Good Things List No.76: Gravel Tips For Gardens, Fruit Harvest, Oven Thermometer Win, Books and More!

A monthly list of good things to see, buy, read and watch. This month’s list includes laying weed-free gravel for new garden areas, a small fruit harvest, the difference an oven thermometer can make, a few books read and a fun movie watched.

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Here we are in September – the start of fall – and the lead up to the holidays. Are you ready for it? Or sad at the passing of the slower, warmer months?

It really depends on where you live, doesn’t it? Down in the southern part of the US, you’re looking at finally getting outside again after sheltering in air conditioning. But for me in the Pacific Northwest, I mourn our beautiful warm and sunny days because aside from a few 100 degree days, this is the time of year to be outside.

Fall is still very beautiful here – I’ll just have to put a long sleeve shirt over my tank tops now. And with the cooler weather, we’ll have more time for some outdoor projects we’d like to work on before the rain (and mud) hits.

So the seasons change and we change and adapt with them, don’t we? It’s all good – just like this list of good things from last month (I couldn’t resist that segue, lol).

Good Things List

More Weed-Free Gravel Areas

We finally were able to finish the other side of our back door pathway with gravel and it looks SO much better than the patchy grass weeds we had here after laying our cement walkway.

We admittedly are not grass people – I’m too busy with the gardens and Brian isn’t one of those guys who cares about perfect grass. But still we thought we could seed this small area and get it to grow. Um, no. I think we tried seeding three times and it was really a muddy, weedy eyesore, especially next to the path with the neat and tidy gravel fire pit area on the other side.

I’ve got plans for this area, but for now we’re using it as our outdoor dining area until we get our kitchen porch done.

I get questions all the time about laying weed-free gravel so I thought I’d share my two biggest tips:

1. Lay 6-milliliter (or thicker) black plastic over the area to be covered. You can also use a professional grade landscape fabric if you’d like. Make sure all the edges are covered or buried under things as much as possible and there is overlap between any inner edges. TIP: if you are covering grass/weeds, lay the plastic down at least a month early so it will all be dead and flattened. (If you’re worried about plastic in the garden, this is permanent and isn’t going anywhere.)
2. Buy 3/4 inch gravel without fines. This is important, as “fines” are smaller pieces, dirt and dust and they will create the perfect medium to grow weeds (ask me how I know…). You want clean gravel – as clean as you can get it and larger gravel usually comes cleaner. You can go smaller if you can find it clean, but I’ve found smaller gravel often grows more weeds.

That’s basically it, although I have a few more things to consider:

• If you have moles or gophers: Be sure to lay the gravel really thick – like 2-3 inches. This weight should keep them from coming up under the gravel – it’s worked for us for a few years and we have a LOT of these critters.
• To save money: Try and find a way to haul the gravel yourself if possible – I couldn’t believe how much more it cost us to have gravel delivered when we needed it for our cement project! As an example, we paid $39 a yard for this project vs. the $100 a yard delivered for our previous project (and that was 2 years ago – it’s probably more now).
• Drainage: Even with the solid plastic, our gravel areas have always drained well. My theory is that the gravel adds little holes to the plastic as it gets walked on, creating a similar effect of landscape fabric.

PS – That’s our new berry garden above that we graveled at the same time, also adding a motion-activated sprinkler deer scarer (is that a word?) so that these poor little plants can finally grow (the deer were coming through the string and flags we had before). So glad it’s working!

First Fruit Harvest

Our five year old Italian plum tree finally produced a good crop for us this year! This was after fertilizing twice last year, once in the spring and once in the fall.

While we were happy to harvest anything at all, the plums were small and pinkish instead of the larger purple plums they are supposed to be. It may have been a watering issue or weather related. They were ripe and tasty, though.

We also have a few apples on our 4-year-old tree which we’re looking forward to trying.

This is the fertilizer I applied in the spring and this is what I used in the fall.

Everyone Needs An Oven Thermometer

Okay, maybe not everyone – but more than you’d think!

I started this website (back in 2009!) with a 20 year old JennAir range that baked perfectly so I never felt the need to check the oven temperature.

