Starlight Run

Moving

We are moving blogs. Due to a quirk in blogger, we are moving this blog to here:

http://8004theorangedoor.blogspot.com/

Matt will be reinviting you, as we will be making this one private. You can always go back and see the entries on this one.

So sorry.

Gardening, gardening, gardening, gardening

I’ve been gardening. Or at least doing all the things people do when they want to start gardening. Many of these things require money and muscle, so it isn’t surprising that home food production has fallen to such a small percentage, nationally. Still, there is a sense of accomplishment.
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I’ve just completed four main projects: digging out my first (of four) garden beds, planting two columnar apple trees, planting my huckleberry bush and setting up the lettuce raised beds.
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Before I did any of those things, though, I bought some gardening clogs. I felt a bit silly and bourgeois doing this, but it turns out that I really like them. They sit outside on the patio and I slip them on to work in the yard, and off when I have to run inside.

Double Digging is double fun!
One book that is influencing my garden is How to Grow More Vegetables (than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagine.) The book’s premise is that you can plant stuff in beds rather than rows and the closer spacing of the plants creates a micro climate that will benefit the plants. Doing this wears out the soil faster so it is important to grow compost crops which can then be converted into compost.
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The first step to growing more vegetables is to double dig. There is a very nice explanation of this process here (scroll down to Double Digging.) How to Grow More Vegetables says that the double digging process only takes about an hour for an experienced person to dig 100 square feet. I had 45 square feet and was a beginner.
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First, you prep the soil by watering it for 2 hours and then letting it sit for 1-2 days. That was easy enough. Then you take a digging fork and loosen the soil. I did this without wearing gloves and got my very first gardening blister.

Then it sits for a few more days. When it came time to do the actual double digging, it was fairly easy. I was worried that my soil was so clay-y that I wouldn’t be able to get the digging shovel in, but all that watering and sitting helped.

Here you can sort of see the layers. At the top is the soil that has been dug. The middle is soil that has been “forked” and the bottom is the undug soil with some phosphorous and lime on top of it.
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All in all, the whole digging part took me about an hour. I was pleasantly sore the next day. The double digging really breaks up the soil and makes it more airy, but I have a long road ahead of me to break up all of that clay.
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Remember about gardening taking money and muscle? Here is a picture of all the stuff I bought in one day to get these projects going. Eeek! Matt reminded me that we would be getting vegetables out of the process, but I remain a little worried that nothing will grow and this will end up being an expensive experiment.

Both the raised beds and the columnar apples required me to make some form of “dirt.” I used Mel’s Mix as outlined in Square Foot Gardening. (http://www.squarefootgardening.com/)
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Mel wanted me to make a mixture of 1/3 compost, 1/3 peat moss and 1/3 vermiculite. I figured out how much of everything I needed to fill two raised beds and 2 wine barrels and then set off to buy.
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Mel lives in a world where price is no object.
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I was supposed to get 16 cubic feet of vermiculite. Vermiculite costs about $30.00 for 4 cubic feet. I went with one bag. I couldn’t find peat moss at the first garden center I went to, and I ended up buying coconut fiber at the second, thinking they would have peat moss either. Except they did. The coconut fiber is a renewable resource, though so, a bit better. It was also a bit more expensive than I imagined so I got two bricks which were supposed to equal 8 square feet when opened and fluffed. I was going to get the compost from the City of Portland,
where you can get a cubic yard for $16.00, but forgot this fact in the overwhelming world of the gardening center and ended up buying 15 cubic feet of it in handy bags. It cost more than it would have been from Metro, but oh well. I’m learning.
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You are supposed to dump out all three of the items on a tarp and then move the pile around the tarp until it is mixed.
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The coconut fiber was a bit of a problem. The directions said open the package, break up the brick, water lightly and fluff to remove any clumps. Hah! I opened the package and started to break up the brick. It was mostly a solid mass. Not exactly break up able. Plus, it was a bit windy and the fibers I did remove from the mass blew away. After about 30 minutes of effort, I said “screw this,” pulled the tarp over the coconut fiber, put the bags of compost on top and left the whole thing there for two weeks while I lived my life.
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I came back on Saturday and started again. I figured out that mixing 15 cubic feet of compost, 8 cubic feet of coconut fiber and 4 cubic feet of vermiculite would be easier if I did it a quarter at a time.
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I think the coconut fiber sitting in the tarp for two weeks caused it to mellow a bit because it wasn’t quite so stubborn this time. I figured out that I could stand a chuck upright, and put weight on it. This would cause the chunk to come apart.

Then I added the compost and the vermiculite.

Then I mixed by dragging the tarp this way and that. This was kind of fun, because all the materials are light and you get to kick them around a little. And there you have "Patricia’s real world, price is an object," version of Mel’s Mix.

Apple Trees
I have a great book called McGee’s & Stucky’s the Bountiful Container which I bought with the gift card the Extension Service gave me when I quit. It’s all about container gardening and has a great section on fruit. I read about columnar apples and decided they would be perfect for the back yard. I bought two trees from Raintree Nursery. One is a Golden Sentinel and one is a North Pole variety. They came last week and I was too intimidated to plant them, so I plunged them in a bucket of water.

