Chim chiminey

Over the past winter, we used our fireplace about 10 times. We decided to get our chimney clean. 

It was a pretty simple process. Deceptively so, for $150. Two guys came with a big shop-vac and a big brush (the diameter of the chimney) with lots of attachable handles. 

They scrubbed up the length of the chimney and vacuumed up the debris. Not that much came down. I imagine we could have gone another year.

Afterwards one of them walked on our roof. Which I wasn't pleased with, since we have a slate roof and the slates are rather brittle. Hopefully he didn't crack any of the tiles. He then took a few terrible cell-phone photos of the inside of our chimney that exhausts our oil-burning furnace and informed me that the liner was totally degraded and needed to be re-lined immediately. For about $2000. Hmm

From some Google-searching it seems that chimney cleaners are always recommending new liners. Our porcelain liner is about 55 years old. They can last up to 75 years. Maybe ours does need to be replaced now - but I'm not inclined to spend $2000 based on word-of-mouth and some cruddy cellphone pictures.

Weeds of grass

Our backyard is a mess of spindly bushes and trees increasingly cushioned with engorging circles of weeds and ivy-like plants. I hope to reclaim some of the backyard for the people by converting some of the weed patches to a grass-like surface.

Fortunately the mother-in-law lent us her little electric rototiller. Last Friday I spent about an hour (~1 mosquito bite per 3 minute interval) chewing up a portion of the yard. This is about halfway through.

Here's the day after, now with a grass-seed mix. I've marked the boundaries of the seed spreading. Hopefully the conditions will be sufficient for grass growth.

As you can see, there are still plenty of weeds. I don't feel like hand-weeding this entire section, so this will have to do for now. It's really more of an experiment. I haven't successfully grown grass in a plot larger than a couple of square meters.

After 4 days (and lots of water), I begun to see a few grass seedlings! Hopefully the density will continue to improve. I might seed again. I'm not sure if that's a good idea, though.

Sunshine and Flowers

We've learned this summer that we have a very spring-centric garden. I seem to have forgotten to take any garden pictures in April and May, but trust me when I say that it was pretty much a pink explosion. Lots of azaleas and roses as well as some unidentified flowers.

For the last two months though, it's been incredibly boring. Just green everywhere (and a lot of dead green at that, given the heat waves we've been having). So I decided to change that by putting in the most cheerful flowers I know: Black-Eyed Susans.

They seem to be the only thing that can withstand the heat and flower in late summer and just looking at them makes me smile (except last week when they looked all burned and dried up--I even broke my normal watering taboo and gave them a little drink). I'm not usually a yellow fan but I think they really help the yard look happier. And certainly less green.
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