ongoing project: my front yard

I'm trying to get back into the swing of blogging, no less because VEGAN MOFO is in September this year! Since I'll be posting about food every day of that month, I'm writing about the house this month. I meant to be updating all summer.. but it turns out that the first year of being a first-time homeowner is really time consuming! July's post was and the next couple posts will be about some of the projects that have been taking up so much of my time (which would otherwise have been spent blogging, I'm sure).

First, here is the home my husband and I bought a little over a year ago:

It was a partially flipped house built in 1910. I say "partially" because it seems like the flippers did the minimum amount of work they could do while still getting away with calling the home "flipped." But that was okay with us--we were both okay with the "fix-me-up" nature of some of our house.

I'll show you some inside shots in a later entry, but the real projects that have been sucking up my time are outdoors. Did you notice my front yard in the picture above? And how by "yard" I mean "dirt?" Here's another view:

 

When we moved in, the only green in the front of our house was a few patches of crabgrass. (Which, true to crabgrass's nature, soon became "a jungle of crabgrass.") I put down grass seed and am still slowly trying to choke out weeds.

The slope of the front of our lawn is a difficult angle to mow, so I decided to turn the worst of it--the edges-- into flowerbeds. First I had to get rid of what was already there. I bought some black plastic sheeting. (Specifically I bought "landscape fabric," but any black plastic sheeting will do.) Because it is black plastic, it not only blocks the weeds underneath from getting any light, but it absorbs light, making the ground underneath it super hot, killing the weeds and (hopefully) their seeds. I laid it down along the edges of the lawn. It comes with flimsy plastic stakes, but I knew they wouldn't do the job for the many months I intended to leave them there, so I also just weighed down the plastic every few feet with pavers.

The green on the lawn in this picture is all crabgrass.

I did this in October of last year and warned our neighbors that it would look ugly for many more months, but it was in an attempt to make it look pretty in the future.

This past April, I rolled back the plastic, which had done a good job killing the weeds! I used a digging fork to turn the soil, mixing in some compost as I went. In retrospect, I should really have used some stronger tools (like my hoe axe!) and done a better job of really mixing up the soil, but I didn't know that at the time.

The picture above shows freshly-turned dirt on the bottom left side, and the paler row of not-yet-turned soil. Please ignore my thumb in the corner (oops). The picture below shows the fully turned bed:

One bold robin, one of the first robins of the season, LOVED ME for turning all the soil, and followed me around the yard like an excited dog. All I had to do was turn my back, and when I'd turn around, there he'd be. He was sort of my yard work mascot this spring, as every time I did a new project, he'd be watching me and eating any worm I might unearth.

I then planted flower seeds. many of which died. Our front lawn gets full sun all day, every day, and we had an incredibly dry spring. I had picked all drought-resistant varieties, but despite daily watering, I couldn't keep the flower beds moist enough for little seeds to thrive--poor things! I replanted a few weeks ago, and some of the flowers are finally coming in, but it's a slow process. I've learned my lesson for next year: I'll have to start my plants indoors.

This is still a work in progress. It's not as pretty as it will be next year, but it's a start. I'll keep you posted!

spring 2013 project: my back yard

(AKA, DIY yard terracing! Whoo!)

One of the reasons I wanted to move out to Waltham, our city/suburb, was that I wanted to be able to have a house and outdoor space of our own. I wanted a garden and a yard where our future kids could play. We couldn't get that in the middle of Cambridge or Boston. The lot we ended up with is relatively small, but the front is big enough for some flower beds, and the back yard had a small green space and the edge of a rocky hill. It looked spacious enough when we had first seen our place in late winter, but when the back yard started to fill in with weeds and poison ivy come spring, I realized we actually had very little useable outdoor space.

(You can see larger versions of these picture by clicking on them.)

That lush green jungle is primarily just rocks, broken glass, a large dead tree, and poison ivy. Definitely not useable.

