Well, we haven't posted in a while but not for lack of incidents. Mostly it's because my day job has taken all my time and energy so the only things going on have been the things going wrong.

We've had plumbing that wouldn't drain - even after running the auger through it, and feeding it digestive microbes for a week; the oven went into overdrive, wherein the only way to stop it on it's quest to reach the surface temperature of the sun was cutting the power at the breaker.

I'm in the process of working out what to plant this year, after last year's experiments. The ollas worked well for the small areas they covered, so I'll probably be getting many more of those as I convert the patches of grass to garden.

It's been very cold this winter, so thankfully we got the first phase of the attic insulation in before the cold arrived. We still have about two thirds of the attic to cover, but while the cotton insulation is so much easier to work with than the fiberglass, it's also more expensive, so that's going to have to be done in stages.

Here we have the original insulation, as it extends under the attic "floor" (the boards around the trapdoor), I think it is as old as the house...

... that's actually one of the deeper areas. We're supposed to have R38 in this area - I'm not sure what thin, dirty fiberglass-and-mouse-dropping, insulation counts as, but that's not it.

The insulation arrives...

... there were nine of these blocks, each containing eight pieces. The trapdoor was big enough to carry two up at a time. It took a while to get them all up into the attic. There's some irony in the recycled denim, ecofriendly insulation coming in non-recyclable plastic wraps.

Several hours of lifting later, we have a pile in the attic.



Installing the new insulation wasn't bad. Removing the dirty old stuff first was a lot less fun. Almost to the point where I was seriously considering paying someone else to do it.



Those three little strips were two hours of hot, unpleasant work, in a face mask and long sleeves to keep the fiberglass dust out. Next time I do it while it's grey and cold out - the attic gets warm even in late autumn if there's any sun.

Garden

We haven't posted much recently as we haven't been getting much done on the house. The yard is the only thing that's been making any progress. Little by little we're getting pieces of it converted into garden. This is very slow going, especially at the back, as the top couple of inches of soil is full of ... things*. Which means we can't just plow under the whole yard and start from scratch.

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Some of the things we get from filtering the top couple of inches (through a garden sieve, by hand, this is why it's taking a while):

• Bits of plastic
• Rocks (of varying sizes)
• Pieces of fiberglass insulation
• Pieces of glass
• Nails
• Children's toys
• A bungie cord
• A patch of tarmac
• Wire
• A twelve foot long piece of two-inch pvc pipe, not connected to anything.
• bits of wood (painted)
• Japanese beetle grubs:
  

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The "raised" vegetable bed is actually level with the original surface, but four inches above the level we excavated down to in order to clean the soil. The sides of the bed are constructed from material from the demolition.

Initial frame, with a layer of not-quite-compost from the pile (mostly half decayed leaves) to at least have some organic material in the mix.

Filled with filtered soil from the hole, using rocks we pulled out as spacers:


Putting the peas in. You can see the neck of the Olla we got from these folk - it's basically an unglazed pot that you fill with water. The water seeps out through the pot, watering the plants from underneath - which promotes better roots and avoids leaf rot from watering the plants from the top.


The peas, two weeks later:


At which point they got eaten by rabbits. So we added some, unsightly but effective, rabbit netting to foil the cute critters:



Then we dug up the next patch, didn't have time or energy to make another raised bed, so planted potatoes in the dug patch:



The peppers refused to sprout, but we had successful seedlings of cauliflower and brocolli, so those went out a couple of weeks later:


The beds by the kitchen window aren't doing so well so far. The best growing item at this point is a parsnip top we rescued from the compost pile (where it was happily growing). Here they are back in March:


And today, still droopy and brown:


Except the mint, of course, which is still trying to take over the garden:


By midsummer, we might actually have compost. The huge pile of leaves, etc. from last autumn is finally heating up (in part due to being tossed every other week - that's hard work with around 200 cubit feet of wet leaves), and cooking down into (notifcably smaller) compost:



The cherry tree behind the house bloomed spectacularly, at which point we discovered it was a grafted tree (which explains some of its mutant form), so we have a white side and a pink weeping side.


The rose bush beside the house is once more trying to eat the house:

Snow

Our first snowfall in the house



(nighttime snow. you can see the large compost bin under construction behind the tree).

The next morning, not long after sunrise. Everything looks pretty with snow.