Friday Morning ~ Home, Sweet Home

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

You are looking at about one quarter of our native plant garden. This morning's photo is to the east, from the deck, with the beer garden patio and shed in the background.

Enjoy your Friday, and your weekend, this is where we will be spending ours...

~PEACE & LOVE~

Whimsical Nostalgia Junk Chimes...

...rust never sleeps Click on image to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

Tinkering around in my nearly completed junk-shop I was inspired to put together these wind chimes from more of my junk collection.

While removing an old hole saw from my electric drill recently I bumped the edge of the blade into something noticing that it rang out with a beautiful clear tone.

I have dozens of these old saws, of various sizes, rusting away in a box, so I had a great time digging them out and clanging 'em all together to hear their various tones, thus the idea for this wind chime was born.

For the following week or so Peggy and I were picking up every picturesque tin-can & lid we saw lying by the roadside and she also found the lovely bit of barbed wire & the old spring hanging there.

I went through our collection of beach glass from a vacation with the kids in Fort Bragg over two decades ago, finding the shell, a bottle neck, and some old ceramic pieces from electrical devices.

I strung a bunch of old dog tags, from our dear-departed pets of the past, together on a chain, an old metal California license plate tag from the year of Peggy's birth, and old brass Post Office registry cage chit, with the number 14 on it, the day of the month on which I was born.

There's an old pocket watch cover with my initials, a gift from Peg on our 10th Anniversary, which I used daily until the cover broke off (we're celebrating our 30th in 10 days).

Add some glass beads, a few old reflectors, some spinners from the tackle box, and some rusty old bailing wire, and there you have it.

I did buy some thin steel cable to suspend the whole mess from the beaded rack of manzanita wood at the top (see picture below).

I looped the cables through a pair of holes in each saw, fastening them together with aluminum cable ferrules. Suspending the hole saws in that manner allows them to ring without the tone being deadened.

The wind chimes now hang over the table on our beer garden patio, gently swaying in the breeze to play their soft clear song.

Rust never does sleep, especially around our place.

~Entire Wind Chime~ Click on photo to enlarge - © 2009 jim otterstrom

A Nice Drizzly Day At Earth Home Garden...

Click on photo to enlarge - ©2009 jim otterstrom

We're enjoying intermittent showers, hail, wind gusts, and thunder here in Big Bear today so I thought I'd come indoors for a spell and share some photos I took between the raindrops.

Dallas is sporting his summer cut in front of the nearly completed workshop/studio/beer garden, and you can see the recently added 'Earthquake Memorial' rock garden in the background, with the pond-pump solar panel now mounted there.

Inside the workshop/studio I have built a sturdy workbench, a toolbox bench, and re-painted & installed steel shelving (salvaged somewhere-in-time from an old auto parts store). This week I'm staining, painting, and getting ready to do an artsy-fartsy collage on the interior back & side walls (pictures to come).

The beer tap equipment isn't completely installed yet so the christening of the beer gardens is a ways off yet, but early this summer for sure!

The rock garden was built of recycled junk and masonry debris from our highly destructive '92 Big Bear quake. There's a dump-site closeby where mountains of old broken chimneys are still piled-up, so a friend, with a truck, and I, dragged a bunch of the stuff home for garden art.

Three sides of the rock garden were built-up with broken concrete from a neighbors old driveway which was then filled with dirt from another neighbors foundation excavation. Remember my Close Encounters/Matterhorn posts? This is where the dirt went, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow. The face of the rock garden was terraced, as I filled it, using chimney pieces, old wood, and even a staircase from the dumpsite. An old twisted wall-heater vent from a demolished house became the garden mascot when I gooped a leering plaster skull to it.

Reclining Skeleton - The Rock Garden Mascot

Click on image to enlarge - ©2009 jim otterstrom

A close-up (Photoshopped) of the ruins rock garden featuring our cheery Lost Civilization mascot.

