Why I Oughta...

Just a few days ago, I posted some inspiration and details of a DIY Alpine trough project that I found on Instagram where someone used a *real* stone trough as a water feature ( wasserspiel ).  I talked about buying a styrofoam cooler to use as the chassis and building out the 'stone look' with concrete.   As luck would have it, I came across a free (to me) styrofoam cooler this past week.  It is small.  At least....smaller than I want for a wasserspiel or...ahem.... Alpine stone trough.   But, for a prototype?  I think it will work perfectly.   The outside dimensions of the prototype are 15" long x 11" wide x 9" deep.   It has 1" thick walls.   Based on what I picked up from watching various YouTube shorts, Instagram reels and reddit posts, there are a number of ways to go about DIY'ing your own stone trough.  You can apply burlap and concrete.  You can apply something like an acrylic fortifier to try to g...

Recently, I have been thinking one of the signature moments in Chicago's history:  The World's Columbian Exposition. The Chicago's World's Fair in 1893.  Plenty has been written about it , but it continues to be a source of fascination for plenty of people - including myself.   There are tons of posts/videos/thoughts about the architecture and the permanent/not-permanent nature of the structures.  The structures were built to be temporary.  That's why they're not around any longer.  (Aside from MSI).  That's interesting of itself.  But, If you look around online, you can also go deep on various kinds of something else 'temporary' related to the fair:  ephemera .  Brochures, photos, badges , coins and more.  I've written about Disney Parks ephemera before, as it continues to fascinate me, too.  In hunting around, I also came across this page on Wikipedia that features the "Official Seal of the World's Columbian Exp...

All the way back in Summer of 2019, I bought and planted a number of VERY SMALL Canadian Hemlock trees from an online nursery .   Three of them were planted along the north side fence line .  Today, two of those three are still standing .  Seven years ago, these trees weren't even a foot-tall in height.   Today?  This one is probably five-feet tall.  But, sparsely branched.  And, the caliper of the trunk is probably up to almost an inch.  Below is a look at this Canadian Hemlock tucked into the 'understory garden'.   Would I plant this tree back here, close to these other trunks - if I was to do it all over?  No.  Would I plant this small of a tree - if I was to do it all over?  No. But, here we are.  Seven years later and the tree is in this spot. The growth of the tree isn't really the point of this post in my garden diary.  I was out taking some kitchen scraps to the compost bin and took a number of ...

My list of potential projects is now posted and includes a couple that I've already posted about and one this one - that I'm going to call number three for the year.   My 'early look' list is here.  Priority 1 - the renovation of the bluestone chip gravel garden path is here .  And, Priority 2 - the minimum viable product on the pizza oven project is here .   My third project is in the front yard - the island bed.   I created this bed in mid-Summer 2024 when I planted the Korean Maple (Northern Glow) and cut out a kidney-bean-shaped bed in the 'front-ish' of our front yard.  Kind-of in the corner between our sidewalk and driveway.  I added a Spring Grove dwarf Ginkgo tree next to the Korean Maple a couple days later.  I also planted some Inferno coleus as an annual  and an October Daphne sedum (that the rabbits ate up all Summer...).  In the Fall, I added even more to this bed - three dwarf Seslarias (John Greenlee) , ...

It is about to be the second week in March.  Spring is coming.  Fast.   For me, that means I need to focus on organizing my yard and garden priorities and draft my 2025 to-do list.    Last year, I posted a short list that I called "an early look at some potential priority projects for 2024" .   That was a pretty helpful exercise - writing to understand (per Paul Graham ). A list of potential projects can be used as the foundation for that larger 2025 to-do list.   In 2024 , I categorized some of the potential projects to front vs. back vs. side yards and ended up with sixteen ideas.  Did I move on all of them?  No.  But, a bunch of them (pizza oven, hosta replacement, groundcover, front yard conifers) made the list and I was able to pull them off (mostly).   Ahead of this post, I've already posted about one of my (potential) priorities - a renovation project: That first, potential 2025 "priority" project was post...

Last week, I included a mention of _Laceybakes_ - the focaccia baker on TikTok amongst other little pizza-related tidbits in a round-up post .   Her videos influenced me to make a batch of focaccia this past weekend.  I opted for a simple olive oil and garlic butter-topped bread. I was too impatient (and didn't plan well-enough), so I ended up doing a same-day dough - which lead to an underwhelming hole-structure.    Below are a few photos.   This is the second-ever batch of focaccia that I've made - with my original research back in 2022 .   Some notes:  I used the stand-mixer to do the initial incorporation.  That was a mistake.  Think I over-worked this dough.  I did about five-or-so rounds of stretch-and-folds.  That was probably fine.  I dimpled this focaccia *and then* let it keep rising.  Pretty sure...that I should have dimpled-it right ahead of the bake. Also, as I mentioned above, there was no cold...

