Jon's Home Blog » planter

Painting and Yardwork in 92 degree heat

JonC — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 02:13:10 +0000

Wow, today was a scorcher once again, it’s been pretty warm out lately but that didn’t stop work from proceeding on painting the house and doing some yard work.

Fridays are half day for me and it feels like we worked all day on some of these projects. We’ve been slowly scraping and priming the back side of the house. The paint on the house is not that old but was not applied very well and it’s starting to peel and chip, additionally there are cracks between the slats of the wood. I’m sure the house could use a nice vinyl siding job or something, but paint and caulk are much cheaper for now.

A while ago I scraped, caulked and primed the lower 8 feet of the wall which you can see in the picture and today we scraped another section and began to caulk any gaps and cracks between the siding. Tomorrow I’m going to try go get further up the wall, then caulk it and we’ll put some more primer on.

I’m using a bonding primer from Valspar and it works pretty good. It’s very thick and covers up spots, wood grain and stains very well.

Bryn started scraping out the planting beds today as well and managed to strike and ants nest in the process and got swarmed. Ah natures aerators and largest annoyance in the yard. At least for now they’re staying mostly in the yard! Once the planter is all cleared out of the weeds and such we’re going to put some landscape fabric down and to try and prevent weeds from taking root. then insert a few flowering plants before mulching. Colorful flowers are nice but they’re so high maintenance to keep the weeds and such out of the area it seems like more trouble than it’s maybe worth.

Repainting the house

Some New Flowers Popped Up – They are Platycodon Grandiflorus

JonC — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:54:31 +0000

Some new flowers have popped up in the yard, they’re pretty neat looking and purplish in color with dark bluish veins through the petals. The flower has 5 points and the petals are all one piece, not individual petals. The middle of the flower is white with a blue bulb at the tip. I managed to catch these flowers while mid-bloom, so some of them are still closed, and their shape is also pretty interesting when closed. They look like a puffed up 5 sided star. Apparently they usually bloom with 5 ‘petals’ but for some reason oen of them has 7 points.

After doing some searching I’ve found that these flowers are a ‘Balloon Flower’ or ‘ Chinese/Japanese Bellflower’ or more specifically Platycodon grandiflorus, they come in a varietty of colors. There are a lot more buds on these plants and I’m hoping that they will all bloom, it will look really nice.

Another Day, Another Thunder Storm

JonC — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 03:35:28 +0000

After weeks of nightly, hours long, rainy downpours they have subsided a bit, but now we’re getting these daily thunderstorms ripping across the Catskills and through town. I posted a video of one the other day which was pretty fantastic and very active for our area. The thunderstorm video below is in the daytime and mostly shows the quantity of rain that comes with these storms. You can see the Scott’s PatchMaster patch in there also after about 5 or 6 weeks of growth. It’s doing well, but of course it looks better than the rest of the lawn.

We will be over-seeding the lawn in September sometime, or possibly just ripping it out and seeding from scratch. I still haven’t decided which is a better way to go. Ripping out the old lawn and laying new seed would definitely be in order since this old lawn has been here for years upon years, and I don’t think there’s much that could make it look good or feel young again. It is certainly a lot more work though, and I would need to bring in more topsoil for some more spots where it’s thin over the rock base.

The gutters on the house are in terrible shape. The one you’ll see in the video is a newer one, but it was not put in properly. There should be a drop in height of the gutter from the non-downspout side to the downspout side, I think whoever did this one just put it in along the edge and went ‘good!’.

You can see the gallons of water pouring out over the edge of the gutters and even at the downspout end of the gutter, although some of the plants in the planter seem to benefit from it. It needs to be repaired to get the water away from the house though, the sump pump has been working overtime to keep things dry in the basement.

I think it’s kind of odd that the water is pouring out from the downspout end of the gutter. I’m guessing it’s plugged with leaves or something, I’ll probably have to get up there with the ladder on Saturday and see what’s really going on with it.

Also near the end of the video you can see where the blue stone pavers have been pulled up in preparation for the placement of a new concrete sidewalk. I found someone in the area who was working on a stone wall and they called up and helped me get rid of this bluestone. I still have some big bluestone curb and slab pieces sitting around, so if you’re in the mid-hudson area and interested let me know.

