Fixin' Up the Backyard

 Well my good friend Tony is my roommate.  As part of his "rent" he is taking on some of the repairs and such around the house.  So we designed this and started working on it.  Here he is spreading soil

Tony is hanging brackets for the lanterns I bought from Dollar Tree.

A better view.

We had a little visitor. It loved the flowers. We need more flowers for the backyard. 

Okay, here is the first video I am posting on my blog.  I hope I uploaded correctly.  I wanted to show off what the lights looked like in the dark.  Most of the lanterns are from Dollar Tree.  

I hope to get more done soon.  

Sweet potatoes

Here are the sweet potatoes we harvest this fall. These were the sweet potatoes that we grew in the cement mixing trays. Only 3 of the 4 varieties produced, so we only actually got 3 trays worth of potatoes. It was still a pretty big harvest considering the size of the trays.

We harvested the white sweet potatoes first:

Steampunk pots, the yard & garden

I finally got around to downloading the pictures off my camera. I am very slowly starting to steampunk my house. I decided to use blues, greens & teals in the backyard with some terracotta. I'm going to use black furniture with colored pillows for accents but I haven't bought or made any yet except some folding furniture so all I have is some old faded plastic furniture that is about on its last leg. Anyway here are the pots:

I took plain old plastic pots that were faded and revamped them with plastic paint. I used black, blue and dark green to make these.

Pot #1: I started by spray painting the pot black. I then cut out tentacle stencils out of contact paper and put them on the pot. I then lightly sprayed them with blue and green spray paint to give them a watery look. I sprayed them more solidly towards the bottom of the pot and let it fade into black towards the top. This pot is the biggest of the pots I painted.





Pot #2 - I started out painting this pot black and just spray painted the top with the blue and black and let if fade into the black towards the bottom.



Pot #3 - I started out painting this pot black. I taped off areas and then sprayed blue and green. I then pulled off the tape. I found some upholstery tacks and cut off the shanks. I glued them onto the pot with e-6000 to make the pot look studded.



I have also painted some of them with just the blue and green. I didn't get a picture of them before I got them planted. But here is one of them:



Oh and for giggles, here is the before picture:



I haven't painted all of them yet ( I ran out of good weather and paint), but I did paint over half of them. I haven't decided what else I'm going to do to my yard yet to add a touch of steampunk to it, so I'm open to suggestions. I'm actually thinking of painting images on the fence. I want to add an arbor over the deck out of copper pipe but that might get expensive. Here are some pictures of the backyard so far:





Yes I use unusual containers to make my garden beds. I used an ice bucket tote from Target to make a small water garden for my water lotus plants.







Here's the boys outside toybox. Outside toys are huge.


I'm using cement mixing trays to grow my sweet potatoes, jerusaleum artichokes, taro and water celery. I don't know how well this is going to work but I poked drainage holes where needed, so we will see. I'm hoping to make it easier to harvest the root plants. But some of the plants (the Taro and water celery) like boggy conditions.

Fairy Garden

I'm currently working on a fairy garden right in front of the house. Here's what I've got so far:



I made a mushroom circle out of ceramic mushrooms I found at a discount store. I've got hose guides in the front and a little frog prince. He watches over the bird bath. I tried to plant a lot of low growing ground covers. We will see how this works. I'm in love with it so far.




The butterfly's like it.



Here are a few update pics of the big garden.

Garden

In case you were wondering why the crafting has been going slow lately. Well I've been outside setting up a garden.



We have to garden in raised beds because our ground doesn't seem to drain. Plus we have alot of clay. Its just easier to garden in raised beds. Of course it back breaking work to fill the beds. But once you have them filled, its not so bad. We are working on the second dump of garden soil now. This is our kitchen garden. It will be filled with herbs and vegetables we use most in the kitchen.

Flower beds too






Check out my awesome birdbath:

I found it at Lowes.

The only way to plant mint, in pots, LOL:


Anyway, we still have 3 more garden beds to fill with soil and one flower bed.