We paid landscapers to remove the worst of the brush last fall; I had gotten a bad case of poison ivy last summer (I used to be immune! but no longer) and didn't want to mess with it again. We were then hoping to have the landscapers terrace the backyard a little, but when we got the estimate for the work, it was about $10,000. We could definitely not afford that! I decided to try working on it myself. (After paying a professional to take down the dead tree. I knew I couldn't do that myself.)

I had no idea what I was doing. I have never landscaped or done anything close to it. Mowing our lawn last summer was the first time I'd ever mowed. The only "garden" I've ever grown was the pots of herbs I grew on the fire escape of our last place. But I am not one to let inexperience stop me! Have you ever heard the silly kids' joke, "How do you make a statue of an elephant?" The answer is "Take a block of stone and chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant." This was the approach I decided to take with the backyard. I would chip away everything that didn't look like "my" back yard.

I got started in late March/early April, after the snow had melted but before anything could grow. I wasn't sure what I would do yet, but I knew that the first step was to clear away all of the leaves, sticks, and branches so I could get an idea of the land I had to work with.

Partially cleared. Unfortunately I didn't take many "before" pictures. This was the worst part of the project. There were decades' worth of leaves to rake away, wrapped around decades' worth of rotting branches and garbage. More than half of the yard was covered in winter creeper, an annoying, invasive vine that kept getting caught in the rake and making my job even harder. I had to pull out all the vines and runners and roots, some of which turned out to be poison ivy roots. I couldn't tell at the time because it was too early for the poison ivy to grow leaves, so it blended in with the winter creeper runners. After my first rash of this season cropped up, I started wearing long sleeves, arm warmers, and my work gloves, and washing myself and all of my clothing obsessively after each time outside. There was also a huge amount of broken glass throughout the yard, which I removed shard by shard.

While I did find a couple 3-4 hour chunks of time on weekends, the vast majority of this work was done between when I got home from work and when the sun set, which was about an hour a day in April. And because of social life stuff, I couldn't be home before dark every day. So it took me the whole month to clear the back yard, one hour at a time.

All cleared. Now that I had an idea of the shape of things, I could sort of envision how best to make it useable space. I imagined two distinct levels: one larger, even one on the bottom, where someday I'd have a garden, a seating area, and a bird bath. The other, upper level would be smaller, left sort of wild, with trees and eventually flowers. I would make a path between the two terraced levels.

I didn't know how exactly that would work, but I liked the idea. Online searches for the best way to level one's land mostly gave me answers like "rent a tractor" or "hire a landscaper," so I was on my own. I did find that for small leveling jobs, people used what a bunch of sites called a "grub hoe" and a dirt rake. I could have gone to the hardware store for these, but first I went to my dad. He had an extra dirt rake (this is the best part about being from a really rural area: of course my dad had an extra dirt rake) and while he only had one grub hoe, he gave it to me because he "never wants to have a reason to use it again." (This did not bode well for how laborious the work ahead of me would be.)

What I call a grub hoe, on the left, is also called a grubbing hoe or hoe axe. It has a hoe on one end and an axe head on the other. You use it to hack at the ground to dig and loosen up the dirt you want to move. It belonged to my grandfather, who was a farmer. It was really exciting and sort of sappily symbolic to me that I would use the same tool he used on the land where I grew up to improve my own home and land. The dirt rake, on the right, is what you use to move the loosened dirt around. These were my buddies for weeks of work and remain my favorite yard work tools.

Again, I could only put in about an hour a day of work, and even then only a few days a week, but I hacked at and raked the ground, pulling out winter creeper, poison ivy, and locust tree shoots as I found them. (I am proud to say that I seem to have eliminated the first two, but those darn locusts are still my enemy.)

The finished version! At least, as finished as it's going to get this year. I sprinkled some grass seed around just to have something growing out there, and other plants have sprouted up. I also planted a garden! A real one! That wild rabbits love! The bottom area is mostly leveled and larger, with plenty of space for our garden (which will hopefully be twice as big next year). Someday we'll put a bird bath and a seating area back there, too. The top area isn't quite as leveled as I had hoped it would be, but there are so many roots from our trees and the trees on our neighbors' property that it was really difficult to move the earth around. It is flatter now though, so it's easier to walk on, and I made a little path between the layers on the right side.