Anyways, heres the thunderstorm video, if you can’t see the embedded YouTube video below, just click the link to go directly to YouTube to watch it, you won’t leave the site.

If you enjoy thunder storm videos, check out my YouTube channel on the right. I have a few from the last couple of years posted there that you may enjoy watching.

Budding Plant with Ants Identified

JonC — Mon, 25 May 2009 17:09:20 +0000

I did a bit more searching to find out what the plant in the below picture is as I have a couple of them in the front planter. According to the info I could find they are called Peonies and the ants just like the sugar and stuff that comes off the buds. I’m not sure how long it will be before these bloom, but the flowers are supposed to look pretty great.

These plants only have a few blooms each, but I guess as they get older and if they’re fed properly they will get more blooms. The front planter is quite crowded with many types of plants so we may try to transplant them over into mom’s planter once the season is through. The leaves drop and the stems need trimming each year. They’re also very hungry plants, and I think with the crowding they’ll just choke the current planter out. Plant density is HIGH with about 6 or 7 different things growing in there. Though I must say when the snow finally melted this year, there was nothing left on top of the planter and all this growth just came through. I’ll probably leave a major portion of the stem and try to get as much of the root ball as possible.

I also want to renovate the planter and make it ‘right’ after we put in the new concrete sidewalk in front of the house and do some work on the front porch.

Please click here to see more of my Ant Related Posts

Another Lazy Sunday

JonC — Sun, 17 May 2009 21:25:39 +0000

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.

This Weekend’s Yard Report

JonC — Sat, 16 May 2009 22:16:29 +0000

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.

House Centipede – Scutigera Coleoptrata

JonC — Fri, 15 May 2009 03:03:11 +0000

What has 30 legs, eats spiders and insects and can run 16 inches per second? If you’ve found this page you’re probably asking yourself those questions and need answers. I hope to clarify a little bit for you what this creature is.

A House centipede / Scutigera Coleoptrata (oh quit screaming!)

A house centipede aka the Scutigera Coleoptrata centipede are one of those creepy house bugs (it’s not a bug!) you probably don’t enjoy seeing, and I can’t blame you for that, they look pretty terrifying. The house centipede in the photo above was discovered making a dash for the bathroom cupboard but made the mistake of racing into a plastic zip lock bag I had sitting on the floor. Muahahaha! Pre-packaged house centipedes, now if only I had a distribution network setup!

I got at least one nice close up photo of Mr./Ms. Scutigera Coleoptrata, (how do you tell a male from a female? does the male wear a baseball cap?) and a couple of fuzzy ones, and also some video of the little guy/gal moving around inside the bag-o-drome. These creatures, arthropods I guess (?), are pretty cool in design and functionality. I have found a couple of them here at the house and had them at my old apartment from time to time. When it rains they are driven indoors and tend to seek higher ground like your face! (no, sorry just being bad again), in my house at least. Wikipedia says that house centipedes prefer the first floor, but I’ve not seen one there yet. Update: Okay i found two house centipedes downstairs Scutigera’ing around the floors and walls being all centipedy like!

Interesting Note: The number of searches for ‘house centipede’ went WAY up on my stats during periods of high rain in the northeast an every year I get a spike, and every year I update this site multiple times, AND sometimes when I guess there’s a lot of rain in other places. There are big ripples in the statistics which seem to move with the seasons and the amount of rainfall we are getting across the country. Maybe after a few years I will analyze all of the house centipede searches of the long term and be able to make a usable graph for some reason. I mostly just love to watch statistics, so that would be excuse enough for a House Centipede Interest Chart.

Scutigera Coleoptrata / House centipede fuzzy photo, ooo ick!!

They’re claimed to be one of the most beneficial of house pests according to the WikiPedia article on them and as to house centipede bites: “The bite of most house centipedes is incapable of penetrating human skin. Those that do give an effect no worse than a minor bee sting, and the symptoms generally disappear within a few hours.” additional resources say that in rare circumstances they can result in severe pain and swelling, but in most cases it is as stated above, their bites are mild annoyances. Read on to find the terrible truth about house centipede bites!

