I hope everyone in the US is having or had a good Memorial Day weekend.  So far I’ve been doing yard work and flying, and tomorrow will probably be grilling as well.

I’ve been a bit slow this week in uploading photos and updates on the new patch I put on the lawn on Monday, 7 days ago.   The PatchMaster hasn’t sprouted up grass yet, but it should go in the next few days if all goes well and things should start to turn green.  I bought the 15 pound bag for around $25 to patch this area and some others.

There’s some thunderstorms moving in as I type so the lawns have been getting plenty of water.   There’s also a pick of the backyard lawn which we leveled and then planted seed with the use of a wood fiber germinating mat.  The areas that grew in seem to be doing well, but unfortunately there seem to be good size patches which just never sprouted, and I’m not sure why.   I mowed over that mat once, most of it stayed in place.  I suspect we’ll have to put more seed down once the summer is over.

The big lawn project however, on the peninsula is doing well as you can see in that photo (with the 4 sprinklers, next to the barn).   I trimmed back our Eastern Red Cedar on the peninsula (which is actually a juniper – Juniperus virginiana) so now it is not hanging on the ground.  You can see the before picture, with the moss ‘lawn area’  in the forground, and the after picture with the now grassy lawn in the foreground. It looks a lot better being opened up like that and will make mowing a bit easier.   I also want to cut back some branches from the acorn tree which are hanging over the front of the barn.

I also added a couple photo’s of a plant that I’m not familiar with. (Update: They appear to be Peonies)  It has these big red buds at the top of the stem which have not opened up yet, I guess it’s still doing something in there before it bursts forth.   There are a lot of tiny ants all over these buds that seem to be paying a lot of attention to them though.   Either they’re waiting for what’s inside, or there’s some sort of plant juices they like there.

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Okay, I bought some more Scott’s QuickPatch for part of the left side lawn I leveled off with topsoil and applied it tonight.  I put the soil down a week or so ago and we had a major rainstorm which I helped level it out and make it part of the yard.  I put weed and feed down about a week ago and was hoping that the weeds would be dead, but they’re not.  Progress cannot be impeded, we’ll take care of the weeds later.  I’ve sharpened up some nail clippers for Bryn so he can get the weeds.

Hopefully in a week there will be sprouts and in short time there will be lawn.  I love how this stuff works, but it really really makes me want to build a home-owner sized hydro-seeder over the summer.

You can flip through the photos and see the stages from:  Topsoil -> Crushing up the compressed quickpatch -> applied quickpatch -> watered quickpatch.

Oh please! contain your excitement, don’t crowd.  The pics are as exciting as watching grass grow, but I’ll take photo’s twice a week and provide a post in about 2 months with all of the ‘progress’ photos together so you can see the lawn sprout, become infested with weeds, and then get razed with a large blowtorch!

Sorry about pics being out of order, my image viewer app plugin is a dimwit.

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Well, we’ve all heard the saying that ‘Idle hands are the Devil’s work’ but this doesn’t qualify as the Devil’s work, but maybe not very productive.   I went out with my friend Ollie today and got some flying in at a local small field.   It’s been a long time since I’ve actually flown at a field, for the last year the most flying I’ve done is mostly just hovering and buzzing around a little in the yard.  Back when I had the nitro and gasoline heli’s I would be at the field every weekend flying and was a much better pilot.  Things are slowly coming back, I’m getting more comfortable flying this small (feels tiny) electric, and plan to do a lot more flying this summer.

The photo gallery is of myself ( blue shirt, mostly white Mini-Titan e325 ) and my buddy Ollie (dark shirt, white/black/red Cypher 3D with custom frames and small plane ) flying at the field this afternoon.  Once we got back we decided to to burn some more time with an old LiPo pack.  Unfortunately the pack had been sitting around too long and we couldn’t even get it to deflagrate violently.   So the next best thing was to fire off an Estes E9 model rocket engine in one of the planters.   We buried the engine and let it rip, here’s the video

Estes E9 Engine WMV Format

Estes E9 Engine Quicktime MOV Format

Here are the photo’s, please enjoy.  If you’re not familiar with the image viewer on this site, click on a picture below, it will open in the viewer.  Use the Left and Right arrows on the bottom right side of the image to move between images.

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Things seem to be going good all around out here.   I mowed the peninsula lawn this weekend for the first time since planting the grass and it looks great.   It’s still thin but now that it’s gotten more sun absorbing leafy surface area going and I added the starter fertilizer it’s really been picking up pace.   With any luck this lawn will be established before the weather gets too hot, but I’m not sure.   We’ve only been watering it every 2 days using the timer lately.  It’s still bright and green and seems to be thriving.  Additionally we’ve gotten rain over the past two weeks which helps save money on water, etc.

The lawn on the back yard hill is growing in okay, I was hoping it would have been thicker but that doesn’t seem to be the case.   If I could have gotten this or the peninsula to grow in as fast and thick as that Scott’s quick patch (PatchMaster(tm)) stuff I’d have been happy.   Maybe I need to look into hydro-seeding for any future lawn work ( DIY Hydro-seeder anyone? ) .    The Scott’s quick patch is basically hydro-seeding ingredients minus the water from what I saw on the bag.   I saw a spot down the road where the town had cut up some big 8-12 foot wide swaths of land to do fire hydrant work, then hydroseeded when done.   That was 2 weeks ago and the grass is already growing really fast there.

I also have some more photos of the Iris flowers.  The second one looks like it’s sticking it’s tongue out   Say ahhhh!

Additionally are the photo’s of something special brewing in ‘Mom’s Sunshine Garden’  I was worried they weren’t going to come up, but they bloomed fairly quick.  It appears something has been nibbling them, but with the number of bunnies I’ve seen around here, I hope it’s them and not bugs!

And finally you can see a couple of herbs from the garden planter.  The first one is Sage and the second one is Parsley.

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Not much here for today, just posting some pics of the left side of the house, and some Iris’ flowers which have popped up here and there and a robin that has been helping with the ant population.  I also did a panoramic photo ‘from the hip’ which is why they don’t merge so well.  I’ll try to do some better ones with my tripod and see if I can get them to look like the R/C Field development photo’s I took and turned into a panorama over here.

My mom identified the flowers for me, they’re Iris flowers and maybe Crocus or Snap Dragon.  Up until 30 minutes ago I just called them ‘flowers’ !   I’ll have more photos in the next few days as more bloom which should help ID things better.   I looked at pictures of Iris’ and both flowers look similar so I’m thinking they’re just Iris.  Time will tell *suspense music*.  Feel free to post suggestions.

Here’s an interesting website I found for the Iris Species Database provided by The Species Iris Group of North America

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