Backyard Garden

We seeded the lawn a little early in the season, but we really wanted to get started on something in the new back yard. Jen went to Paris Farmers Union and picked 10 pounds of a conservation mix of lawn seed and two bales of straw. We spread all the seed and spread all the straw. This is what we ended up with. Now we just needed to wait for it to grow in.

There were a few events leading up to pool removal day, but they are not worthy of their own posts. We were quoted, we had to raise the money, and we had to get the ok from our neighbor because we had to go thru their yard to kill our pool. The gravel company called the Saturday before they were going to come to let us know we were slated for the following Saturday depending on the weather and they suggested we start emptying the pool by Wednesday. We started that day it it was a good thing we did. We dropped a hose in and ran it down the driveway hopeing it would siphon all of the water out by the end of the week. After a full 24 hours we were down a half an inch. We had a pump so we plugged that in and let it run. After another 24 hours we had dropped about 6 to 8 inches. We realized that in order to have that pool empty it would have to run all week. This is how it looked on Saturday morning. It was disgusting, but empty. The gravel company showed up around 9:00 and began immedi

Last summer was our 1st in our new house with a swimming pool. Our water bill was considerably higher. Our electric bill jumped up about a third of its regular rate and I began spending My Saturday mornings outside with a pool vacuum and a scoop to collect the dead things that floated on the top of it. It was a particularly rainy summer and every other week I ran to the pool chemical place to buy more non chlorine chemicals to kill what ever was living in the pool. This added a bit to the cost of keeping the pool open as well. I jumped into the pool for the first time in early June and quickly jumped out. I didn't jump back in for another 2 weeks because it was sooo cold. It didn't really warm up until mid July. I spent quite a bit of time cleaning and not swimming in the pool. One side effect of cleaning the pool is that you are more aware of all the tiny little creatures that are in the water; fat water logged worms, thousand leg centipedes, strange spiders that can surviv