It's getting overgrown, but I just can't spend much more time on it this year.  It's still a work in progress, but I'm so happy with how far it's come!

earth machine compost bin

House decorating/beautifying is still taking place, as well as yardwork. I've been doing yardwork! The most yardwork I've ever done is maintaining a tiny flower garden when I was in college, and now I'm mowing! I'm creating flower beds! Everything is a process; pictures will come soon (or, more realistically, when the projects finish--so maybe not super soon).

In the meantime, my greatest domestic triumph is that we've started composting! When we first moved to Waltham (the Boston suburb I now call home) and went to pick up our recycling bin from the city municipal building, the lady who works there told us that Waltham has teamed up with another nearby suburb to provide compost bins to residents at discounted rates. A lot of places do this, as it saves the municipality time, money, and space by not having to pick up so much garbage,  so if you're interested in getting a compost bin, look into whether your city or township has a composting program or subsidy.

from earthmachine.com

The city gives you a choice of compost bins, and I went with the Earth Machine, since it seemed like the easiest. It retails for around $60, but with the city subsidy, I paid half that. The only trick was that I had to go to the municipal center of the next town over and pick i up--then drive it home. We have a tiny car, but fortunately the composter comes in parts that you assemble at home:

Getting it into the car was tricky, getting it back out was much tricker.

I had already plotted out the place it would go in our back yard: close to the house, but not so close that it would be a problem in case it attracted critters or began to smell (I know compost is not supposed to do either thing if you do it right, but I was afraid I might mess it up).

You have to put it somewhere flat or the convenient bottom panel won't sit properly. I put it by that rock because the rock is already hard to mow around, so I figured adding a hard-to-mow-around compost bin wouldn't change much.

My first step was the attach the bottom panel to the bottom half of the bin.

It clicks in, but it doesn't actually secure with anything, which might be frustrating for if I ever want to move the compost bin. So I'll just aim not to have to move it ever.

Putting on the top half of the bin was trickier than I imagined.

The dude at the municipal center told me I'd have to get someone to help me with it, but I had thought he meant because I was a girl and it might be too hard for me. Nope. It's really just more of a two person job--it's hard to click all the tabs into place at once if you're by yourself. I finagled it by stepping inside the bin and sitting on one edge while I pushed on the other.

Next was sliding on the door to the compost bin,

...which was no big deal.

It comes with convenient pegs to secure the whole thing to the ground. Again, there's nothing to secure that bottom screen to it if you remove these pegs, but these are still handy in case I get really vigorous with my compost turning.

They were also easy to drive into the ground.

And voila! I have a compost bin!

I've had it less than a month, so it's much too early to know how it's doing, compost-wise, but the results are pretty dramatic in terms of waste reduction. In composting our food scraps, we have reduced our garbage by 1/3 to 1/2. And I'll get some great compost to apply to the gardens I'm hoping to have ready next spring... A pretty good deal! And even if it doesn't work out, it's an interesting experiment.

My biggest complaint, however, is that I got the first manicure of my life a week before setting up the compost bin, and the set-up process chipped my nail:
 

...so I guess they were not meant to be installed by ladies with pretty nails. I normally don't have pretty nails, though, so I guess I don't mind.

I've been so busy with the house that I haven't been cooking that much in the way of new and exciting recipes yet, but I'll try to get back in the swing of food blogging for September. I'm definitely planning to do daily Vegan Month of Food blogging this October, though, so that should put me back on the front lines of blogging. See you soon!

how to dye a wedding dress

I really loved my wedding dress. It was pretty, it was simple, and it was formal enough to match the husband's tux without being a giant terrifying pile of icing. Getting it was incredibly simple: I'd looked at it for weeks online before my mother and I had a chance to get to a David's Bridal. We sat down with the saleslady there, and she asked "What kind of dress are you looking for?"