Big Bear native plants now established on the rock garden include Firecracker Penstemon (Penstemon eatonii), Prickly Poppy (Argemone munita), Bumble-Bee Penstemon (Penstemon grinnellii), Narrow-Leaf Milkweed (Asclepias fascicularis), California Fuschia (Zauschneria californica mexicana), Sulfur Buckwheat (Eriogonum umbellatum), Wright's Buckwheat (Eriogonum wrightii), California Poppy (Eschscholzia californica), Showy Penstemon (Penstemon Spectabilis), Hedgehog Cactus (Echinocereus triglochidiatus), Beaver-Tail Cactus (Opuntia basilaris), Prickly-Pear Cactus (Opuntia phaeacantha), California Evening Primrose (Oenothera californica).

California natives include Banana Yucca (Yucca baccata), Soapweed Yucca (Yucca glauca) and Sky-Blue Penstemon (Penstemon azureus).

~The Greenhouse Today~

Click on photo to enlarge - ©2009 jim otterstrom

We're growing potted vegetables in the greenhouse this year because of a gopher problem which we're, hopefully, going to solve in the fall by digging out a couple of feet of dirt and lining the bottom of the greenhouse with wire mesh, to keep the critters out, before we replace the soil.

The plants in here now include tomatoes, japanese eggplant, yellow crookneck squash, and basil.

The plants are starters from the nursery except for most of the tomatoes which were started by Peggy from a variety of seeds.

~The Raised-Bed Garden Today~

Click on photo to enlarge - ©2009 jim otterstrom

The wintered-over greens we planted last October are almost gone now (you can see spinach in the background which is beginning to bolt). The lettuce mix in the foreground was planted in early spring and is in dire need of thinning. there are young green onion seedlings behind that, and some chives in flower on the left. We have pea and snow pea seedlings which are going in the empty or declining boxes here in the next few days. We also have raised boxes with beets (for greens) and swiss chard.


Salad Hill!

Click on photo to enlarge - ©2009 jim otterstrom

We tried an experiment this year which has greatly exceeded our expectations.

While going through our seeds in early spring we discovered that we had partial packets of what we assumed where mostly expired seeds dating back to 1997. Instead of throwing them away, I suggested that maybe we should mix up one of our compost piles with the soil beneath it and cast all the seeds randomly there to see what might germinate.

This salad garden was planted when night-time temperatures were still in the teens and low twenties so we kept the hill covered with clear plastic for a few weeks, removing it only to water about once a week.

To our surprise it appears that most of the seeds were still viable and we now have a very productive salad garden right outside the back door. Growing here are an assortment of lettuces, spinach, chard, kale, radishes, carrots, cilantro, green onions, basil, mustard greens, rocket, and several other salad vegetables & herbs.

So far, the gophers and squirrels are leaving Salad Hill alone! It's already so productive that we're having a hard time keeping up with it so we invited our next door neighbors to consider it their own kitchen garden as well, and help themselves to salad stuff whenever they want.

The large-leafed plants around the perimeter are previously established Hollyhocks.

See, we have been busy!

Update On The Earth Home Garden Temple Of The Lost Civilization, Tool Crib, Workshop, Fallout Shelter, Den Of Antiquities, And Beer Garden Pub...

.....

The Chernobyl Door

Click on photo to enlarge - ©2008 jim otterstrom

One can't erect a monument of junk to the folly of the Twentieth Century without including a reference to our nuclear adventurism, so I've christened my new shed door in honor of that most infamous of meltdowns thus far.

I kept my eyes peeled for months, looking for an old beat up door I could salvage for the shed, to no avail. It finally came to the point where winter weather was bearing down and I had to buy a door.

The cheapest sturdy door I could find cost $88 at Home Depot, and, aesthetically, it was completely unnacceptable as an entrance for my funky Den Of Antiquities, but it was modifiable.

