back yard during the late summer

[mellowtigger]

I have mason bees, giant (apparently) spaghetti squash, and now a fire pit.

I checked the Minneapolis website for rules about fire pits, then I measured 25 feet from the back of my house.  That distance pretty much put the fire pit in the middle of the back yard, which is farther away than I would have liked, but I don't want to give the city or my neighbors any reason to complain.

I wanted to put some fire damage onto that metal ring immediately after setting it up today, thinking maybe it will help reduce the temptation of anyone to simply steal it from the back of my yard.  I still very much want a fence, but getting rid of (at least some of) those trees is the priority expenditure for September.  August money went to pay off the electricians for the air conditioning that never got installed.  At least I no longer need the a/c for this year.

I plan to get a chain saw that uses the same batteries as my lawn mower and edger.  It'll require a special order at Home Depot, but I'll finally be able to get rid of these horrible box elder trees.  It seems their only purpose is to attract carpenter ants (I've seen the large black ants on at least 2 of them) and fill my house with box elder bugs.  They're back for a 2nd season this year.  At least the bugs now are not as bad as earlier this spring.

I still want to do some more work on the fire pit: put some sand and rocks as a bottom layer, which will raise it up another inch or two.  That metal ring gets very hot, so I might consider putting some thin cinder pieces on top to make it suitable for sitting on the edge, away from the searing metal ring.

I also need to get a proper poker for the fire pit.  It came with a mini-version that is much too short.  I noticed some strange white fluff on my arms, and it took me a few moments to realize that I'd singed the hairs on my arm.  They were all in various stages of melting away.  Oops.

I moved my mason bee bamboo home from the old house.  It appears to be well used this year.  Lots of the holes have been filled up by a mother bee putting one of her larva into each tube then sealing it up.  I call it a bee "home", since mason bees are not social, so they don't form a "hive" together.  They're also quite sociable around humans and not territorial at all, since they don't have an expensive hive to protect.  Yay for helping out a few more pollinators in the city!

You can tell from the top photo that the "small vines" (not like the huge pumpkin vines taking over the front yard) are flourishing in the back yard.  I wasn't sure they'd get enough sunlight because of the huge box elder trees lining the southern edge of the property.  So far, all I can tell that's fruiting is what appears to be the spaghetti squash.  It's making squashes much larger, maybe twice as large, than the stuff I usually buy in the grocery store.  I'm not sure I want one that's so large.  Unless I've lucked out, and it's actually one of the watermelons that starts pale and will look more watermelony in a few more weeks.

I'm looking forward to much cooler weather, sitting in the back yard by the fire pit, and contemplating plans for more changes to yard layout for 2017.  It's slowly getting closer to what I want.