Two wildlife spotting’s in the back yard this morning within minutes.
As I sat out drinking my coffee I see this animal coming trotting cross our grass. Low and behold it’s a bobcat!
As I walk over to get a picture our friend the owl flies out of a tree into the post of the trampoline where I was able to get a video of it.
I hope these two start to make a dent in the population of chipmunks in the yard.
We have been coming out in the mornings recently to see a great horned owl swoop off our back porch. Pat was able to capture a picture of our new resident on our neighbors fence! What a beautiful bird... and hopefully he/she cleans up some chipmunks and maybe a rabbit around our place.
A great day starting off with the annual pet parade, followed by swimming, bbq and backyard fire. Thanks to Pat for taking some great photos!
Kevin along with the beautiful garden he built just put up a pool for our family. Living a little ways out of town and on land makes days at home relaxing. Kevin's next project will be building a fence and deck around the pool. We love our hard working dad!
Hunter, Noah and our neighbor Asher sleeping out on the trampoline. Enjoying the morning sun.
Happy birthday to the greatest guy we know. So glad we get to call him ours.
We celebrated by having dinner out and Kevin finishing the day working in his garden.
We haven't had a vegetable garden since we lived in Boise, so now that we had some space, I thought it would be fun to have one here at the new house. Few challenges - ground is rocky, soil is like sand, short growing season and their are a lot of animals that would love some soft leafy greens - especially deer. In February I started researching and doing some planning. The idea was that when we did our landscaping in the back, I would get the team to scrape an area and bring an irrigation line down to the area when they put the rest of the irrigation system in. My inspiration for the garden was here. Beautiful but unfortunately no plans so I had to make up my own plans just by looking at the pictures. I also used the farmers almanac online garden planner tool just to see how it might look.
The garden would be a set of raised beds, with a 5-6 foot wooden fence around it. The back landscaping went in late march, so I ordered the wood and set to work. The biggest challenge was getting the base level. its funny how the ground feels pretty level until you actually start to measure it. The west side (right side in most of the photos) was at least 10 inches lower which meant getting a load of gravel dropped in the driveway and a lot of hauling gravel in a wheelbarrow down to bring it up somewhat. Additionally... like a lot of plans, they seem right until you get started so due to large boulders messing up post placement and other challenges I had to make a number of changes and concessions as I went along. Here is a series of photos of the build process.
Here is the finished product. Ultimately I think it turned out pretty nice and we look forward to growing some fresh veggies for years to come! The only thing left to do is install the drip irrigation system. Abbie and PJ helps plant as well... for now we are hose watering it until the irrigation is running... hopefully in next couple days.
The summer solstice is still a few weeks away but with the calendar turn to June, and some beautiful weather this weekend, we will call this the formal kick off to summer in central Oregon. Kelly was gone on girls weekend so it was the rest of the crew making the best of it! Campfire in the backyard Friday night and a day at Scout lake on Saturday. Ending of Saturday evening with a glorious sunset off the back porch.
Deer are normal to have around here, but over the past few months a pair of peacocks seems to have made a 6 house block in our neighborhood their home.
Last summer, we did our front landscaping near the end of June. We focused here as that was the first thing people saw when they came up to the house. This spring I wanted to get our sides and back done a little earlier so we could enjoy the yard through the entire summer.
Here is a 'before' video from about 2.5 weeks ago.
Here is the 'after' video from today. They finished Friday and spend the day today putting some rocks along edges where it was steep to prevent erosion.