First Fruits (and Leaves and Roots): the Garden in June

First strawberry of the season!

As I was weeding, I spotted it: the first ripe strawberry of the season. I picked it, then had a brief internal argument with myself about whether I should just eat it on the spot or share it with Justin and Junie. 

Generosity won out. I ran inside to show what I had found, then sliced it in thirds so we could all enjoy that first delicious taste of summer. 

And now, the strawberries are ripening at a fast pace, much to everyone's delight. They're big, juicy, and beautiful! It amazes me that a bed that started out the season looking like this:

The strawberry bed in May

Has blossomed into this:

The strawberry bed in June

And if that amount of growth amazes you, take a look at my greens bed before I planted anything:

The greens bed in early spring

And compare it to this green, leafy goodness:

The greens bed in June

We've been enjoying plenty of fresh salads as I thin the lettuce. We've also pulled up a rainbow of beautiful radishes. And just last night I made a stir fry with bok choi and garlic scapes. So much to be excited about in the garden this time of year!

 

bok choi and garlic scapes!

Staying warm when it's colder than the South Pole

Yikes!

When the forecasted HIGH for the day is -11 and your thermometer reads -20 at 8 AM, you know it's gonna be a cold day. How cold? Colder than the South Pole, it turns out (a balmy -11). Cold winters are nothing new to the Midwest, but this is quite the extreme! To prepare for this arctic blast, we worked on buttoning up the house this weekend as best we could. 

When in doubt, put on more hats. 

I finished shrinkwrapping all our windows (a project I started in November) and stuffed insulation under our drafty dining room window seat. 

Nice shelving space, but it's uninsulated and juts out into open air, so it's pretty drafty!

Justin sealed up the frames of our outside doors and installed door sweeps; this made a big difference almost immediately! I knew those doors were drafty, but didn't realize how much. 

We then made major headway on insulating the attic (Look how far we've come!). Last spring, we installed insulation baffles and fiberglass batts. We had picked up foil-faced foam a while back and we wanted to wait to finish replacing the attic floor before we finished the walls. But we knew these would make a big difference in keeping the house warm, so Justin worked hard to get them all hung before the cold settled in.

Starting to install foil-faced foam 

Foam installation nearly complete. Welcome to our spaceship! 

With the foam in place, our unheated attic was comfortably warm yesterday. As was the rest of our house. I was even able to turn the thermostat down and have it stay toasty--so our efforts were a success!

Another garden bed bites the dust (so our backporch doesn't)

The previous owners built a small, raised garden bed right alongside our three-season porch. There are two problems with this. First, the soil line is above the poured concrete slab, right alongside the untreated wood of the porch, without any barrier, which has caused the wood to rot. Second, the porch is not structurally sound, and even without the rot issues, it would still be a bit of a precarious structure. 

Justin removed and leveled the garden bed, and then added pressure-treated lumber to reinforce the porch for the time being. We plan to redo the porch at some point, but we would like it to stay standing until we decide to take it down! 

I transplanted some of the herbs (chives, oregano) and perennials (echinacea)

We gave all these landscape bricks to a neighbor.

Justin pries off some of the old wood planks to see what's underneath.

And underneath, a rag-tag pile of scraps holding the porch up!

This small pile of wood was all that was holding up a section of the porch!

Progress!

I forgot to mention that we also rerouted our dryer vent a while back. It had been venting directly underneath the porch, which not only meant there was a ridiculous amount of lint under our porch, but also that the windows would become covered with condensation any time we used the dryer. In winter, of course, this condensation would freeze. Not so good. But now the dryer actually vents outside the house like it's supposed to!

The new, improved dryer vent (it's the little things in life...)

Basement Windows get a Makeover, part 2

In our last post, we talked about removing and installing the easier of the two new basement windows. Next up, the much more challenging second window!

Before: Window 2

But what did we discover when we started digging? A huge slab of concrete underneath the entire window! Why anyone would put such a thing there, we'll never know. But it does help explain why the flooding was the worst under this window: the water was just sitting on the slab, soaking into the rotting wood of the window frame.