When I bought a new Cafe range for the farmhouse (see it in the kitchen here – it’s lovely to look at!), it never occurred to me to check. It was brand new, so of course it worked – right?

Sadly, it took a couple of years of some things baking just okay and some things not turning out like they always had for me to wonder what the heck was going on?

I finally bought an oven thermometer (a larger one that I can see better!) and it’s been EYE-OPENING. At first I thought it was 25 degrees off (what??). But then I realized that when you’re preheating and the oven beeps to tell you it’s up to temperature, it’s NOT up to temp! In fact it’s as much as 100 degrees less!!

Now imagine putting something like a cake in at that point. You wonder why it turned out so dry and brown when you took it out early to check, but that’s because the oven was blasting heat for the first 10 minutes it was in there. Even heat is crucial to baked goods and mine haven’t been getting that for the last few years.

It was a quiet month on the reading front. I looked back to try and figure out why and I see that we had a week of family vacation (many people read during these times, but I find I want to be talking with people more) and the weather was warmer so we didn’t do as much long outdoor project or indoor cooking (two key time for me to listen to books).

Golden Son and Morning Star (Red Rising Series 2 & 3), Pierce Brown. I finished re-listening to this favorite series of mine from a few years ago to see if I still liked it as much. Yes – it’s so well written with deep themes of family, friendship, loss and grief as well as societal themes of the haves and have nots and what happens when war is the only answer for equality. I don’t love everything that happens and it is very violent (I probably won’t see any show they make if they keep all that), but like The Hunger Games, the violence serves the purpose of showing how far those in power can go – and how far those who rise up may have to go to overcome.

Network Effect (Murderbot Diaries #5 novel), Martha Wells. Brian and I continued listening to this fun series about a security unit (mostly robotic, some human) in the future when different planets have been terraformed and inhabited, who disables his governor module to be able to do what he wants (mainly watch space soap operas). It’s told from first person as his “diary” so we get all his inner thoughts which are funny and sarcastic. Over the course of the first four novellas, we saw him basically become more human and gain friends and a “family” of sorts as he works to protect those around him. This is the first novel length book in the series and it tells a longer story of he and a small crew that get abducted and have to fight and find their way back home. Some series overarching storylines are explored more and answered – with more answers to come in the novella #6 (I’m assuming), so reading in order is probably the way to enjoy this the best.

Manor For Sale- Baron Included, Esther Hatch. This is a closed door historical romance author I just discovered who has really good reviews of people enjoying her stories. This book is about a woman who’s come into money and wants to buy a home for her ill younger sister and her to live in – very unusual at the time this is set. She has to deal with the Baron owner who is forced to sell, but decides to try and woo her to gain a wife and his house back at the same time. While I enjoyed the lighthearted story, in the end it was just ho-hum for me with a writing style I often found disjointed and hard to follow (I think this was just me, though, based on the Amazon reviews!).

The Gentleman’s Gambit, Evie Dunmore. This is the fourth in the Extraordinary Women series by this author and while I’ve enjoyed the other books a lot, this one didn’t hit the mark for me. It tells the story of the more reclusive of the series’ women and a man who comes to her uncle about helping to catalog ancient artifacts, but we know he’s there to steal them and take them back to his homeland where they were taken from. This is London in the Victorian era when Egyptology was the rage. I didn’t like the stealing part, no matter the cause and I didn’t really think they had much chemistry. Plus, I think this author has gotten more open door, this time having the heroine basically live with her hero for a month with no one saying anything, which is hard for me to believe in that time period.

Watching

Twisters, theater (also Amazon). Just a fun, thriller type movie like Michael Crichton wrote. I’ve seen varying types of ratings for this but from our perspective, we thought the writing was good and got a few laughs out of it and the story was exciting. I thought the lead actress was miscast – she looked way too young – but other than that it was an enjoyable date night movie!

That’s it for another addition of the Good Things List!

If you’d like to see more of what I’m enjoying, you can check out all the Good Things Lists here. I’d love to know what you think – if you’ve tried any of these or what you’d recommend. Leave a comment below with your thoughts!

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