Grvland.com

Well, I didn't post anything here all summer.  I guess I was mostly just lazy, and it was a busy time with Megan and I both starting new jobs as well trying to keep up with the homestead.  I'm just gonna run down a couple of highlights of the summer in bullet form for ya.

• Planted the window boxes (as you can see from my previous post)
• Nearly killed those plants
• Revived them just in time for them to frost
• Ford 914 mower deck crapped out on me 2x again this summer
• Midas and Lucy gobbled up our crop of peaches and puked up the pits inside the house
• Midas and Lucy continued to make themselves sick on apples following the peaches
• Megan and Mom painted most of the house yellow (I might add some pics of that)
• Repaired multiple breaks in the underground dog fence wire caused by moles/groundhogs
• Midas and Lucy enjoyed a bumper crop of pears

More recently I added the following to my yard arsenal:

 

Oh...and Lucy finally caught a mole after months of hunting and digging:

You may (or most likely may not) recall this post in which I described how one of the bearings in my Ford 914 mid-mount mower deck burned itself out and cost me much time and money to replace.  The exact same thing has happened again!  It is a different blade assembly this time.  The only good part is that I know how to dis-assemble everything so the teardown went much more smoothly this time around.  I have ordered parts ($100's of $) for both remaining blade assemblies.  After they come in, I will have replaced all the bearings in the deck.

Update: May 3, 2008 - I finally put the other box up and they have also been populated with vegetation.  The ends are planted with sweet potato vines (black and chartruse), and the middle has a combination of pink begonias and sky blue trailing lobelia.  We'll see how it all works out.  Hit up the picture link below to see how the initial planting looks.

My winter project this year was completely impractical, but more fun than those 'necessary' projects.

Over the months since Christmas I have been steadily building two 'Whimsical Window Boxes' (as described by the plans not by me). I found the plans on the Cottage Living website. They can be found here. Click the pic below to check out the gallery images.

 

I have updated the RSS feeds for my 'News' section.

The feeds are now full text, including any media content such as pictures (only if your reader supports them).  I have tested it in Google Reader, so I know that it at least works there.  Also, the feeds only list the latest 5 items.  Previously every single article was listed, which was just a waste of bandwidth.  I don't update content very often, so if you're checking so infrequently that you miss more than 5...well, you probably don't care that much anyway so you're out of luck.  If someone gives me a compelling reason to publish more than 5 at a time, I'll consider upping the limit. 

Please click on the ridiculously large icon with unnecessary reflection to view the raw feed.