The mysterious concrete slab

Of course, instead of just digging, this meant that we had to bust up and remove all the concrete before we could do anything else.

Removing the concrete pad.

Sayonara, concrete! 

The window after the concrete pad was removed

Once the concrete was removed, we could finally begin cutting out the windows themselves. As badly rotted as the windows were, they were still a pain to remove.

Justin cuts out the window frames.

View from inside.

Way more concrete than the last one.

Because the window is an irregular size and we didn't want to bother with a custom window, we decided to fill in part of the opening with cinder blocks and concrete.

Levelling up the cinder blocks

First layer in, mortar bed for the second layer laid down.

Window time! 

After: Window 2. Much better!

Next up; raised beds...

Basement Windows get a Makeover, part 1

Summer has flown by, and for the most part, we haven't done any large-scale house projects--a welcome break. But now it's time to delve into another project.

We want to avoid the flooding we had last spring, so we're doing a number of things to address it. To start with, we replaced the old, rotting wood window frames with new, glass brick windows. We also installed window wells where there had been none before. Sounds pretty easy, but there were a lot of steps involved.  

Before: Window 1

Cutting out the old window with a sawzall

First, we had to remove the old window and cut out the old frame.

Uneven foundation that had been hiding beneath the window

We discovered that the foundation wall beneath the old window was very uneven. As in, cracked and pockmarked. We'd have to fix that before installing the new window...

Forms to hold cement in place. Note the beginning of the hole for the window wells. 

...So we decided to add a layer of quick-setting cement.

Expand, foam, expand! 

To keep the concrete from running out the cracks we used expanding foam.

Does watched cement ever dry? 

Justin poured the cement and made sure it was level, then made sure if was dry before moving on to the next step.

Mortar, viewed from inside. 

Next, we laid the mortar bed that would hold in the new window.

After: Window 1. Ta da!

Finally, Justin slid the new window into place and finished mortaring around it while Brigitte stood on the other side, making sure it didn't fall inward and crash to the ground. No photos of this part since we were both occupied and Juniper was running around somewhere else. But here's the finished product! Doesn't it look much better?

The Kitchen Island

The Kitchen Island finally came together. Though much like anything else so far, there were some road bumps along the way. For starters, one of the smaller of the two cabinets was not made to the same specs as the larger one. The face frames matched up just fine, but the carcasses were not even close.

Level island on an uneven floor.  

The second issue was the floor. Even after all the work we did, the floor is still not perfectly level.  With some carpentry magic, we managed to make the bottom of the island presentable while keeping the top level.

The cabinet carcasses were mounted together with a 1/4" piece of sanded birch plywood sandwiched in between and attached with screws and wood glue.

After the main bit of carpentry was completed we oiled the butcher block with mineral oil, installed the garbage and recycling pull-outs and stained the cabinets.

All done before the family came over. 

Adventures of the Pea Trellis

Weeds!

Part of Brigitte's ambitious gardening project involved tearing out this den of iniquity bed of noxious weeds. The last owners had tried growing veggies here--there were still tomato and pepper tags on the ground--and before that, there were evergreen shrubs, according to Google street view (and the massive roots I dug up!). 

Evergreen bushes in our yard, circa 2007

We eventually want to re-plant some evergreen shrubs here, but for now, it will do nicely as an early-season veggie bed. We want to plant peas here, which need something to climb, so we built an awesome trellis from scratch.

Weeds and a sapling tree stump: gone!

V is for "Victory Garden"

Justin and Junie build the pea trellis

We built the trellis out of cedar 2x2s and 2x4s, with eyehooks strung with twine for the peas to climb. The twine can be replaced every season or as needed. 

Stringing up twine for the peas to climb

Ta da! Finished pea trellis! Now to install it...

Justin secures the posts.

Isn't it lovely? It will be even lovelier once peas are growing on it. 

Brigitte poses in her gardening duds...

...and pretends to climb the trellis like a pea vine.