from for a number of years.

Dengue is spread my Dengue mosquitoes - a special breed of mozzie that carries the disease. They're different to normal mozzies, smaller, only come out at night, hide in dark places, etc. But they can also breed in very small amounts of water - smaller than what normal mozzies would use. So an old palm frond laying on the ground can hold enough water for them to breed in - obviously not something you want around your house.

Because of the seriousness of this year's outbreak, the council formed a special Dengue Patrol unit, which went around inspecting people's yards for potential breeding grounds. They had the power to fine you big dollars if they thought the situation warranted it. In practice, only a handful of people were fined, and that was for persistently ignoring their requests. But still, if you had your house inspected (like we did), it was still in your best interests to heed their warning. In the past we've just left the back gardens as a jungle, since it gives good privacy from the neighbours, but it's now time to clean them out.

Unfortunately one side effect of cutting the garden back as aggressively as we did is that you now have a clear view of our back fence. The back fence was a point of contention when we bought the house - we wanted the current owners to replace it before we bought it, and they didn't want to. I suspect it's made out of asbestos fibro sheeting, and it's really not in a good way. It's busted up, cracked, and generally falling down. You can see in the above photos the sheet of second-hand corrugated iron that Trev and I bought when we fist moved in and screwed to the fence to cover a large hole and keep Badger in our yard. The rest of the fence is being held up by a combination of star pickets, fencing wire, cable ties and concentration.

That said, we actually have the good end of the deal. For years now it's been hidden behind a thick garden, so we haven't had to look at it. But for our back neighbours who share this fence, this fence is part of their pool fence. So when you're in their pool area, lounging around, you have an uninterrupted view of this dodgy old fence, complete with "windows" of shiny corrugated iron peeking through. It must be a good look. Last year the new owners of that house dropped a note in our mailbox saying they wanted to get it replaced ASAP with a nice new colourbond fence, and would we pay half. We gleefully accepted, and told them to get some quotes and we'd go ahead ASAP as well. We've not heard from them since. Which hasn't been a problem, until now.

In the meantime, I'm probably going to give the fibro a quick and dodgy coat of paint, so at least it's mainly one colour, and will blend in and disappear a bit. But I think the long term solution will be to talk to the neighbours again, and see if they're still keen to replace it, and have it swapped out for a nice new presentable fence (that's not going to give us all Mesothelioma).

One unexpected side effect of being able to see the fence, however, is that it's made our back yard appear to be very small. Before, the yard looked huge. You knew there was a fence, but it was way back there somewhere - behind all that garden. Now that you can see the fence, despite the additional area we've uncovered, the yard looks quite small. It's an interested effect, and one that we really didn't expect. Hopefully as we fill in the garden with plants and paint the fence, it won't be as noticeable.

Our plan is to work our way around the back yard, slowly cutting all the gardens back and clearing them out, and eventually we'll be left with some pretty, easy to maintain and safe gardens. As we go we're going to be dropping some of the bigger trees and palms before they get too big for us to handle, as well as taking the top out of some of the bigger trees that are starting to just get too big. Hopefully it'll all look good at the end of it!

One job that has been on our list is to remove the existing clothes line. It's right smack-bang in the centre of the side yard, which is great for it, but means that we can't drive a car up there. Which is the whole point of all of this! We want to replace it with a lift-out-able hoist, so that when we need access we can simply pull the hoist out of the ground and drive over it. Best of both worlds!

After taking the second load of rubbish to the dump yesterday, Trev jokingly asked "any more jobs you want me to do?". So I jokingly answered "well, you could always pull out that clothes line if you were desperate!". So before you know it, we had the crowbar and pick out, and were digging it out. We also found a block of cement right next to it where the clothesline had previously been - it had been cut off with an angle grinder, and re-positioned to where it is now! After digging around for 10 minutes and still not getting it to budge, the 4WD was called into action. A length of rope and some low-range action later, and this is what we'd achieved:


(Note the Safety Chair positioned over the hole!)

So I guess now we need to:
1) get rid of the clothesline somehow? Keep it somewhere in case it comes in handy later on?
2) buy new clothesline
3) decide where we want it, and
4) dig a new hole and cement new clothesline in.

Sounds like fun, eh???!!! Stay tuned for next week's episode where we try and use a 4WD for more inappropriate things! Will we actually manage to put the clothesline through the radiator next time? Tune in to find out!!!