Outbuildings

Weather: Each year when we reach this time in October when we get some rain, I stop watering and let the plants adjust to nature’s water levels.

Last useful rain: 10/14. Week’s low: 38 degrees F. Week’s high: 70 degrees F in the shade.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid roses, silver lace vine, Russian sage, datura, sweet peas, Maximilian sunflowers, chrysanthemums, zinnias

What’s blooming in my yard: Calamintha, chocolate flowers, blanket flowers, Sensation cosmos, African marigolds, morning glories

What’s blooming outside the walls and fences: Bindweed, silver leaf nightshade, greenleaf five eyes, chamisa, broom snakeweed, senecio, purple asters.

What’s red or turning red and orange: Sand cherries, spirea, Virginia creeper leaves; prostrate knotweed stems

What’s yellow or turning yellow and orange: Sweet cherry, choke cherry, peach, apricot, catalpa, skunk bush, caryopteris, grape leaves

Bedding plants: Petunias and dwarf marigolds locally

Tasks: It’s a hard time of year to work outside. My body has no problem adjusting to changing hours of daylight, but my mind is another matter. It’s used to my doing physical labor right after breakfast, and then getting on to other more cerebral activities. When I can’t because it’s still too cold, it doesn’t want to go outside in late morning.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, small brown birds, geckos, hornets, sidewalk ants

The Maximilian sunflowers are out of bloom and the leaves turning yellow. Earlier today I saw the first batch of birds harvesting the seeds. They probably were goldfinches that blend into the pied foliage.

Weekly update: Last year at this time I had hired a dumpster and was cleaning out the garage. I was forced to that expense because I could never find anyone with a pickup truck willing to work, and I simply couldn’t get rid of stuff one trash container at a time.

This problem seems universal. Even when people have trucks to haul away trash, they seem to limit themselves to taking away brush, large weeds like Russian thistles, and crop debris. Manufactured objects just take on roots.

Once upon a time, when men had to build their own storage sheds, the labor acted as a deterrent against amassing stuff. The adobe ones mostly are ruins now, and few wooden ones exist, perhaps because of the cost of wood, perhaps because frame construction isn’t as indigenous as block.

Businesses of different sorts offer easier alternatives: self storage units fill vacant lots and portable sheds are hawked. The problem with these is they fill up, and rather than clean them, more sheds are installed.

Very often the first is well done, but the next is more ephemeral.

I’ve lived in Michigan, Ohio, and west Texas where tornadoes are always a threat. When I drive by these sheds I wonder about how well they are installed. My one neighbor put a cement slab under his first, and had the sellers erect it and its mate.

Another neighbor put his on an existing slab, but probably on some kind of blocks. He told me that’s where the ground squirrel lives.

Like you I’ve been looking at photographs of destruction in western Florida. The winds apparently got under metal surfaces and lifted the sheets away. They show buildings stripped of their siding, and not just the usual trailers. If such winds every happened here, all our sheet metal roofs could disappear.

One child was killed when a carport flew into her house. Those metal canopies on poles are ubiquitous here. I’m not sure it mattered in Florida how strongly they were attached, but here I wonder about them in the spring winds.

Notes on photographs: All taken in the area on 23 May 2018.
1. This began as a garage and attached carport. A few years ago the carport was walled. Later, the metal barn was added.

2. The one on the left was first.
3. Two wooden buildings.

4. Another outbuilding was installed first. Then the one on the left. After that, the one on the right was built.

5. I’m not sure of the order for the carport and two sheds. You can see both sheds are perched somewhat unsteadily on blocks, unlike the ones in #2 which were professionally installed.