When Life Gives You Lemons



I've mentioned a few times on this blog that The Papered House has a slate roof. It's beautiful and historic, and tends to be very durable. Our roof is in pretty good shape, all things considered. But every once in a while, individual slate tiles become so weathered that they chip and fall off our roof. This is most common after particularly bad ice storms; the ice thaws and slides off the roof, taking small pieces of slate with it. When the ice and slate hit the ground, there is quite a ruckus. I'll tell you, seeing pieces of your roof on the ground, a good 30 feet from where they are supposed to be, is a pretty terrible feeling. We've been checking the attic for leaks after every storm, and, so far so good. We're also planning to have a roofer perform routine annual maintenance on our roof as a preventative measure. We have a plan to keep our slate roof in good repair. But still, seeing broken pieces of roofing material on the ground is an unsettling occurrence to say the least.

Throughout the winter, I gathered those slate scraps and stacked them into a pile. For some reason, I couldn't bring myself to throw them out. I kept thinking, "Suppose we could do something with all this slate. It'd be a waste to throw it out." So I collected little pieces of slate for several months. It's similar to my hoarding of "good" boxes. I will save any cardboard box that is particularly sturdy/well-proportioned/potentially useful, with a definitive proclamation that "This is a good box. We can do something with my box. We shouldn't get rid of this box." My husband doesn't like this tendency; his response is typically, "Yes. We can do something with that box. We can recycle it."

Anyway, back to these pieces of slate. I decided to give them new life as DIY garden markers. If that's not an overly-optimistic interpretation of the saying "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade" I'm not sure what is.

Garden versus Groundhog (0-3)

The Papered House has met its match. On three separate occasions, we have been bested by a pudgy groundhog who skulks through our backyard. He has an insatiable appetite for leafy greens and seems to view our garden as his own personal salad bar. I've taken to calling him our nemesis. My husband has a much stronger name for him, not fit for this blog.

When we first planted the garden, we knew we would need to take some measures to keep the animals away. So we surrounded all the beds with a chicken wire fence. That worked for a few weeks, until our peas, cucumbers, and broccoli seedlings went missing. A groundhog had found a way in.

Our next step was to douse all the plants with a homemade pesticide made from habanero peppers boiled in water. This measure worked for about a month. But then our nemesis must have developed a spicy palette, because he kept munching away, this time on kale and bok choy. Seriously? He likes kale? It's as though we have a hipster groundhog who thinks he's entitled to eat all the kale because he was eating kale before it became a trendy superfood. Whatever, groundhog. I didn't really care about the kale anyway. We just grew it because, you know, it's supposed to be good for us. And also, kale chips are oddly delicious.

After the second round of vegetable thievery, we doubled down and protected each individual vegetable bed with fine black netting. The netting made it more difficult for us to weed, but we figured that would be a small price to pay for keeping the groundhog at bay. Right?

Unfortunately, this is the mess we discovered in our vegetable garden after the groundhog's most recent escapade. It's almost impossible to see in this picture, but the groundhog ate the plants through the netting. He got our lettuce, arugula, and beets. He also got the second set of broccoli seedlings, which we planted recently to replace the ones he ate. From what we can tell, he sat on the netting until the vegetable leaves poked through the holes in the netting, and ate to his heart's content.

He's one determined bugger. I have to admit that I'm sort of amused by his tenacity and resourcefulness. On the other hand, it's hard not to feel deflated after devoting so much thought and time into a project that isn't going to flourish (at least, not this year). My husband carefully picked out the vegetable varieties from the Hudson Valley Seed Library, even going so far as to select the Calabrese broccoli variety because it dates to the 1800s (apparently it's not sufficient to paint our rooms historically appropriate colors. We are also trying to grow the very same type of broccoli that previous owners might have. If you're rolling your eyes right now, I don't blame you. We're obsessive, I know.) Anyway, we planted some of these crops back in the winter, setting up fluorescent light bulbs and heating pads in our basement so that we could grow the seedlings when the ground was still covered in ice and snow. The seedlings grew really well in the basement, and we gradually hardened them outside, then transplanted them when the weather was warm enough. We were really looking forward to enjoying the fruits of our labor.

I hope our nemesis enjoyed that organic heirloom broccoli.

Blush Pink for the Master Bedroom

I almost named this post "In which my husband agrees to a blush pink bedroom, because the Victorians said so." But that title was far too long. Plus, I thought it might imply that my husband lacks strong opinions about interior decor. That would be misleading. In fact, he's so committed to historically appropriate decor that he agreed to paint our bedroom a color that looks suspiciously like ballet slippers, in spite the fact that he doesn't really like the color.

Anyway, let me provide some background before I bore you with paint color research.

Last night, I came across an email I wrote to my sister-in-law. Among other things, I mentioned that we would be working on our master bedroom over the weekend, hoping to make significant progress. That email was dated March 6. It's now solidly July, and the master bedroom is still a work in progress.