Exterior – Strubgrass Ranch

Let’s talk about something this year that has been good and inspirational: the veg garden.

The ranch has a sizable area fenced off in the backyard for a vegetable garden (or a rose garden?). It separates a big portion of the yard (probably 16×32) from the grass and keeps large four-legged animals out (but not the rats or squirrels, lol). I don’t think it would have occurred to us to build a fence around such a big portion of the yard for a garden. But we like it and have been using it every year since we moved in.

This yeah we went wild with seeds, since March is when the stockpiling panic began. And I had anxiety. Which manifested itself in seed collecting & garden planning! My mom also mailed us a ton of seeds which was great!

We planted: shelling peas, green beans, spinach, kale, butter lettuce, cauliflower, carrots, and got some tomato starts from a fancy local place. We couldn’t find swiss chard seeds, so I’m gonna let the monster chard plants go to seed and harvest those. Anyone need any?

Here’s how it’s looking:

Painting is done! But somehow I forgot to take pictures of the outside to post while on vacation. So while the full reveal is going to have to wait, here are some in progress pics.

The painters did an ok job, not great. They were reasonably priced and fast, but missed a bunch of details. But we got them to come pack and redo the areas on the front/sunny side (the most important part, geez), and my amazing wife touched up the parts that we didn’t want to wait for them to come back to finish.

We love the colors, though! We picked the same colors as Strubgrass Manor, except that the Manor required 3 colors because it was a fancy (?) Victorian. The color selection process for the Manor was arduous, which is why we decided to use those colors again. I guess we have signature exterior colors for future home renovations, too. The colors are: Benjamin Moore Willow Creek for the wall and Light Pewter for the trim.