Landscaping Under the Poverty Line

This has been another year living below the poverty line. My wife and I run 3 businesses out of our house: my engineering consulting, her day-home, and her framing and art studio. This year, the only one consistently earning money is the day home.

But we bought a house 2-1/2 years ago with a disastrous yard killed by neglect. How do you revive a yard to preserve your home value when you struggle to pay the electric bill and the mortgage? The old way. Reuse, recycle, re-engineer, re-purpose. I built a 2 cubic meter composter two years ago. It's monstrous but holy shit it works. The first year nothing happened as the bugs and worms took a long time to establish. Everything goes into it: grass clippings, leaves, weeds we pick and the ubiquitous food waste generated by folks who home cook nearly everything. Last summer season it generated about 10 cubic meters of excellent compost. For the composter, I purchased the materials for about $120. I could have had a dump truck deliver a 10 cubic meter load of screened topsoil for about $100 trucking time and maybe $150 for the soil. But this option reduces garbage to the dump, will make soil forever and gives me a showcase project to promote my beliefs.

Our lawn is dying. Six rampaging rug rats every day driving Tonkas and peddle cars around the yard added to a dog and some years of near drought have left it spotty and brown. Last year I mowed it twice in the entire summer. The center parts weren't even tall enough to be cut by the mower blade. So I bought $10 of plastic garden fence, $6 of grass seed, and $20 of new lawn fertilizer. Piece by piece at about 15 square meters a time we are going to top dress and reseed. But I need more soil? We decided this is a good time to build a nice retaining wall but again price is a huge issue. So I'm digging out a foundation and reusing the soil to top dress and adjust the slope of the patch for seeding. It's slow since I dig it by hand and have to pick out rocks, crush lumps, and spread carefully.

The wall is going to be dry stone made of scrounged river rock. That came about after a trip to the local gravel pit. I got a cubic meter of decent sand for $20 to finish the kids sand box. The cost was actually beer money for the loader operator since the pit owners can't be bothered to charge for a pickup truck full of sand. But somehow the $150/hour rate of the loader and operator needs to be paid. Fine by me. Talking with the operator as he loaded my pickup he sent me to the back corner of the pit where all the large waste rock from the separator gets dumped. I can go and pick my own rocks at no cost. Just backbreaking labour. All of this is going to take months, but there are lots of hands here with my wife and I and the kids. If those rocks don't suit, we'll drive down to the river and pick them there while the kids splash about.

The older kids have decided to assist with the landscaping in some unique ways. Here's what you get with 3 recycled food tins, paintbrushes, some bricks of tempera paint and vigour.

Six years ago I built my kids a 2 meter by 2 meter by 1 meter playhouse for $50 dollars. It was made of scrounged mahogany plywood, old barn wood ripped into studs, leftover steel roofing, leftover mixed paints, and a couple of old railroad ties for the foundation. The only cost was a 20 L pail of barn paint in white. Barn paint only comes in two colours but it's actually cheaper than primer and you can buy latex or oil. The plywood I used was so old it took me 3 coats to cover it to just reach a white base. It's a great playhouse but sadly we had to leave it behind when we moved from the farm. That plywood was 19 mm thick making the entire playhouse about 500 kg. I built it into spruce tree patch so it's not even possible to drag it out to haul away. Some other kids get to have that one someday.

Down the road I hope to make a wind mill of scrap to handle rainwater. But that's still in the dreamy concept phase.