Oh, so slow to start.

The title could refer to either this blog or my home. We have lived here for about a year and a half. I spent most of the first year clearing junk, rotted landscape lumber and poison ivy out of the yard, as well as observing the general lay of the land. This may sound grand, but our plot is about 33' wide by 75' deep, and a third of that is house. I guess land can not be that big if you can easily measure it in feet. Maybe I should switch to metric, the numbers may be smaller, but very few around here know the size of a meter.

I have watched sun and shadow patterns, water flow, and soil composition. Suprisingly, we have a decent orientation. Southern exposure for the front of the house with a mature oak at a reasonable distance. The back yard gets a decent amount of sun in the summer, but almost no sun at the winter solstice until the end of the day, when it peeks around the neighbor’s house.

We are at the bottom of the “hill” for our row of townhouses, so most of the rainwater makes its way down to our yard’s NW corner. There is significant pooling during a heavy rainstorm as evidenced by the recent deluges, although it quickly disperses into the nearby grove. The front yard is fairly dry, most water runs off into the parking lot. The side yard (west) also pools in a decent rain, then runs back to the NW puddle.

Our soil is almost entirely clay, though it does contain a significant amount of rocks (landscaping gravel and what I think is local quartz), landscaping plastic, and construction debris. I have not yet tried a soil test. I probably should to find out what extra “nutrients” we have, I noticed one neighbor spilled motor oil on our front lawn (fairly sure it was an accident) and there was also a discarded gas can in the alley behind our townhouse row. With all the run-off in our yard I bet we will not recieve our organic certification any time soon.

Well, those are some of the basics. I will continue with what we are doing and what we have planned for the future.

Cheers,
christopher