I’ve been approached by a museum about including my wedding-dress in an exhibit they are doing in spring 2013. I’m amazed, and honored! I’ve been walking on air since I got the email.
Nothing much has happened on any front for the last two days; I spent Tuesday helping out with the Special Sample Service for CNCH, and had a quiet evening at home yesterday, reading through Edible Landscaping by Rosalind Creasy. It’s a really interesting book, though I suspect that we’ll probably go with a more traditional (=less beautiful) garden. Still, we are trying to think what to do with our front yard, and it will be interesting to read about how to make a vegetable/herb garden beautiful. (Mike and I are agreed that we’d rather have the front yard be useful as well as decorative.)
I’ve also been reading up on how to kill your lawn. OK, in this case, there’s very little lawn to kill: the previous owners didn’t bother keeping up the lawn (or, apparently, watering it), so the front yard is mostly weeds. But we need to kill off the remaining weeds before replanting. Common wisdom says several layers of newspaper or a layer of cardboard, topped with four to six inches of mulch, will do the trick. But I’ve been thinking that compost might work better than mulch – we can plant immediately in the compost, whereas we’d have to wait for the mulch to break down, and the breakdown process would deprive the soil of nitrogen while it decomposed. I’m currently researching where to find several cubic yards of compost cheaply in Sunnyvale. (You can get up to three cubic yards for free, but you’d have to haul it – and we’d need more than three cubic yards to cover the yard sufficiently.)
Today the plumbers are coming to do various plumbing stuff, including roughing out the plumbing for my dye sink. Mike and I will still need to hook up the sink and brace the drainboard, but the bulk of the labor will be done. The plumbers are also going to do things like replacing our shutoff valve, installing a pressure reducer and expansion tank, and so on – much more prosaic and much less interesting.
I’ve also been designing/searching Handweaving.net for appropriate drafts for my cross-dyeing project. So far I have a collection of 4 shaft twills (birds-eye and regular), 8-shaft crepes and twill blocks, and various 24-shaft fancy twills. I need to translate these to 24-shaft drafts on a straight draw threading, which will be tedious but not (I hope!) difficult.
If you make a friendly growing environment on top of the cardboard, will it still kill the weeds? Or will they grow through? We have weeds growing through landscaping cloth topped by 6 inches of playground shredded rubber that has been down for 4 years (oxalis, lovely corm-based stuff). The neighbors down the street used exposed black plastic for a full year or more. Looked awful, but did the trick.
About weeds and killing grass. Weeds will not grow through cardboard. Nor will they grow through sturdy plastic. We killed most of the grass in our front yard using these two materials with mulch (not compost) as the top layer. We used the plastic sacks from the mulch and a ton of cardboard, very heavy boxes opened out, probably from the laminate floor we put into the basement. Of course, there is a continued problem of wind and bird born seed, sitting in the disintegrating mulch, just waiting for the opportunity to spring back to life.
Weeds will, indeed, grow through landscape cloth. So will any grass that was missed. We used landscape cloth over pebbles in once side yard. We put mulch over that. Regrowth has been limited. I’ve become a firm believer in Round-Up to take care of vegetation that just won’t quit.
I am a firm believer in Round-Up. It takes care of these problems.
congratulations about the inclusion in a museum exhibit–it’s a well-deserved recognition of your work!