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I planted them in these lovely whisky barrels my mother bought me which my brother transported.

The Bountiful container has a bunch of container layouts in the book and I followed the one for the columnar apple tree, planting Malabar spinach around the base—it’s supposed to grow up the tree and then chives and normal spinach alternating in a circle. The trees look a little stick-like, but will hopefully be happy in their new home.

Evergreen Huckleberry
We need something bushy out front. We have this amazing front porch, but right now it is a little too close to the sidewalk. I wanted some bush thing that would grow up a bit and provide a little bit of separation from the street. I also wanted something that would produce something to eat, as you might as well get some food out of your plants. I initially thought blueberry, but there is a large tree in the yard next door and a small tree, which will get bigger, out front. Blueberries need sun, so I needed something that would thrive in the shade.
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I found the Evergreen Huckleberry. It doesn’t do well in sun, but in shade supposedly grows from 6-8 feet. It’s also supposed to be pretty. And it produces Huckleberries. It’s a little small now, and it is a bit slow growing, but someday, I think it will block our front porch a bit from the rest of the world. It’s that little tiny green thing in the middle.

Raised Beds
Chris and I had previously built raised beds. They were originally going to go in the back yard, four beds of 2X8 feet, but I decided I wanted the back yard garden bigger and instead decided to stack the four beds into two and put them on the North side of the house in hopes that lettuce will grow there as it doesn’t have a lot of sun.
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To prepare the beds, I watered and then forked the soil. So much clay, I’m thinking they should have built our house out of adobe.

Then I put in all the remaining mix. I ran out, of course. So one bed is full and the other is a bit full. Guess I will get to buy some compost from the city anyway.

Now I am left to plant in the beds. I'll let you know how that goes.

Finished projects

Towel Racks
Our bathroom has one very lovely towel rack. Since we moved in, I’ve been putting my towel over the door to dry. This is not dissimilar to our situation in the fortress of solitude where we only had one towel rack. For almost a year one of us would dry our towel over the door of the shower. I finally got sick of that and installed three towel racks. It was a sweaty, most-of-the-day job involving a level, many toggle bolts, much too much marking on the walls, followed by a lot of erasing, a lot of drilling and eventually, success.
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I’m happy to report I learned from that experience and installing two towel racks was much easier this time.

Behind the door is where we are putting the towels. At that point, the ingredients for the towel racks had been sitting there three weeks, attracting all that gunk that floats around in corners if you don’t clean your floors fairly often.
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First I got out the level and marked a horizontal line for the first towel rack. I only marked the far left and right side instead of drawing a line all the way across which I would have to erase. Then, I assembled the towel rack and marked the vertical lines. Then, I had an amazing realization.

When I first installed the towel racks, I didn’t have any instructions and I had to figure out how that rectangular piece of metal works. After installing it upside down the first time I called in technical support and Matt pointed out that the lip had to face up because that was what the tiny screw on the bottom of the rack holder grabbed a hold of.
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So I conquered that learning curve. This time, I realized that I didn’t have to put a toggle bolt in both the top and the bottom holes on the bracket. They had included a handy middle hole. So, instead of drilling eight holes, I only had to drill four. Incidentally, the 12 large holes in the Fortress of Solitude’s bathroom was one of the only things the landlord complained about after we moved out. I think that that is what he gets for not giving us any towel racks. Really! How does it work that two people have one towel rack between them?
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Things went up quickly. I drilled, I toggled, I screwed, I repeated for the other side and then again for the next rack. Voila! Towels on racks!

Then I swept the bathroom floor. I’m on a mission to get everything off the floor. Which brings me to:

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Hooks
I don’t know if there has been any study, but I am willing to bet that people who primarily use public transportation have more bags than the average car driver. Why? Because when you have a car, you can shove the various things you are carrying with you in a dozen nooks and crannies, but when you are navigating the world via public transportation everything comes with you on your shoulders, back, hips, arms or head. Sometimes you need the big backpack, sometimes the middle one. Sometimes the small purse, sometimes the hearty purse. This is my excuse for having a lot of bags. But believe me, I use them.
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I also love hooks. Hooks are easy to install, you just need an anchor and a hook, hammer and drill. Sometimes, you don’t even need a drill or an anchor. They are also cheap and portable. I’ve got some hooks that I’ve had since I lived in South Boston. They were originally attached to my loft bed and moved with me to my yellow, orange and green room in Somerville, my studio in Portland and then the Fortress of Solitude.
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Hooks were what I installed in the office and all those bags sitting on the floor are now neatly contained on a wall. Then, I happily swept of the detritus from that corner.

Knife Holder
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I love my knife holder. It was cheap, it came from Fred Meyer, but I think it is one of the most useful kitchen items ever. Your knives are RIGHT THERE! On the WALL! Not in a drawer, not in a butcher block which takes up too much room on the counter and you have to move to wipe the counter under it. You can wash the knives, dry them on a dish towel and BAM! Back onto the holder. And it is magnetic. Who doesn’t love magnets?

