Another fun day of threatening clouds, but no rain. We even had a boomer watch from 3pm on, and the rains didn't kick in until almost suppertime. Fortunately for whoever nearby enough we could hear them had a fireworks show, the rains had well stopped by the time it got dark. We tried to see them from upstairs, but all we could see was the occasional glow in the sky, not the actual explosions.
Have I mentioned the rain barrel has stayed near to full since we installed it? (Despite my daily watering rounds.) We're now debating if we should get the second one to tandem with the first, rather than wait until we can gutter at least part of the back. I know it's been rainy of late, but we also don't know how long that's going to last either.
After some hemming and hawing, I decided to forgo the extra chain bits for the rain chain and will stick to a simpler scheme. I will start linking them together this week and see how it goes. I have to devise or just buy a cover for the double cut hole we currently have in our gutter, as there is currently a large chance that too much of the water will not hit the center even with the leader links to the first bucket. We do have a lot of cherry coke cans sitting around waiting to be returned for the deposits, so I'm wondering if it's worth some minor metalworking to save a few bucks, or if I should just go buy a pre-made piece from the hardware store.
One troublesome bit is when I looked back up the directions for proper grading, the west side is not enough room to do a gradual slope because of the neighbor's rock wall. I could do a French drain, but I also started looking into "dry" riverbed set ups. We'd been thinking of doing the first rain garden out front anyhoo, so I could easily direct it towards that, and solve the problem of too steep a slope by filling in said dirt slope with rocks that will let the water just head downhill towards where we planned to put the rain garden.
In between laundry and doing walk arounds thinking about what to do when in the yard, I realized I'd been so focused on the oriental bittersweet that all sorts of things have been happening and I'm just catching up. We have another patch of milkweed (much smaller) towards the rockwall, and there seems to be more food available already than I'd realized.
I'm fairly certain that's a walnut tree. The question is...Black or English? We'll find out in time for sure just from how the nuts behave, and I have more research to do on that. The raspberries in particular have some younger siblings nearby that are nearing a foot now. I'm trying to decide where to put them, as they are scattered and not in a cool way I'll keep. There's another low bush near to the rock wall that I think may be a fruit, but I don't recall flowers before, and I'm not seeing any fruit. So I have to look that one up as best I can. (Forgot to take a picture.)
I'm starting to get an idea of where to put the natural pond, now I just need to get some rope and try out a few outlines to see what seems right. I'm realizing there's a lot of digging to be done, so I'm thinking about contacting the "call before you dig" people and saying, "Look. We just bought this house. We plan to do A LOT. Do I have to flag
everything, or can they just do the whole property in one visit?"
Other surprises from today:
The first of the two I'm shaking my head over because every time I've walked down the west side of the property of late, I've had my eyes on the ground, thinking about the grading. So I completely missed that (and the 2nd bunch of milkweed I mentioned above.) The second, I was keeping an eye there since the leaves clawed their way through the overgrowth, but I've been so wrapped up on the bittersweet, Shoobie and the compost that I didn't even notice buds. The color was what caught my eye today as I did a round about the yard after hanging laundry in the morning, watching all our flying friends flitting about.
If I haven't mentioned it before, the dragons and damsels love the clothesline. Sometimes there's more than a half a dozen perched on it when there's no laundry present. Today, though, when I went out to take in the laundry, I had a big surprise--a small bee had decided it wanted to hang out in my clothespin hanger. So there I am, trying to gently encourage it out, hoping desperately to not get stung. Successful, though! So now I have to remember to keep the zipper shut so that doesn't happen again.