So, like I say, I’ve been trying to give myself some grace. I’ve also been trying not to get drenched, and the weather (as is often the case in the PNW) is not entirely predictable. Which is another way of saying it’s been raining quite a lot. Actually, it’s kind of flung itself wildly from rain to boiling hot sun and back to rain. Not ideal weather for working outside. AS I’m looking now, the sky has some light fluffy clouds skittering across a blue sky – and it’s predicted to start raining in about 2 hours.
I could use those two hours to get the mitrebox out, cut a couple of pieces, plane them to fit, and then rush to throw everything away before it starts raining, but I’m trying to be a little patient with myself.
But, that doesn’t mean that we’ve not achieved anything.
The compost is largely moved to the back garden, there’s still somewhat of a pile in the front, but it’s not quite so ridiculous. At some point that needs to come back and move to the big triangular bed in the backgarden. About half of what needs to come back is there. I think there’ll be some extra, but that’s fine, because we’ve got other bits of the garden that will need some that weren’t included in my original calculation. That’s the joy of rounding.
The big thing we’ve done in the back garden is we’ve erected a fence. Up until now, we’ve been fending off deer with individual fences:
But that has been a nightmare for weeding and watering. And it’s not like we’re the most efficient at getting out there (Oh, here come the clouds, btw) and weeding / watering. Doing so when you have to spend 10 challenging minutes unwrapping the flappy sharp bits of wire mesh was… less likely to happen. So we’ ordered some fence poles (turns out you can mail order metal 8′ fence poles) and over the weekend we put up the first run of fence – an ~7ft fence (tallest we could manage, really).
Then today we put up a second run of fence – apparently, deer have terrible depth perception, and really don’t like double fences. Indeed, apparently, you can get away with a 4ft high fence and a second 4ft tall, but canted at 45 degrees fence running parallel, and they’ll go “uh, no”. But we didn’t really want to lose that much garden, and thought our neighbours might not appreciate a fence canted over like a set of spears.
Now, 7ft is apparently a lousy height for a deer fence, because desperate deer will try to jump it, and it’s right on the margins of what they can manage and they’re more likely to fall attempting to clear a 7′ fence and failing (apparently, they’ll pretty much give up at 8′, and our planned proper fence will be 6′ with 2′ of trellis). However, our fence will probably just fall over if they attempt that, so I’m hoping we won’t end up with dead/damaged deer in our garden, and also, we’ve erected our trench defenses second line of fencing alongside our first fence which, while it’s only 2′ or so away will, we’re hoping dissuade them further.
I’m hopeful, but not convinced. When the lockdown lifts (at least for a while) we can hopefully go get some wood posts, and work out where our boundary is with our neighbour, and put up a real fence that’s somewhat more attractive (and also, ideally, doesn’t make a 3m wide strip of our garden look like some middleclass reenactment of the maginot line).
The nice thing about this is that our garden is starting to look more like a garden, and less like a collection of sad fences. Now it’s just the slugs and the moles that we need to deal with.
In interior news, work is progressing slowly on trimming around doors and windows – yesterday I did three of the window’s vertical sections. I now need to cut and wax/oil the horizontals, which needs…weather that’s forecast to be dry for a solid day, really. Something that’s been in short supply this week.
However, my weirdy plane the back off them so we end up with L-shaped pieces seems to be working okay.
