First Rain
Oct. 31st, 2008 03:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snousleThe good news for the day is that we made it back home after a run to town. The road is really soupy after the first big rainfall, and it wasn't clear if our front wheel drive CRV would get back up the hill. But we had no trouble at all. (Even in the worst case, we would only have had to walk half a mile. Straight uphill, but not all that bad.)
The rain has made the forest really beautiful again. It's amazing what a little water does to perk up the landscape, especially at this time of year. After so much dryness, the moss practically explodes off the trees. The grass will start growing again shortly, and the oaks will shed their leaves, admitting much more light.
The basic elements of the landscape are gorgeous, and suggest all sorts of possibilities, but at the same time it's pretty resistant to change. Some day, I want to create a moss garden in the vicinity of these stones, with some sort of sprinkler system that can "reactivate" the moss on warm summer evenings so as to cool the area down. But given that the largest rocks are completely immobile, it's not obvious how to make the area people-friendly. It's a long term project for sure.
Here's the totally rednecky fabric garage structure we put in. It's situated in the "ugly zone" where we don't care how bad things look - very handy when you're trying to make the other areas look nice. It's not totally finished, but by god it's dry as a bone. 240 square feet of storage is nothing to sneeze at!
It's nominally "easy to assemble" but of course that only applies if you have another 500 square feet of totally clear space to unfold the fabric covering. Man, that was a bee-eye-tea-sea-aitch to get over the frame, since it weighs about 100 pounds and is stiff in all the wrong ways. But it was cheap and it does the job.
If the economy hadn't tanked we'd have been able to build a real garage, but this was less than one tenth the price and isn't half bad. I can imagine gradually transforming it to a solid structure on the same pipe-and-connector frame, perhaps adding some extra poles along the way. As our neighbor says, "the building department only comes here if you invite them!"
The rain has made the forest really beautiful again. It's amazing what a little water does to perk up the landscape, especially at this time of year. After so much dryness, the moss practically explodes off the trees. The grass will start growing again shortly, and the oaks will shed their leaves, admitting much more light.
The basic elements of the landscape are gorgeous, and suggest all sorts of possibilities, but at the same time it's pretty resistant to change. Some day, I want to create a moss garden in the vicinity of these stones, with some sort of sprinkler system that can "reactivate" the moss on warm summer evenings so as to cool the area down. But given that the largest rocks are completely immobile, it's not obvious how to make the area people-friendly. It's a long term project for sure.
Here's the totally rednecky fabric garage structure we put in. It's situated in the "ugly zone" where we don't care how bad things look - very handy when you're trying to make the other areas look nice. It's not totally finished, but by god it's dry as a bone. 240 square feet of storage is nothing to sneeze at!
It's nominally "easy to assemble" but of course that only applies if you have another 500 square feet of totally clear space to unfold the fabric covering. Man, that was a bee-eye-tea-sea-aitch to get over the frame, since it weighs about 100 pounds and is stiff in all the wrong ways. But it was cheap and it does the job.
If the economy hadn't tanked we'd have been able to build a real garage, but this was less than one tenth the price and isn't half bad. I can imagine gradually transforming it to a solid structure on the same pipe-and-connector frame, perhaps adding some extra poles along the way. As our neighbor says, "the building department only comes here if you invite them!"
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-11-01 08:23 pm (UTC)Be aware that regular summer water on oaks is Death. It won't happen quickly, but over the course of 10 years the oak roots will rot.