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There Was Time Now, so the garden of Chidi House, the humble abode that only gave us stomachaches for a year and a half, is springing up nicely. - VEGETABLES: Nah man. The possums go for them first. We gave it a go, and Henry got to them. (All possums are named Henry.) - FRUITS: Blackberries! You don't have to do much with a blackberry bush. Plant it and ignore it. Summer's gonna kick rear end. - LANDSCAPING: Oh my goodness, the flowers. My wife has taken to the Philadelphia Flower Show as an annual pilgrimage with friends, and she comes back with many things, including tulips so large and jagged before they pop that I started calling them The Audreys. Also, if you just wanna plant something and ignore it? I suggest corn flowers. They get up to your ribcage in height without too much effort, and they spread. Oh my god, the volunteer cornflowers are taking over my street. The neighbors don't seem to mind, and we're laughing because Johnny Appleseed sounds cool and Johnny Cornflower sounds like a bootlegger from Windsor, ON. - TILLING: Chidi House is a hundred year old house, and until two years ago, it sat vacant for decades. That means the neighborhood kids screwed around in it, busted out every window, and I cannot explain to you how many condoms were found. So a big part of the rehab project has involved taking a hand tiller - look, I'm young and I don't feel like gasoline powered anything - and digging up glass from every square inch of our property. "Bumper crop of glass this year, honey," we'd yell to each other from time to time. Also found: shards of 50's era ceramics, old nails, an entire hose, and what appears to be a set of marbles. Our theory is that the raised flower bed has a leveled surface underneath, and kids used to play marbles there. We might learn how to play marbles. Why the gently caress not. There Was Time Now. - THE ACCURSED BLOODY LAWN: We don't want sod. Sod is for shitters, man. But we don't want to do weed killer, because weed killer might hurt our cat. So our lawn is...well, it's more weeds than grass, and it looks for all the world like the fully grown weed clumps from Animal Crossing. We broke down and bought a push lawnmower - again, no gas powered anything - and it does the job for everything that isn't a certain height and thickness. Including the volunteer tulips. Got a lithium-battery-powered weed whacker, which seemed fairly intuitive, but I poo poo you not, the instructions Makita provided straight up skip steps for assembly. They include parts, don't tell you where they go, and you stare at the instructions and ask why the gently caress things don't go together. Anyway it all works now. Mostly. The weed whacker runs forwards and backwards, but if I run it backwards, the head falls off and my wife falls over laughing. I live in a sitcom. I live in pre-Urkel Family Matters. (If you've never watched Family Matters pre-Urkel, I recommend it. It's a very different show.) - SOLAR POWER, MOTHERFUCKER: The District of Columbia is a great place to get solar. My best friend and I got solar power at the same time; she lives in Alexandria, I live in DC. She's paying something like $22,000 over a 20 year loan for her solar panels; I'm paying...well...nothing. No charge for installation. DC really, really wants you to go solar, to the point where solar companies can go door to door and give you the easiest sell of all time; they get the subsidies from the city to build it, and I pay the solar company $30 a month for the power. I also pay Pepco, the local power company, for what non-solar power we use. Last month, despite both of us being out of work and using a fair bit of electricity? $3.50. Look into your local/state solar situations, because solar might just be the Right loving Answer. - THE CITY IS HERE FOR YOU TO USE: DC also gets aggressive about water. If your land isn't permeable, you get a massive charge on your water bill, the proceeds of which goes to Chris, The Boring Machine, which is currently boring a hole across the city to help clean/filter garbage out of the Anacostia River. You can call the water company to bitch about it, and they'll reassess your land. "Oh," they said, "You can have way more permeable land than this, check out these city programs!" My friends, the District of Columbia will subsidize landscapers to plant rain gardens, "bayscape" (aka Chesapeake Bay-native plants that are super thirsty), and full on trees. You pay $50 for the gardens, $100 for the trees, $50 for rain barrels, and all of this, if you report it to the city water department, grants you credits to your water bill. Home ownership in a super expensive town is an adventure, but as long as you aren't scared of black people, you can live quietly, nobody bothers you because you're not a loving cop, and there's room to grow. Literally. The eastern tip of DC used to be all farm land. As my neighbor said, "Wait until you see how good the soil is!" Then she stole a bunch of our tomatoes. It's okay though. We had plenty.
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Apr 30, 2020 17:03
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 13:50 |
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