i'm wearing a green thumb for st. patrick's day

i forgot to plan for st. patrick's day. i wore a really pretty green and white springy-looking shirt to jennifer's baby shower on saturday. a smarter gal would have saved it for today. oh well. i suppose most people don't care much about that. and besides, i can't be sure if i've got any irish in me (:insert dirty joke here)... but, of late, i do have a green thumb!

so i got a huge, full window set on saturday - through freecycle.dc, from a lady named arlene. the full window (top window, bottom window, and frame) was as tall as i am! and heavy heavy, to boot. i drove over there to pick it up, and it took both arlene and me several minutes to wrestle it into the back of my car. as it turns out, arlene is a fellow freecycle-addict. we compared stories of trying to fit huge heavy items into our small cars. i told her how i had to tie a bicycle to the lid of my trunk using shoelaces taken from my shoes, and how 3/4 of the bike hung out of the back as i drove all the way from upper wisconsin ave. she topped me with a story about how she used tubesocks to tie her passenger door shut, to hold in the oversized futon in her backseat. good times. i like to close freecycle transactions with a brisk handshake, and a heartfelt "long live freecycle!"

so i wrestled the window home (note: it had been sitting in her back yard for god-knows how long, and was covered in mud/dead bugs/leaves/cobwebs), through the house, and onto the back deck. "hmm. there has to be a way to dismantle this thing....," i thought. there was! i found about 18 kajillion little screws holding the frame together. once those were gone, the whole thing came apart. i threw the frame pieces into the wasteland under the deck, and i was left with 2 windows and one screen - each about 30"x30". perfect!

at this point, i thought briefly about stopping right there - maybe finish up on sunday... our pi party ran really late on friday night, and i had gotten up bright and early to make it to the baby shower... but i kept on going, knowing that if i stopped i would likely never finish the project. so i slapped on some sunscreen and some cruddy jeans and went to work. i had to duck-walk in a crouch, under the deck, to fish out the bricks leftover from the patio project. duck-walk in, grab a maximum load of 5 bricks, duck-walk out, stand up without smashing skull on overhanging deck, walk to deck stairs, walk up stairs... make tiny insignificant stack of 5 bricks. repeat. over and over again. not to mention the fact that the stack of bricks, in the creepy under-deck, were covered in unidentifiable schmutz - dead spiders, rotten paper from who-knows-where, hobo germs, a tuft of what i can only guess was rat hair, feral cat pee, and a layer of freshly hatched baby slugs. i had the heebie-jeebies like you wouldn't believe. at one point, i picked up a brick and a chunk of muddy rubble rolled down my bare arm. i promptly dropped all the bricks from my arms, and high speed duck-walked outta there making panicked gibberish sounds along the lines of "ghurr, ghurr, ghurr!" but i persevered, and moved a goodly number of the bricks up to the deck proper.

i measured (!) out the size of the window, and plotted out a space on the deck where i wanted to construct the cold frame. i chose a spot in a sort-of out of the way corner, closest to the strongest support beams. i then laid out the bricks to match the size of the window, and started stacking. due to the shape of the cold frame, and also my laziness, i didn't want to have to cut any bricks. thusly, i couldn't stagger the bricks. those of you who have played with legos or blocks, you know that this could be a problem. but i think that the walls are shallow enough that it shouldn't be an issue. so anyway. i stacked the walls up 4 bricks high, then lined the entire thing with weedproof cloth (also leftover from the brick patio experience), followed by a layer of gravel and smallish rocks from the "yard." now for the dirt. hmmm... dirt. i recalled that i had left a dirtpile by the deck stairs (product of often mentioned patio project), so i shoveled that into a series of buckets and empty flower pots and transported the lot up to the deck, and dumped it in. hmmm. this is going to take a lot of dirt. i was too tired to think of driving to home depot for potting soil, so i proceeded to empty all unoccupied planters and pots into the new cold frame bed. i made it! then trimmed the weed cloth to overhang the bricks a bit, and stacked up 2 more rows of bricks. just made it! i used up EXACTLY every brick that i had. how's that for perfect? the dirt ended up being about 14" deep, with about 8" of headroom to the top. capped off with one of the windows, it makes a handsome mini-greenhouse thingie for the deck. once the plants get hardy enough, i will just leave the window off and i'll have a nice raised vegetable bed right there on the deck. yay! i figure the screen will be handy for transitional times, when the plants will be vulnerable to the crazy-ass alley squirrels. anytime they see me messing around in the yard, they wait until nightfall to dig the crap out of everything looking for bulbs, edible seeds, hamburgers, DVDs, whatever it is they are after. a nice screen should keep them out for a night or two until they lose interest.

to test things out, i moved 24 little onion sproutlings out there. i hope i don't kill them. i have some really healthy tomato seedlings coming along, too! but they aren't going outside for a while. i did, however, move the sugar peas outside on saturday. they were threatening to climb all over the inside of my house, devouring us and the furniture a la the ruins. i think they'll be fine out there. it's been sunny and 50/60 during the day lately, and high 30s at night. just fine for peas and lettuce.






































For more gardening adventures, go to my flickr page:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/melaniejeanbrown/sets/72157604129426864/