looking out and looking ahead

So the snow is melting. I look outside with anticipation. My fingers are itching to get out and into the dirt. I want to make out a plan of house and yard goals for every week.... Except I know I won't achieve all that I will brainstorm. So where are our priorities?

Inside we need to finish our bathroom renovation. It will be nice to go back to two toilets and shower upstairs instead of in the basement. Daniel will appreciate being able to stand up while showering. And we will all appreciate a heated room to shower in. (No the basement is not heated even though our wood stove and water tanks for our house heating system are there. it is a waste of resources to heat the basement.) No pictures for that one - again my blogging savvy-ness is showing itself... I don't know how to put up more than the amount of pictures that I managed to include in this entry.

Spring Planting/Garden: This is the chicken coop. I will be turning it into a garden plot since I have no intentions of keeping chickens. (or pigeons.... sorry C.) I have the best natural fertilizer conveniently left here from the former owners. :) The snow was a bit too heavy for the netting on top so some of the boards were bowed and broken. But the side ones seem to be stable so I will grow some climbing plants on the coop wire. Peas, green beans.... I have to plot it all out. Nearby, I will do my salad stuff. Fresh spinach. I have another spot where I will do potatoes to get the soil ready for other garden greens next year. And I have to try my hand at pumpkins. I want to grow tomatoes in the greenhouse again (you can see the greenhouse below in the pruning picture). With a full season and the greenhouse benefits I should get even better results this year. All the stuff I was growing and trying to grow on my balcony and in my apartment the last two years and very small yard plots the two years before will have the room and depth they really need!

Pruning:

Honestly, I am counting down till I can have at it! I did a little late fall, but only some trees can tolerate that time of year. This one, that you see in front of the house is the worst of the lot, it has multiple issues, I want to try my hand at grafting. I have been reading about it and family apple trees. I didn't get to nor care to spend time on the apples from this tree, as the other two were so good and I didn't have time to deal with the masses of small bug infested apples on this tree. So I need to put a stop to the infestation (also reading up on that) and then I want to graft in a couple other sorts of apples when I prune.

The second pictures are a pear, plum and apple tree in the row and if you look closely across from the plum tree is another apple tree. These two apple trees had great fruit and were not ripe at the same time. Convenient.

Roof: The picture is taken from the attic. The black.... mold, rot... The grey is a poor replacement for the ridge cap that should have been at the top of the roof outside. Since there is bad wood inside we have to pull off the whole roof to take care of it. Then it will need new roofing. It already is missing a good draining system as you can see on the facade system, which is part of the reason we need a new facade.

(Look at the roof shape in the pruning pictures above.)

Facade: The facade also doesn't have proper airflow/ventilation within itself, so we need to put that in before putting on the new facade.

Look at the rotten boards there.... you can see where it is just falling off. That was caused by lack of good roof drainage system.

Since we will redo the facade, we are not repainting at this point.


And we will build a compost to make good use of all the good garden waste we generate here.

I think that is enough to fill up our year!