The Tree Shelf

The big project for the week was to remove a small, cramped closet from the kids' room, freeing up some valuable floor space. As usual, I completely forgot to take an actual "before" picture, so here's a shot from early in the process: The old closet is gone, the walls and ceilings repaired, but still no flooring.

A few years ago, we painted a tree on the wall over my daughters bed:

To tie in the corners of the room, we built a tree shelf for the newly-liberated corner.
This is the frame and a few slats of wood, the beginnings of the base and the bark of our tree.

Once all the slats are on, we end up with something like this.

A little paint:

And we end up with a finished base:

Base + shelves = the beginnings of a nice little project.

A top was built for our little tree, following the same procedure as the base, then attached and painted. A little detail work later and, Voila! Tree shelf!

A lot of the materials for this project were reclaimed from the torn-down closet. The paint was left over from the previous tree-related project, and the carpet was scrap. I bought a couple of pieces of thin plywood for the bark, but this was still a cheap and relatively easy project that the kids seem to like.

The Coop

A couple of years ago, I built a chicken coop to house our little flock. Most of the frame was reclaimed from an old cedar swing set that was slowly deteriorating on the property. Some plywood and shingles and one unused patio door later, and we had a coop.

This is the business side of the coop: the chicken ramp and the egg door. The egg door is a bit finicky simply because the hens love to cram straw in the hinge crevice, which makes it difficult to close at times. It does make egg collecting easy.

The front shot shows the old patio door, which provides lots of light for the hens all year. It also pivots up to let in fresh air. Below the glass is another small door that folds down. This one is backed with chicken wire so that it can be left open at night.

The other side image shows the "human" entrance that allows us to get in and change the straw and feed and water everybody.

These are the youngest chickens in the flock; five ameraucana's that we've had for about two months.

This is a long shot of the coop in it's little pasture. You may have noticed the strand of electric fence around the pen: This is a new addition, and not really for the chickens. A couple of weeks ago, we had two adult red foxes showing a kit to hunt, and they chose to use our chickens as target practice. Fortunately, we heard the commotion before we lost anybody, but it definitely pushed us to upgrade our fences. Of course our big, scary rooster slept through the whole thing, curled up in a nesting box in the coop.

Pipe Planters

I found a long piece of steel culvert rusting away behind the house in a ditch. Four metal-cutting saw blades and 20-odd pieces of sandpaper later, we now have five spiffy new planters. These are the three in the yard just off the kitchen.

It's a bit hard to see the middle planter there because of the plants, but it really is back there.

There's a pretty interesting variety of plants in there, especially considering the situation with the light. These guys all reside under an old Carolina Hemlock (Tsuga caroliniana), and on a pretty steep east-facing slope. Lots of morning sun, filtered afternoon light and basically dark from late afternoon on. Working with that, we put in some fennel and Bright Lights chard, an asparagus fern, some pansies and a lemon thyme. The chard has already gone to seed, and we also had some decorative cabbages in there that bolted as well. I replaced those plants with some Coral Bells heuchera and, most excitingly, some amaranth.

This is a gorgeous plant, also known as Love-Lies-Bleeding, that is absolutely thriving in less than ideal conditions. I picked up seeds for this and a green variety from Baker Creek Seeds, and I couldn't be happier. I'm already fantasizing about a whole hillside covered in amaranth, waving and rustling in the breeze...

Square foot gardening

Back in the summer, I dug up some old barn wood and decided to make a raised bed for a square foot garden. I picked up some really cheap 1"x1" at the home improvement store to make the rails for the fencing. I don't really expect the fence cage to last for too long out in the elements, but the local rabbit population insisted that I come up with a temporary solution at the very least.



So that's it, basically. It's five feet long and three feet deep, which was just about right since we only have access from one side. I subdivided the box into fifteen squares, and my daughter and I went to planting.



It's pretty incredible how much produce we got from this little box. The vines growing up the back of the cage are peas, and I think we put in about 45 plants, of which maybe 30 grew well. I think we planted a little late in the season for peas, but the tendrils and flowers have been delicious. We also put in spinach, collard greens, turnips, beets, radishes, okra and carrots. Of those, the carrots and okra didn't work out. The carrots have beautiful greens, but no actual carrot at the end. The okra was probably the wrong choice for our climate. All in all, though, fantastic amount of vegetables for such a small area. With careful planting and some succession planting, I think we could do exponentially better next year.

Pallet planter

I had access to a big stack of pallets, and I thought to myself, "Hey, let's make something!" My grandiose dreams of a free four bedroom house quickly dwindled when I found I could only fit four pallets in the back of my Subaru Outback. You know the saying: When life limits your cargo capacity, make something smaller. So, I present the pallet planter!



So, it's rustic... Which is fine. It's also sitting in a recessed area beside the house on a base of gravel. It's about three feet high and a foot deep. The top has a false bottom, so there's only about 18 inches of soil.



This particular planter took about two and a half pallets to make, although I had a small amount of broken slats that I couldn't use. If you decide to try one for yourself, look around for good pallets. Two of the ones I picked up were oak, which makes for a good, sturdy and nearly completely weatherproof box. Also, unbelievably hard to disassemble. The other two were pine, which is much easier to use but also much softer and less resistant to the elements. Most of the pine is on the back and inside, where it can be slightly protected.

Here's my two and a half year old for scale...





Once it was put together, I decided to make a little scene out of , although that's still a work in progress. Basic ingredients: Some rocks, a small hosta transplanted from somewhere else, lots of moss and a tiny little Japanese holly.