Further research of mine led me me to find out that house centipedes eats spiders, and insects… excellent! Okay, I let this one free into the planter. I have disposed of them before, and they are incredibly fragile, they almost dematerialize when you even lightly squish them in a wad of toilet paper. Their spindly legs pop off and, yeah, it’s just pretty weird overall. Imagine that, someone touches you and parts fall off of your body!

Also of interesting note, to some, and perhaps a bit scary to others some of these house centipedes can move as fast as 16 inches per second(!) Figure that 2″ is the large size, that’s 8 times their body length per second. So that would be like a 6′ human running at 48fps or about 32 miles per hour ( in actuality and fortunate for most of us, 16 inches per second works out to be a ground speed of about 0.9 MPH, do you feel any better!? )

House Centipede wuvs you(r bugs)!

Here are some additional stats:

Can house centipedes be completely eliminated from a home? My understanding from the reading I’ve done is that house centipedes cannot be completely eliminated from a home or from around a home. Spraying pesticides and placing sticky traps and other things will only have temporary success. I spoke with a local exterminator and he said that the best time to put down a pesticide for house centipedes will be in April if you want to get a lead on them. They will be back, though so you have to continue to treat. The guy I spoke to recommended granular insecticides around the outside perimeter of the home that specify they work on centipedes or house centipedes from one of the home stores. I’d highly recommend checking into one of the pest control companies in your area and see what you can do, some of them are linked around here on this site, but you ultimately decide if you need to go that far.

One other important thing is that house centipedes need a source of food to eat. Much like fellow broke friends in your formative years, if there’s nothing to eat at your place they’ll go to someone else’s place. If they’re hanging out at your place it means the centipedes are getting fed somehow, which probably means you may have a kind of bug-buffet going on somewhere in your house and maybe a reason to call an exterminator ‘pest specialist’ (like I mentioned previously), or whatever other politically correct name they have now, out to see whats going on.

You can reduce the number of house centipedes (scutigera coleoptrata) living and hiding in your home in a few ways. Of utemost importance is to seal the gaps around pipes in walls, seal holes in the walls, seal gaps around doors, etc. Basically seal your home like you would if you were trying to weatherize it. If you do this you’ll prevent bugs in your home AND save electricity or save fuel oil. The bugs can move around inside walls. In older uninsulated homes or open frame homes they have a lot more places to go. Keep your house dry, they prefer cool moist climates such as wet basements, showers, toilets, etc. Good basement and bathroom ventilation and maybe a mechanical dehumidifier can be important in reducing the desirability of your home as a centipede habitat. (same procedure to control molds as well, mold is evil, so prevent this too with one combined attack!)

In the winter months these little guys and gals are more likely to move into a warm area like your garage, basement or home, but they still need moisture as well so don’t be surprised to see more of them from Fall through Spring, most at the start and the end of those periods though. Sort of like college move in and move out times.

How is a house centipede born? House centipede eggs are laid in spring and early summer and they are born with 4 pairs of legs and as they grow they molt 5 times in their life. The female produces an average of 65 eggs in the Spring. Each egg is individually fertilized and ‘planted’ as opposed to some bugs 1000 eggs hatching at once in some freaky alien swarm routine. The centipede babies and the mother centipede live near each other for the first couple of weeks.

What eats house centipedes? Other house centipedes, Dogs, Cats, not a lot of other detail available that I could find. Pets such as dogs and cats tend to eat anything that’s creepy and runs around a lot. If you could actually watch some of the bugs they eat you’d probably be terrified, I don’t doubt that

What do house centipedes eat? They eat mostly smaller arthropods and spiders. They generally won’t attack anything that will outmatch them unless it’s in self defense. (I’m sure there’s always a few idiots in the crowd ‘hey hold my beers and watch this!’ but all species suffer from that one).

How long do house centipedes live? I’ve been doing some reading and have seen numbers like 7.5 year lifespans being thrown around to reach their large sizes. So when you see a really large centipede it means they’ve been there for a while, possibly living outside in your leaves and bushes and underbrush, and just coming in recently when it rained.

A question to my viewers: I seem to get a lot of people searching ‘house centipede eggs’. Are these a delicacy did you find some? Are you trying to get rid of them? Do you have a dastardly plot to seek revenge on someone and need some centipede hatch-lings? Do you have photos? I’d love to hear your input below in the comments because I’m completely baffled why you’d search for eggs.

