Destruction project

This week Jeff and I took a nice hot day and our crowbars (he insists that they are goosenecks and there are also flat bars and whatever else but to me they're all crowbars) and worked together to deconstruct the porch.  The porch was a sad, rotten thing.  It was situated at the main entrance of the house but it sagged and tipped and pulled away from the house and had a hole in the floor that we had to remember to avoid every time we entered or exited.  Not to mention all the spider webs. We've been eyeing the porch all summer, and just awaiting the day when it's turn would come.

We took off the siding, removed the boards, cut out the window, knocked out the vertical 2x4's and watched the roof fall!  It was a satisfying thing to be sure! So now we have sunshine coming in the front door in the morning, a surplus of rusty nails and a bunch of wood we can reuse.  Some of it is quite lovely (we're open to suggestions for reclaimed wood projects)!  It was nice to be able to roll up my sleeves and get in there on a project. Because I don't have much by way of construction/renovation/plumbing experience usually Jeff works on house stuff and I play the supporting role and do the other stuff, whatever that may be. I don't always feel useful doing the background things, especially when the goal for being out here is 'work on the house.'  So it was good to get dirty and sore and tired tearing something apart.

We've also been working on the garden, but these days "working" is mostly a lot of book reading. Books on plants and planning and composting and soil...  We decided that we would really like to have some kind of compost built. What kind of compost to build is apparently a less than simple question - one we could spend a long time figuring out (and with our lack of gardening experience and our general indecisiveness we probably would). In the meantime to discovering the perfect compost system(s), I took a rummage through the sometimes junk, sometimes treasures of our outbuildings and found some wire mesh. So I've thrown together a probably too small, but at least functional compost that will do us for the moment.

In other garden news, we ate our first garden cucumber! It was juicy and crunchy and sweet and delicious.  I don't think I've ever tasted as sweet a cucumber before.  The garden is beginning to reward us for our efforts, although it still does look tiny compared to every other garden I have seen around here.  The race is now on to be able to harvest the fruits of our labours a) before it gets cold, and b) before the time we plan to return to Calgary.  The carrots are still very small and the beans are only just beginning to form fruit.  Fertilizer has become my friend, and I am trying to be especially diligent to water everything regularly.  I have my eye on the next to ripen cucumber though and I think today may be the day for it!