Birds!

They are currently nested in the upper white birdhouse mounted on our sweetgum tree, and we think they might be sparrows or starlings...

One year after putting up these birdhouses we finally have some bird neighbors in our yards. Tala has been highly concerned with their presence in our yard and has followed her Dad's lead and reported them as potential threats to the security of the homeland.....

I will be using this success to leverage my arguement for a bathouse in the near future...

Shade!

Last summer our house was extremely hot so this year we built a pergola while Adriana was in Spain. I guess "we" doesn't work here. It works to shade the house, especially our West-facing bedroom doors and windows. Within a few years the trumpet vines (2) and climbing hydrangea overhead will hopefully curb our need to run the air conditioning on the 90+ degree days...

Compost!

We compost almost everything. From household trash and grass clippings/yard waste (our own or "creatively repurposed" from neighbors' Sunday night trash god offerings). Composting is a good way to start a garden, fill holes that your rotten dog has dug in the yard or to restart a dying lawn (all of which we did this year). We estimate that we are able to harvest about 340 gallons (~10 trash cans full) of useable compost every ten weeks on average or 1700 gallons a year. It also keeps approxiamately 480 trash cans full of useable trash ranging from leaves/grass/all non-meat food products/shredded paper and cardboard/and newspapers from the dump each year. We only put out one trash bag in the month of June. It was all cat litter because they hate the environment since they live indoors.


To the right are our two Costco purchased compost bins (held together by bungee cords because the plastic tabs that hold the sides together are flimsy at best) and below are our two compost tumblers built with old barrels from a pancake syrup factory - no joke.


Build your own out of "creatively repurposed" pallets or find our how to make tumblers here: http://www.wikihow.com/Build-a-Tumbling-Composter



Personally I like the bins but the tumblers are better for getting the compost started and for going through the "final cook" especially if you have hard Indiana clay soil like we do and need to add sand or plan on mixing it with bagged topsoil. Plus they are easier to turn.