Why I Oughta...

This is now - unofficially - Staghorn Fern Week - on in my garden diary.  This is the third post in as many days about Staghorn Ferns starting with my first post about bringing home a small 4" Staghorn Fern that the kids and I mounted on a pine board .  Then, yesterday I posted a little story about how I found four 6" - and more mature - Staghorn Ferns at Home Depot and decided I was going to make up a few mounted ferns for Valentine's Day this year.  In that first post, I showed a little look into how we (the kids and I) put together the first mounted fern.  Here, below, is a closer look (with more photos) of how I put together one of these larger Staghorn Ferns using the same process.   I started this larger, more mature Staghorn with the same size board, but I used a larger bowl to make a slightly larger circle.  Below, you can see the circle I drew in pencil along with the 1-1/4 narrow-threaded drywall screws that I put around the circumference of the circle.  I used

After experiencing the joy of mounting our first Staghorn Fern on a board that I shared yesterday , I decided that I was going to do another one and give it away as a Valentine's Day present to my Mom.  So, one evening after work last week, I ran out to Home Depot.  Now, we live in a spot where there's a "close" Home Depot.  That's the one I normally go to on most occasions.  It is a normal HD in terms of size and inventory.  But, we also have two other Home Depots that are *pretty* close.  Like a couple of minutes further away - but in different directions.  One of those other Home Depots is one of their MASSIVE stores.  I don't know if you've been in the B I G Home Depots, but some of them are just bigger than others.  And that means that the garden center is usually bigger than most.   Because I KNEW what the inventory was of my "normal" Home Depot was (in terms of Staghorn Ferns), I figured...why not run to the large one.  It was just a few m

Yesterday I posted a couple of photos of our second Staghorn Fern - a tiny one that we bought with the intention of trying to mount it to a board - as is typical for these kind of ferns.  Having poked around the Web and watched dozens of YouTube videos of how-to's, I settled on this process: 1.  Find board, cut to size. 2.  Seal said board.  I used a can of clear coat spray that I had on hand.  Don't think this is necessary, but since you dunk the board AND fern in water to keep it hydrated, I figured this little extra step couldn't hurt. 3.  Draw a circle on the board, a little bigger than the container it arrived in. 4.  Drill a couple of short screws in the back that I can run picture-hanging wire from.  I did these first, because I figured that once the fern was mounted, I wasn't going to be able to flip it over and apply pressure with an impact driver to get these screws in. 5.  Flipped it back over and laid down a temporary piece of wood that it rested on top of

I was going through the girls' pin lanyards from our most recent trip to the parks and noticed that The Babe picked up a cute Yoda Valentine's Day one.   According to this post on the Disney Pins Blog , it is a new one that came out in November of 2015.  I know it is a few days past Valentine's Day, but I figured it was still worth sharing.  At some point when we get our place settled, we'll take these off the various lanyards (necklaces as the girls call them) and put them on a real pin board of sorts.  Oh...a guy can dream, right?!?