Additional Photos: I snapped a couple of nice pics of a small house centipede, this one was only 2cm long and wandering around the bathroom. It’s pretty young as far as that goes as some of the bigger ones can be 2-3 times this size. Anyways I thought these couple of photos turned out nice. As I was trying to photograph the little guy/gal I put my hand down in front of it and it just went in another direction.. Every time! Which is about 20 times! I don’t think this qualifies as a baby house centipede as it has quite a few legs already, but it’s certainly young. I have seen smaller house centipedes than this but have never captured photos of them. This one is still alive and well as I left it, as were all the others that I photographed, though outdoors now!

If you enjoyed my page about house centipedes, or at least found it interesting, please share it with you friends or acquainted to show them the creepy beasts you have run across and if you have any photos or YouTube video, please share a link below (just put it right into the comment box).

The follow Short video of a large house centipede video (downloads, then plays automatically)

Some of the local wildlife

JonC — Thu, 14 May 2009 02:05:25 +0000

I stepped out on the porch earlier and there was a small brown bunny hiding under one of the big green bushes (Hosta variety) in front of the porch. When I went out the bunny froze in one place. I sat down on the steps, looked disinterested while I pulled out my Blackberry and took a photo of the critter. Unfortunately the picture isn’t that great from the BB Storm, but you can see the bunny in the center of the picture.

I also managed to get a picture of a carpenter bee that was flying up around the second story windows of the house. It’s a pretty good shot considering it was around 10-15 feet away. I’ve seen a fair number of these, I’m sure they’re holed up in the attic along with the hornets and mud wasps. I’ve not dared to open the attic since the weather has warmed up. I may call an exterminator and have them do a thorough debugging. I doubt the carpenter bees are doing anything constructive! It be nice if there was some kind of ‘carpenter’ insect that actually was beneficial to a house.

Also, another random shot of a Robin.

This evening I found a little frog sitting on the sidewalk in a pile of dirt and concrete dust. I put my finger up under it’s chin and it grabbed my finger with those sticky front feet and climbed up into my hand, then I moved the frog over to the planter and it hopped off. I washed my hands and took a couple of pictures of him.

Side yard photos, a bird, and some flowers

JonC — Mon, 11 May 2009 00:24:14 +0000

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

End of March 2009

JonC — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:07:36 +0000

Here are a few shots of the property at the end of March, I will be taking photo’s for end of April as well so you can see the massive difference over just one month. I took these pictures back at the end of march, so that is when this post is dated, however I added it on April 27th.

New Sidewalk — The back yard was getting very muddy to walk between the back door and the driveway so we solved the problem by laying in some concrete pavers and a retaining wall. It was a tremendous amount of work, I believe the soil is 60%+ rock in this area which makes for much labor. In order to lay out the pavers we had to dig out the soil beneath which was filled with huge chunks of bluestone, and I do mean huge. Some of the pieces of blue stone weighed as much as 50 pounds. Then we leveled out a lot of gravel and then leveling sand on top of that. The retaining wall was just simple stacked pavers. I used a hammer drill to drill through all but the very top concourse of bricks and then we drove rebar stakes down into the earth about 2 feet to keep it in place. Over the last couple of winters the sidewalk and the retaining wall have held up great!

Walkway work

The Back .40: This is the back yard of the property, beyond the ‘developed zone’. It’s probably closer to .60 acre, but I like the ‘back 40′ comparison better.

Back woods area at the end of March '09

Mom’s planter, we gave the planter a special name for my Mom and I’m going to be sending her photo’s from time to time so she can see what I planted in there for her. It should be quite nice if all goes well! Notice how the lawn looks in this photo.

I planning on growing something nice for my mom in here each year, this years special ingredient is.... stay tuned

Barn side yard – If you look at the ground in this phot the ground color is all moss growing there on the surface. This tree is kind of nice(it is still in winter mode) but I plan on trimming the bottom branches a bit so it’ll be nice and open instead of ground cover.

Just one of the pine-type trees in the front yard, I need to get a photo gallery together for identifying different trees and plants in the yard.