Yard

Ok, so here's the "after" photo of the lawn.



Everyone loves it: the kids, the chickens, the wife.

Of course, the after photo looks NOTHING like my photoshopped concept art. And I must admit I'm a bit torn because I feel bit of green-guilt at not removing at least of the lawn. In order to make it up, though, we plan on removing most of the larger lawn in our front yard (which was here when we moved in, and has seen much better days) and replacing it with some kind of xeriscaping. Hopefully that will come closer to evening things out.

In the mean time, we'll use bamboo stakes and bird netting to keep the chickens on their "side" of the yard so we'll have some poo-free zones for us bipeds.

We ran into a bit of a problem with the sprinklers, though. The landscaper wanted to install a timer, and we agreed that would be groovy, but we didn't have a convenient place from which to run electricity near by. So, unknowingly, I said to just go ahead and install the valves and that we'd get the electricity figured out soon and then have him back out to hook it up then.

The problem, though, is that apparently the sprinkler valves leak if they're not hooked up to the timer. In other words, if we used the electric/timered valves manually, they'd leak a bit while they were running. Eventually we decided to just run an extension cord so we could use the timer now and not have to deal with a leak right by the house.

Sure enough, once he hooked up the timer, the leak stopped and things are golden. Will have to get the wiring sorted out into a more permanent configuration though.