"Style number WG3313," I said.

Her jaw dropped. "You... know the number?"

So she went to find the dress, came back with the two sizes the store had in stock, and had me try one on. It fit absolutely perfectly, no alterations needed. And Bam! I had a wedding dress!

It was comfortable, pretty, and easy to dance in. Everything I wanted!

But after the wedding was over, the dress no longer had a purpose. I was a little bummed that I only got to wear this awesome dress for one day, so decided to DYE MY WEDDING DRESS. I was inspired by Sherry over at the Young House Love blog, who dyed her wedding dress an awesome gunmetal gray color. I was also aware of the fact that she'd wanted to dye it black; I was prepared before I even began for things not to turn out as I'd expected.

Here is the extent of my experience with dyeing prior to this: once, when I was Prop Master of a play in high school, I dyed a pair of white cotton gloves yellow. Which is to say, I have almost no experience dyeing things. I was originally planning to use Rit dye, just because that was the only brand I knew, but our local art store didn't carry it. I ended up going with iDye, which had the advantage of having colors for both natural and manmade fibers. (Rit is only for natural fibers.) The top layer of my dress is 52% polyester and 48% rayon. Almost all of the other layers were 100% polyester. Rit was probably not going to work. iDye recommends that for blended fabric, one should combine the normal dye with a complementary color of their "poly" dyes. I got Crimson and Red.

Let me point out right now that these are powders. As soon as I opened a packet, tiiiiny invisible particles of red dye disseminated throughout the bathroom, landing in weird places and not showing up until after our next couple showers, when the steam condensed into little tiny drops of PINK all over the surfaces of our bathroom, even the ones I had covered with a layer of catalogue pages for safety.

For polyester, you're supposed to boil the clothes in the dye for 30-60 minutes. My dress was much too big for even our largest stock pot, so instead I boiled loads of water over the stove and poured it into a storage container in our bath tub. I then added the dye, and THEN THE DRESS.

My dress is in there! Eek! Note the gloves (otherwise I'd've had blotchy red hands) and the paint stirrers: You're supposed to agitate (stir) the dress the whole time! I leaned over the bathtub and listened to an episode of This American Life. After 45 minutes, I couldn't take it anymore, so next came the final, and for me, the hardest step: rinsing the dress. You rinse the dress over and over in cold water until the water runs clear. This. Took. FOREVER. That dress held a lot of dye, let me tell you. Then I put the dress on the fire escape to dry.

While it dried I scrubbed and scrubbed the bathtub, because it had turned hideously pink.

But then, by dinner time, it was dry. AND LOOK:

The light looks dim in this one, but the color of the dress is very close to what it is in real life.

I love it! Mind you, I had expected a crimson/red dress, and this is sorta mauve with cherry red accents. And the dress was "Dry Clean Only," which all sources say not to dye... and definitely not to soak in boiling water. As a result, the heat shrunk the cloth on either side of the zipper, so the bodice shrunk by about about 1/2 an inch... which sounds negligible, except the dress had fit me PERFECTLY before. I had to wear it around the house for a couple hours breathing really deeply to stretch it back out. But it fits fine now, and above all, I think it looks great!

The color looks a little washed out from the flash in this one, but you can see the sash better. And if you look at the bottom right hem, you can see that the layer of crinoline turned cherry red!

Now I just need an occasion to wear a puffy pink dress.

simple mason jar centerpieces and decor

Centerpieces and table settings are things I never really thought about before planning our wedding. (Other things I'd never really thought about: wedding dresses, how kegs work, how far caterers will travel, how many weddings take place in Cooperstown in mid October, and maple syrup shots.) I mean, I know how to set tables and I have put vases of flowers, candles, or fruit bowls on a table to make it prettier. But I'd never before had to think about how to make tables for 70 people look not just pretty, but cohesive. The more I thought about it, the more I found wedding decorations as a whole to be quite daunting.

