The Jolly Green Gardener

It's August 16th already, time has certainly flown on the Live Green, Live Smart project house. It's been a hectic week at the house for me with Keith taking some much needed time away from the site as the tapers get the drywall mudded and taped. During his time away I'm making some big steps outside the house, all while taking care of a couple minor emergencies at site along the way. We took delivery of the first set of our large landscaping stones Tuesday morning. And I do mean large, these stones are around 4 to 6 feet long, 3 feet deep and 16 inches tall. They will become our egress window wells and the stones following them from the quarry will become landscape stone outcroppings around the rain gardens. They are a dramatic statement and will look great, however they are posing their own set of problems and logistical issues. In order for the recycling to make sense time and money wise we have had numerous piles accumulating around the site. The problem was those piles had a tendency to look a little unruly if we didn't keep close tabs on them, and were also taking up quite a bit of space. However it just doesn't make sense to take a trip to the scrap metal recycler every time we have a piece of old ducting to recycle, you have to stock pile and then make one big trip. So this week I set about the task of getting those piles were they needed to go. We got the last of the old stucco cement into a dumpster to be recycled. The scrap lumber we can't re-use or grind up for mulch also found its way into a dumpster to be used as fuel at a power plant. And our scrap metal pile was taken to the scrap yard to be recycled. Those are big steps towards getting the yard into a place where we can begin our landscape installations. The other big news is that the piping is now complete for the rainwater tanks. The tanks are scheduled to be buried completely tomorrow morning, so far they've only been partially buried. Getting them covered to final grade will give us back the left half of the front yard. That piping went smoothly if slowly, we did end up with adequate elevations for getting the water from the gutters into the top of the tank while having appropriate slope out of our overflows towards the rain gardens.