Errands:
1. I made it to the place that is only open until 1:00 pm on Saturdays, and picked up four furnace filters for the house so that I wouldn't need to go back any time soon. (The filters are ~$18 each... so, not cheap, but four wouldn't break the bank.) The filters are four inches thick, and I wasn't sure where else to buy them. I found the invoice for this place as the place they had come from before... it normally only sells to contractors (the furnace guy made the purchase last time), but the clerk figured it was okay to sell me filters, so I didn't have to beg. (Yay!)
2. I bought an inexpensive bike to ride to work:
I have a lovely bike, but it cost my brother around $1000, and neither locking it up outside all day nor carrying it up several flights of stairs seemed like a good option for me. Given that I'll be buying tickets (after this month, which I already have a bus pass for) for days when it rains (if I've just caused it to be a rainy summer, I'm sorry), as long as this one doesn't get stolen before September, I'm ahead of the game financially. If, however, it gets stolen in the first week, I'll go back to riding the bus. ;) (I really do need to get more exercise, though... for some reason, my body doesn't seem to consider gardening to be sufficient exercise.)
3. I went to Shelmerdine's to buy a birch tree. Wow. That place is really overwhelming the first time you visit! It's like the garden center equivalent of Ikea. It's massive. It has *everything* (well, the classy stuff, at least... you'd need to go elsewhere for tacky garden gnomes). Except they were sold out of the small birch trees, and I didn't want to pay $125 for a big one. I guess I'll be transplanting one from the lake after all. I did buy an adorable little brass-looking plastic fairy that perches on the edge of a flower pot, or on the adorable miniature garden furniture they sell, like the stuff pictured here.
4. Since T&T Seeds was right next door and I knew they had the Kozy-coats (not needed any more this year, but I'll have them now for next year), I stopped in there. I didn't stop at getting just the Kozy-coats, though... I also bought some coco earth, three ceramic mushrooms (two tiny, one larger than the tiny ones but the smallest of the three coordinating ones that were probably meant to be bought to make a grouping), a ceramic snail that dangles from a pot edge, a shovel (looks sturdy, similar to one I was thinking of getting from Lee Valley, but about the same price as the Lee Valley one, which is half the price of the Shelmerdine's one), and a watermelon seedling. T&T Seeds is much smaller and less impressive than Shelmerdine's, but I ended up spending *way* more. Weird. Oh, and T&T Seeds has tacky gnomes, if that's your style. ;)
Snail:
Two of the mushrooms:
Watermelon seedling:
(Seen here with my "birdhouse gourd" seedling.)
The coco earth was supposed to be four bricks that could be expanded separately, but I couldn't separate them until I got the whole thing wet. Here's half of the whole thing (two bricks) after getting a bit wet:
And here's the soupy mess expanding:
I ended up putting all four bricks in the water anyway, since I had guessed how much water I would need for all of it once I couldn't separate them, and it was *quite* soupy with only the two. (The packaging did specify how much water to use, but my wheelbarrow doesn't come with measurements on the side like a measuring cup. ;) )
Garden "before" photos:
Here's the pallet before I broke it down:
The current state of the vegetable area:
(This first one is basically the "after" shot as well, since I didn't really end up doing anything here.)
You can actually mostly see my new shovel in this photo... it's the shiny one, not the old one. ;)
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