Last I posted about my backyard DIY pizza oven construction project, I was showing the foundation slab after I had stripped the forms .  The pour went well - thanks to the MudMixer.  Now that the reinforced slab was done, I can move on to building the stand.  That stand is made out of 8x8x16 cinder blocks.  If you go back and look in the archives, you'll see that I went back-and-forth about the dimensions of the slab and stand and after a bunch of thinking/tinker'ing, I ended up deciding on these dimensions : Slab: 72" wide x 80" deep. Stand: 4 blocks wide x 4.5 blocks deep - 62.5" wide x 70.312" deep. Hearth: Same as stand. Oven: 39" interior, 51" exterior side-to-side x 64" front-to-back. That's the slab that I poured: 72" wide (6 feet) by 80" deep (6 feet, 8 inches).  And, so I could go about building the stand with four blocks wide and four-and-a-half blocks deep.   Setting these blocks square is important and I had to pl...

Last Summer (June), I extended and (attempted) to clean up the front edge of our 'front porch bed' along the south property line .  The edge had been creeping 'inward' over the years, so I decided to use a shovel to remove as much of the grass as I could, carve off a clean edge and sort-of 'extend' the swoop of that bed a little bit into the lawn.    If you look back at the photos in this post , you'll see a nice, grass-free edge that I planted with bedding plants ( dwarf, French Marigolds ) and Dusty Millers .   By September, the dwarf (French) Marigolds took off and filled in the new border.  They looked great and were thick/full of oranges, reds and yellows .  Behind those annuals went a colony of Summer Beauty Alliums .  Backed by some small Green Velvet Boxwoods to extend the existing short hedge of boxwoods.   All was good last year.   This year, I've already started to clean up this bed - cutting down grasses and rakin...

We popped down to Wally's Gas Station (our version of Buc-ee's on I-55 near Bloomington) and I nocied this magnet display that included a Wally's-branded magnet in the design of our old, blue-topped State of Illinois license plates.  These were the plates that I grew-up with and feel quite a bit more iconic that the ones we currently have in Illinois. This is what we have now - below.  It has half-an-Abe on the left, shows the Sears Tower and the State of Illinois Capitol dome.  There appears to be a windmill in the middle to represent our agricultural base.   But, they stink.   Why can't we have the blue-topped ones back?  There are literally DOZENS of special plates you see on the road.  University ones.  Charity ones.   Why not a vintage Illinois one?  Come on, Alexi .  Stop trying to put points on the board with the silly book-banning stuff and focus on the job that matters most as the Secretary of State:  Dr...

The Cascade Hops Vine (Humulus Cascade Hops) has grown up the small, temporary trellis and is covering a good-sized width of the fence behind the plant these days.  Below, is a photo showing the Hops vine as it stands today - happy foliage and plenty of vines seeking upward growth. I planted this vine in Summer 2021 , so this the third growing season and last year, I added some wire (screwed to the fence) as a trellis for it to grow up .   The vine quickly consumed that trellis and wants EVEN MORE. In terms of fruit, it threw off some of those beautiful hops in the first season ( August ), but struggled last Summer and started to turn yellow by early September .    I'll watch this August to see if we get any hops.    One thing that is certain - I have to do even more trellis-wise on this next year.  Maybe it is up a wire?  Or around a hoop?  

Back in February, when I was at the end of the line in terms of wanting to deal with snow, I posted something that amounted to a bonsai wish list (or to-do list) for the season.  It was a way to get my brain thinking about what the Spring and Summer will look like and a coping mechanism after all the snow.  (Listen...I'm not normally someone who hates Winter.  But, February...and ALL.THE.SNOW was, umm, a bit much.) So, out of that post , I mentioned that I wanted to do a few things including utilizing the existing nursery stock that I have on hand, acquire more for future use, dig up a 'found' bonsai (American Elm), take a bonsai class and...create a bench or table for the trees.   I've looked around (briefly) on the Web to figure out the right way to display bonsai and it seems like if you are interested in learning more about the topic, stop number one on your journey should be this Bonsai Empire post that talks how to display trees and gives some tips. ...

 A few weeks back, I posted a photo to mark the beginning of my second Winter Break COVID puzzle - this 750 piece puzzle featuring Disney pins that you can trade in/around the parks.  Well, I hit it hard out of the gate - while I was still had some time away from work.  But, then, reality hit and my days were filled with Microsoft Teams calls.  As with my previous COVID puzzles (a smaller, 300-piece Christmas one and a 1000-piece Harry Potter-themed one ) that I successfully completed, I set this Disney Pins puzzle up in the screened porch where there is a lot of light and plenty of company.  After starting strong, this puzzle seemed to just kind of sit idle.  Couple work stuff with the kids using my puzzle table to do their Christmas Lego sets and this one got shelved for a bit.   But, this past weekend, I picked up where I left off, reset a few of the pieces that had come up and got busy.  Here's where I ended the weekend:  Pretty cl...

 When we started this whole global pandemic thing back in Spring, puzzles had a moment.  Everybody was bound to their own home and it seemed liked everyone was doing puzzles.  Here's what Google Trends has in terms of data to show the surge in interest in puzzles this Spring : We tried to do one back then, but failed.  Just never got out of the starting block.  I think it had to do with the location of the puzzle.  We had it set up in our dining room - which is like a ghost town.  But, in recent weeks, I put up our little card table out on the screened porch and put a 300 piece family-friendly Christmas puzzle on it.  Guess what?  Seven or eight days after I started it, we finished it.  Because, it was in a room where we all were hanging out.   So, today is Sunday the 13th of December.  I'm working the rest of this week and a little bit next week.  But, then we'll have some time together as a family.  And, beca...