Deck

Day-4 of building a deck.

BTW, if anyone has a good translation for deck in Chinese, please let me know. I tried to explain what a deck is to my parents but couldn't find a good translation for it. Perhaps 平台?

Kitty and Steve was busy installing the decking today. For the lower-deck, they have so far used more than 2000 screws. Apparently Kitty did more than half of it, a rather impressive workload. I wonder, how much should I pay Steve for his labour? :)


Kitty really enjoyed building it.

Kitty the handywoman

We finally started the deck construction. When I said *we* of course I meant just Kitty, since she is the handy one between the two of us. Steve (the guy in the yellow shirt) is our contractor. He is very nice and professional.

Day-1 involves just digging the holes. The frost-line for Kingston area is about 39in; the holes they dug were 4-feet deep. Our plan is to have a small top-deck of size 10'x7', a lower-deck of 16'x22', with a 3' feet of stairs between the decks.


Day-2 involved getting the city inspector to measure the depth of the holes. Once it was passed, the concrete was poured into the holes. On Day-3, once the concrete were set, joists, beams, and posts were installed.

Yes, Kitty did 1/2 of the actual work, following the instructions given by Steve. She is very sored, tanned, and proud.

nest dissolved

I apologise in advance. The picture isn't pretty and can be quite unsettling. This is what the wasp nest looks like after I sprayed it with foam-pesticide.

The pesticide actually dissolved the outer shell of the nest and killed the wasps and their eggs. Quite a nasty sight, I must say. Worse, I have to remove it by hand.

Snake!

A side effect of having a composter in your yard is...... SNAKE! Actually, the snake was not found in MY composter, but rather in my neighbour's. I believe the snakes in question are common garter snakes (襪帶蛇). Yes, there are 2 of them in the composter.

Apparently snakes like composter. It is warm, wet, dark, with lots of bugs and insects for food. Also, the heat generated from the compost also helps developing the eggs. I just hope that 1) I don't get snake in my own composter, and 2) there won't be any eggs being hatched from this pair snakes.

Now I wonder where did that frog in my yard go....

Wasp nest

It looks like my house is indeed turning into a jungle. We have a small wasp (黄蜂) nest right in the our front door. Too bad it is not the regular honey bee: I'm sure some of our local bee keepers will be happy.

It is time for some pesticides. I don't like it but I have no choice.

Frog!

You can imagine my surprise when I spotted a frog in my yard. Kitty and I live in a 10-years old subdivision, and the closest body of water is more than 1km away. I have no idea how the frog got here.

This is a good sign though. Amphibians breath through their skin and hence they are very sensitive to pollutions. Having a frog in the yard is a sign that our soil and water is relatively clean. Good thing we don't use pesticide.

The jungle

This is what my vegetable garden looks like now. In a few weeks it has been transformed from plain dirt to wild bushes. I'm really amazed on how the tomatoes are growing. If you look at my earlier picture of the garden, you'll see that all these tomato plants started with a height less than 6 inches. Some of them are more than 2-3 feet tall now.


The eggplants are growing quite slow actually. It was only a few days earlier that I noticed they are flowering. The Thai basils are growing quite slow as well. My friend's mom in Burlington (Ontario) has Thai basils that are a few feet tall/wide now. Kingston weather has been quite cool so far and these tropical/sub-tropical plants aren't growing as fast as it could.

tomatoes are coming

Did I mention that I have 10 tomato plants? Yeah, I rescued 1-2 more tomato plants from a local gardening centre at the end of the season. The first 8 tomato plants I planted in June are doing very well: 4-5 of the 8 already have large tomatoes on them, and the rests are in the flowering season. This is good as they will all mature in different times during the season, assuring us to have a continuous supply of tomatoes for a few weeks.

The picture above shows the tomatoes from the Japanese Trifele Black. The plants is about 2.5 feet tall and it has grown like a bush. More pictures will come soon.

Kitty's first planter

Kitty has finally got her hands dirty and made her first planter! I was very surprised that she actually played with the soils. But the result is astonishing! The picture speaks for itself: isn't the planter pretty?

We debated if we want to have annuals or perennials to plant in our yards. Perennials are nice in the sense that you only have to plant it once and you get flowers every year. The problem is, you only get the flowers for a few weeks a year. On the hand, the flowering season for the annuals we have lasts for months so far. For this reason we decided to go with the annuals for this planter.