It's a steel door! Or, I guess I should explain, a wood frame with a thin steel skin attached to both sides, filled with expanded foam. And, It was painted white. Disgusting!

The day after I brought it home I was walking on a back street near the airport with Dallas and saw a perfectly good used wooden door sitting out with someone's trash. So, I figured I'd come back and carry it home, with some help from Peggy, and return the ugly metal door to Home Depot and get my 88 bucks back. However, by the time I went home, got Peg, and came back, the door was gone.
Alas, I was stuck with the sterile white door!
What to do?

To match the old junk that I built my new shed from, I decided to transform the new door into old junk!

Really a quite simple process, if a bit time consuming, but art takes time...

Sanding The Brand New DoorClick on photo to enlarge - ©2008 jim otterstrom

The first step in transforming the door into something I could live with was sanding off most of the white paint. This took less than an hour to accomplish. I left a little paint in the crevices of the stamped panels for character (or, out of laziness, whichever you'd prefer).

My plan was then to spray the unpainted metal door with a mixture of sea salt (from our condiments cupboard) and water, until it rusted to a nice reddish brown patina.

Detail Of The Sanded Door

Click on photo to enlarge - ©2008 jim otterstrom

What I hadn't anticipated, was that the steel under the white paint was galvanized, zinc coated to inhibit the formation of rust. Once I realized this, I had to spend many, many, more hours sanding off the stubborn galvanizing so the door would actually rust (nice stuff to breathe that zinc dust, but my beard doesn't accommodate a sanding mask very well).

Days later, once the door was rusting nicely (and my lungs were beginning to recover), I set the jamb and hung it in place. I installed a metal threshold, measuring the bottom clearance to make sure I had allowed enough room for the rubber seal to compress. Everthing looked like it would fit perfectly until I shut the door. It was a pretty tight fit at the bottom seal so I thought I'd open it back up and lube the rubber with some graphite.

But the door was stuck! I pushed & pushed, but the damned thing was frozen shut! Finally, I thrust all my 195 pounds against it with enough force to break the seal, which also peeled off the front metal skin to about six inches up from the bottom.
Hmmmmm! Now, how am I going to repair this disaster?

I got out the tin snips and raggedly trimmed about 1/4 inch off the bottom of the metal skin, screwing it back down with drywall screws.
Perfect!!! Just what my door needed, some authentic jury-rigged character borne of indomitable American ingenuity!

Almost Finished
Click on photo to enlarge - ©2008 jim otterstrom

Add some vintage porcelain enameled PG&E signs to the door, an old Cold War Fallout Shelter sign, and there you have it!

~The Chernobyl Door~

Just beautiful!!!
If I do say so myself...

I still have to distress (beat up with secret aging techniques) & paint the cheesy spliced jambs with some appropriate color, like flat olive drab or battleship gray, and, add a few more of my fence signs at the left of the door, but you get the idea.

;~)

Close Encounters...

...of the Jim kind

Click on image to enlarge - © 2007 jim otterstrom

So, Peggy comes home the other day to find a small mountain just inside her front gate, blocking the walkway to the house.

The first thing that came to her mind was Richard Dreyfuss building a mountain in his living room in the 1977 movie 'Close Encounters Of A Third Kind'.

The next thing that came to mind was her husband, Jim, a close encounter of another kind...

How do I know this?

She told me...

...right before she said, "Now, tell me why there's a mountain in our front yard".

"It's for my new rock garden honey", I said, smiling, "and it's clean native dirt from right across the street, where they're building that new house, and it was free!"

She gave me one of those raised-eyebrow looks, the kind only a husband really understands, while I smiled a bit more sheepishly.

Well, my plan was to begin moving 'The Mountain' to it's permanent location the very next day (by shovel & wheelbarrow), but then I remembered there were native plants which needed to be potted up and moved out of the way, so I spent much of the day doing that.

Then it rained for a whole day, and, of course, no dirt moving could be done during a downpour.

