Browsing category: Doing It Ourselves

My Handmade Soap

I love the entire soap making process… it always fascinates me that you can take such unappealing ingredients as oils and lye and transform them into a completely different product…

Digging Another Pond By Hand

And here is the beginning of our second pond… like the first pond, we are digging this one entirely by hand. Luckily, there are several natural springs that will be the pond’s water supply, so we will not need a pump or a filter.

Our Hand Dug Backyard Pond

Of all of our landscaping projects, our little pond is one of my favorites. We dug this pond by hand. It was a huge project and took quite a while because we had to dig out so many large rocks.

The Final Cut and Summer Memories

This was such a beautiful sight… to have ninety logs “done” and to see only one log still left to be cut. And there’s the little “brook” that formed under this log during one of our last torrential rains…

What Our Finished Compost Looks Like

This year, for the first time ever in all my years of gardening, I have had more compost available than I could use. It has been WONDERFUL…

Our Load of Logs — A Progress Report

It is raining again this morning. And it rained for a while last night and yesterday and the night before that and the day before that. It feels like it has rained almost every day since our load of logs was delivered to us… and it actually has…

A Truckload of Logs — Our Winter Firewood Supply

For the past four years some of our winter wood supply has come from the woods across the road from our house… but we have cleared out most of those storm-damaged trees and we are always looking for a new firewood source.

More Leaf Mold in the Making — It’s Starting To Heat Up

We don’t add anything to the leaves, but they will naturally contain some pine needles and pieces of grass and other vegetation that get caught up in the raking. These all help the pile to heat up.