Spent an hour tonight screening some of the hummus that I get at the Lower Mac yard waste depot. It does wonders to break down the large chunks of soil and get rid of the unwanted small twigs, rocks, etc. The other benefit to screening seems to be that of aeration – I couldn’t believe how it made the soil so much looser. I made the screen last year and used chicken wire with 1/4″ spacing. Anything smaller and the screen would probably just clog. It’s sandwiched between a 12 x 16″ (apx.) 1×2″ frame that I made and fits nicely over a 16 gallon storage container, used to catch everything that’s screened.

This one isn’t mine, but it looks something like this:

The list of projects around the yard for this year was a bit long but I’ve slowly been chipping away at it…

Project #1: Dirt moving and a new paver walk-off
I started with moving a large mound of our garden bed adjacent to the back patio. It had been home to some kind of ivy -like growth for a few years that we really didn’t like, so I dug all that up and removed another shrub that just about was on its last leg. I spread most of the soil around the base of the Nishiki Willow tree to expand the bed there. I replaced the small layout of pavers that we originally had with a larger area about 4′ x 8′ in size. It’s now a lot easier to walk on and off the patio without getting slapped in the face by the branches of the tree, and it gave a nice home to our grill.

Project #2: Rock wall border around the front garden bed
Over the Easter weekend I collected up some of the Pennsylvania Bluestone that is abundant around the property my in-laws have up in Tioga, PA.  We already have a nice rock wall border around the garden beds that butt-up against the house. Here’s the area that didn’t:

The collection of stone that we hauled down from the mountain:

And the completed rock wall border:

Project #3: Paint the rain barrels
Last year I added a set of rain barrels to the back yard that stuck out like a sore thumb. I decided to paint them brown, to match the shed… and now they look like two big pieces of turd – at least that’s what the wife thinks. :-) I also built a better platform for them to rest on with some of the extra cedar I had in the garage.

Project #4: Join the two garden boxes
I had originally built two separate square foot garden boxes a few years ago. But this season I decided to combine them to form one large box. After dismantling the two facing sides and rejoining them, I have 44 square feet now available (which still may not be enough).

In this picture you can see the strawberries in the foreground are already off to a good start, and towards the back are my garlic shoots that I need to split.

Project #5: Re-mulch the garden beds
Every other year I replenish the beds with new mulch. This year it took two truckloads… and I still ended up running out.

Projects still on the to-do list:

• build a permanent fire pit
• build a series of smaller, portable garden boxes
• paint the trim on the shed
• fix the front door screen (the dog put a hole in it the other day)

I watched this over the past weekend. (I love Frontline btw – they have some really great documentaries).

http://video.pbs.org/video/1402987791/

What was most eye-opening about this piece, besides how swanky 2nd Life’s offices are, is how our various technologies that are supposed to make our lives easier and more connected with each other seem to be affecting the way our kids are learning and retain knowledge. The piece about the MIT students writing their papers one paragraph at a time for example was a bit alarming. We’ve made it so easy to get distracted by all the email, Twittering, and social networking… and these younger generations are fully engulfed by it. Even the multi-tasking that was talked about in the piece, and how all these kids claim that it’s not a problem, and that they’re more efficient. I multi task every day, at least in front of my laptop here. Quite frankly, it’s hard to do. Now maybe that’s because it’s something that I’ve had to learn over the years – unlike these kids who it’s sort of automatically engrained in, but there are things I’ve read over the past couple of years that are starting to say that people would be much better off if they focused on one thing at a time.

“My colleagues in the psychology department drew my attention to some interesting research, which proves that Buddhists and couch potatoes were right all along – the world would be a better place if everyone tried to do just one thing at a time. In a society that encourages more and more multitasking, researchers at Stanford University had assumed that people who do a lot of multitasking would be better at it. “But they’re not. They’re worse. They’re much worse,” said Clifford Nass, a professor at Stanford. “They couldn’t ignore stuff that doesn’t matter. They love stuff that doesn’t matter,” he said.”
– from http://openingtime.blogspot.com/2009/09/effectiveness-of-multi-tasking.html

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august24/multitask-research-study-082409.html

My 3yr old daughter already knows what an iPod is… and she automatically assumes that every phone she picks up can also take pictures. I wouldn’t be surprised if my older daughter comes home from the 1st grade next year and says her class has its own social network on Ning. All these things are great… don’t get me wrong… but as a Dad, I think we just have to be more conscious of how they’re affecting the way our children learn and develop.

24″ x 24″
house paint, modeling paste, oil stick, pencil, and tar on canvas
1/24/10