Enter my new BFF, THE HUMBLE MASON JAR. (The cage thing in the middle is for cards. We had a no-gifts wedding, but my sister got us this because she said we'd get cards anyway. She was right!) Ball mason jars are inexpensive, made in the USA, and available at all hardware (and probably most grocery) stores. They're also perfect for reuse: they are all presently in my kitchen, full of food, right now.

I bought two colors of ribbon (they matched the invitations!) and tied them around the mouths of the mason jars, then put matching (I'm so [color] coordinated!) candles in each one. We had 24 jars all together.

I'm also pretty proud of my camera idea in that picture. While we had two photographers (a professional one, and our friend Michael from the Dazed and Infused blog), I wanted candids. I put a tag on my personal camera saying "Sarah's Camera/Please take lots of photos with this," set it by the "guestbook," and ended up with almost 300 pictures of my friends and family. They were all silly and fun candids--just what I wanted!

Our professionals also took pictures of people taking pictures with it--so meta.

Our table settings looked like this:

Simple, clean, and pretty. The plates were Leafware's palm leaf plates. Disposables, I know, but they're made from fallen palm leaves and are totally biodegradeable, so we still get some green points, right?

Our favors were small bottles of local maple syrup. The husband and I spent a couple hours tying little ribbons onto them.

By the end of the night, the candles burned out completely. Removing the wax so I could reuse the jars was easy: I put the jars in the freezer for about 30 minutes, and the wax tumbled right out. I think I read about that little trick on Martha Stewart's website? You will note the maple syrup bottles in this photo have been opened. That's because a few intrepid wedding guests decided to challenge each other to shots of maple syrup.

Other than a few pumpkins and hay bales outside the venue (thanks, Dad!), the mason jars were our only decorations, but they went far in giving the already pretty venue some extra warmth. (visually, not physically. We had a fireplace for that).

Putting them everywhere drew the place together visually and made it seem like we had a plan. And the plan was mason jars. (Well, and getting married.)

how to remove fruit stains from clothes (thanks, Mom!)

Did any of you ever read Blueberries for Sal when you were kids?

It's about a little girl and her mother who go blueberry-picking, get separated, and end up face-to-face a mother bear and her cub. I loved this book (and I still love it, actually), for multiple reasons: first, as my mother informed me when I was young, Sal is a nickname for Sarah, so of course I associated myself with the little girl. Second, bears!

Third, the whole book is about picking and eating blueberries. Who doesn't love blueberries?! They are so awesome. Pies, crisps, muffics, coffee cakes, eating by the handful; they are good for so many things!

Blueberry crisp and a blueberry-soy-yogurt popsicle

The thing I don't like about blueberries, and about berries in general, is that they stain clothing with even a tiny bit of contact. Most of my clothes are dark, so it doesn't matter, but recently I was wearing a yellow shirt while making blueberry pancakes, and bam! purple spatter all over my stomach and chest. And unless you use some kind of miracle detergent, running fruit stains through the wash usually just sets the stains instead of eliminating them.

My mother was visiting at the time, and told me the so-simple-it's-amazing way of removing fruit stains from clothes. This works on more than just berry stains; it can remove any strong vegetable/fruit juice, even beets. The trick is that you have to do this before the clothing makes it into a washing machine, because once the stain goes through the machine, there's no helping you.

Fill a kettle or a pot with lots of water. You're going to want at least a few cups, more for bigger and/or stubborn stains. Drape the stained article of clothing around a bowl, or in your sink. I've draped my shirt around a large bowl in the next few pictures.

Once the water has boiled, pour it very slowly, in a small stream, over the stain.

You can already see some of the stains coming out. (I circled them for you!) There were more, and larger, stains on my shirt, but I didn't think to take a picture until I was already getting rid of them.

This should wash smaller and lighter stains right out; for stubborn or big stains, just keep drizzling the water until they go away. The whole process takes about 1-2 minutes. Ready?

Before:

After:

Stain-free shirt! NOW it's back to normal! And you can put it in the wash. AND you can eat all the blueberries you want.