House and garden

(Warning: no fiber content in this post.  I promise there will be lots of interesting fiber stuff in the next one, though!)

As requested, here are photos of the new flooring and the garden!

Here is the flooring we are paying a small fortune for:

It’s stranded bamboo, which is shredded bamboo mixed with some sort of resin composite and fashioned into incredibly hard “wood”.  The bamboo grows quickly and is renewable, so this is considered a “green” flooring – though that wasn’t our first reason, it’s a nice bonus.  It’s also a beautiful color, like golden honey, with just enough texture to be visually interesting.

The flooring actually isn’t that expensive as flooring goes (I think about $6-7/square foot), but the house is 1100 square feet and we’re redoing everything except the bathrooms, so it’s pretty pricey.  (That sucking sound you hear is the contractor opening up and vacuuming out my wallet!)

Here’s another photo of the flooring, which looks truer to color on my monitor:

And, here is the living room, which previously had dingy paint and ugly, ratty gray carpet with lots of stains:

And now, let’s go out into the garden.

First, a terrifying tactical error on my part: I bought and planted a zucchini plant without inquiring which type it was.  It turns out it’s a vining type, not the bush variety I usually plant, and if past experience is any measure, it’s going to take over the entire back yard and flood us with zucchini:

This is three weeks after transplanting.  Tremble, world!

Next come the melons:

Some of the tomatoes are happy transplants:

And some are not:

I decided to get ambitious with vining plants, and planted butternut squash:

With these little devils, I know their propensities, and so the spearmint and peppermint come jailed in planters:

When I tell you the spearmint in the above photo was mostly only about half an inch tall a week or two ago, you’ll understand my terror of unleashed mint.  Much better in planters.

And, finally, some plants I am determined to keep going:

We planted and drip irrigated these at our current location, and they did OK, but they’re looking a little stressed after transplanting.  Too much sun?

We transplanted some into a pot earlier, and those are looking much happier:

I love violets (I have fond memories of them as a child on the East Coast) but for some reason they are not at all common here.  I’m guessing it’s either too warm or too dry.  But our front lawn is part shade, not really suitable for vegetables – a wallow of violets, perhaps?  They would be beautiful in the springtime.

And that’s it for now!  Stay tuned, we’ll be back to fiber arts in the next post.  I am collecting an embarrassment of swifts (three already, a fourth on the way, and building a fifth) in my continuing experiments with winding off fine threads.