After I installed the miraculous object, I put up the knives and then wiped down the counter.
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Bliss.

Monopoly

We played Monopoly on Saturday night, a game I love. It wasn’t the greatest game. Matt got a dreaded yellow monopoly early on in the game and also blocked me from getting any monopolies myself. Then it was a long, slow decline for me. I would pass go, collect $200.00 and then pay it in rents to Matt so he could buy another house to charge me higher rent. “This is what it is like to be the working poor.” I complained at one point.

Matt with his winnings. Notice my stack of one dollar bills and mortgaged properties.

Project Priorities

I made a list of projects that need to be done for the house. It has 37 items on it. (and I just thought of two more) Then, I ran the list through CNN’s Prioritizer. It’s this very cool thing on their personal finance page. You pick up to 15 things (they made it for financial goals, but you can use it for anything) and put them in a list. Then you work your way thorough a series of choices picking which of two you find more important. At the end, your items are ranked with a score. I love it!
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In the time it took me to put 37 choices through the Prioritizer, I have already finished the following projects:
Knife holder, install (87.5%)
Plant evergreen huckleberry (78.6%)
Plant apple trees (64.3%)
Install towel racks (finished before I prioritized)
Put up hooks for bags in office (finished before I prioritized)
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The list of projects and their scores:
Kitchen
60% Shelving above refrigerator
15.5% Paint, Kitchen
Great Room
50% mail and key area
42.9% shelves, GR dining
35.7% guitar hanger
22.6% shelves, great room (stairwell)
20.2% white dresser, get rid of
13.1% paint great room
0% curtains, great room
Garden/Yard
92.9% dig bed 1
87.5% set up lettuce bed
57.1% dig bed 2
36.9% clothesline
21.4% hammock
8.3% buy Meyer Lemon tree
Bathroom
79.8% shower curtain
72.6% corner shelving
70.2% newspaper holder
34.5% above toilet shelving
Pantry
100% black shelf
92.9% shelving on long wall
77.4% paint pantry
57.1% shelving above freezer
50% clothesline
Office
40% small rug for floor
20% paint office
0% curtain, office
Bedroom
28.6% bedroom curtain
14.3% paint bedroom
6% new comforter
Storage
100% storage shelves
80% hooks for bags
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And here, just for fun, they are in number order:
100% storage shelves
100% black shelf
92.9% shelving on long wall
92.9% dig bed 1
87.5% set up lettuce bed
80% hooks for bags
79.8% shower curtain
77.4% paint pantry
72.6% corner shelving
70.2% newspaper holder
60% shelving above refrigerator
57.1% shelving above freezer
57.1% dig bed 2
50% mail and key area
50% clothesline
42.9% shelves, GR dining
40% small rug for floor
36.9% clothesline
35.7% guitar hanger
34.5% above toilet shelving
28.6% bedroom curtain
22.6% shelves, great room (stairwell)
21.4% hammock
20.2% white dresser, get rid of
20% paint office
15.5% paint, Kitchen
14.3% paint bedroom
13.1% paint great room
8.3% buy Meyer Lemon tree
6% new comforter
0% curtains, great room
0% curtain, office

The Fortress of Solitude

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We used to live behind a brown door. When Matt and I moved in together, we chose this apartment, another unique living situation. I still have the original Craigslist posting:
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"1 Bedroom Apartment with free parking near Metro Y, PSU, and OHSU; on Barbur Boulevard, with good bus service. Approx 750 to 800 square feet. Includes access to free washer/dryer. $575 per month, including water and garbage. Address: 3700 Barbur Building, 3718 SW Condor, Portland, ORMove in costs: $575.00 first month rent, $200 refundable security deposit, $75.00 nonrefundable cleaning fee, total $850.00. No application fee."
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It was cheap (very,) it was huge, it was close-in, I called. It turned out to be in this building:

which I was very familiar with. It's easy to recognize if you spend any time at all on Barbur Boulivard. I had no idea that there was an apartment in the building, though. It turned out that there were two, built to meet some mixed-use code. Marv and Dave Nepom, the father and son who owned the building, weren't all that into getting an optimal price for their apartments. They just wanted nice people looking for a unique place to live. I swear he said that to me.
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We lived there almost a year and a half, enjoying the views of Mt Hood and Downtown. When they built the tram, it was right down the street from our house. There were only two windows to the apartment and the dryer didn't really like to dry the clothes that well, but there was covered parking, a whole parking lot for when we had a parties, and since no one knew people lived there, it felt very secure. There was traffic noise from Barbur, but I had been living downtown at the top of a small hill that busses and motorcycles loved to race up, so Barbur was much quieter. Sometimes, it felt like we would be there forever, due to the crazy housing market. I will miss the Fortress of Solitude, and I am glad we had such a nice place, for so cheap, with such nice landlords, for so long.