When the rain moved out in the middle of the night, the ground froze, and the next day the shovel responded to the new mountain as if it were solid granite.

And now, today is our food Co-op delivery day so I'll have to receive the order out on the shoulder of the road because the frozen mountain is still blocking the entrance to the yard.

"But I'll get it moved, eventually ("I promise!"), and look at all those lovely rocks in that mountain, just what we need in our rock garden, and they were free!"

Oh, and I didn't tell all you bloggers out there about the theme of the rock garden, did I?

I'm going to call it 'The Garden Of The Lost Civilization', and it's going to be built up around masonry rubble from the 1992 Big Bear Earthquake!

There's a huge repository (a forgotten dump basically) of beautiful broken red-brick and native-stone chimney debris a few miles from here, an historical treasure just lying around for the taking.

As soon as I find someone with a heavy-duty pick-up to help me move that stuff, I'm going to bring a truck-load of those archaeological artifacts home to enhance the new rock garden, after I get this other mountain out of the way, that is.

Anyhow, now you know why I haven't caught up with those other posts I'm behind on (you know, the acorn class & the train trip, and, oh, there's one about my recent birthday too!).

But first, the Co-op delivery, then the moving of the mountain...

...to be continued

~I HOPE~

Part Of The Food Chain?

Click on photo to enlarge

It's been a hard winter for Grandmother, Spirit Of The Garden, as she has had to accept what most of us deny, that she too is part of the food chain.

But it was no large carnivorous predator chomping on her face, it was one of the local Gray Squirrels. They regularly come into the garden to scrape needed calcium from the various animal skulls we have laying around but this one decided to try out grandmother.

I'm more concerned about the squirrel than I am about grandmother's disfigurement. I assumed she was made of plaster, but the gash on her face reveals what looks to be some sort of resin composite, and I doubt that would be real nourishing for any critter.

I made this photo yesterday afternoon, and, as you can see from the entry above it, today is a different kind of day.

Indigenous Woman Statue

Click on photo to enlarge

We have a new resident by our waterfall, I found her at a yard sale over Memorial Day week-end.
Send a comment and help us name her (but please, not the too famous Pocahontas or Sacajawea).

Thank you all for your comments they have been very helpful.

We liked them all and I especially liked "Wats-a-moie" (Osage for "one who travels") because the Serrano people, who once inhabited this forest, traveled here in the summers and moved back to lower elevations in the winter.

We also liked "Grandmother" and "Woman Of The Earth" very much and "Keeper Of The Garden" too.

As commentor 'caribou raisin' knows, Nancy Drury was the name of my 100% Cherokee great-great grandmother on my mother's side of the family, so I was leaning toward something related to Grandmother.

Chief Seattle once said "The Earth Does Not Belong To Us, We Belong To The Earth", and I couldn't agree more.

It is often said that we humans are the stewards of the Earth but our history, and ever escalating destructiveness, proves that to be absurd.

Yet there have been human cultures (and still are to a small extent) who consider all the species and elements of the Earth (and the universe for that matter) as their "relations"---all one family united as the living spirit of a place.

Peggy and I identify with this idea so we've decided to combine several of your suggestions into the name for our lovely weathered garden statue.

Grandmother---Spirit Of The Garden

Now if I only knew how to say that in Serrano or Cherokee!

30,000 Pound Birdbath!

Click on photo to enlarge
We rescued this 30,000 lb boulder (our birdbath) from a housing development about 10 years ago.
It's roughly the size of an old VW bug with the wheels removed.
A friend of ours works for the company that was doing the excavating and asked if we'd like a nice boulder.
The bucket on the skiploader used to bring the boulder here was rated at 30,000 lbs capacity, and the boulder bent the bucket, so we're assuming the rock weighs at least that much.

Birdbath Detail

Click on photo to enlarge
Shallow depressions in the top of our 30,000 pound boulder make for natural looking birdbaths.