bike trailer

My dad was the kind of guy that saved everything, knowing that someday he would need it for something. He had a couple of wheelchairs torn apart in his stash of stuff. He gave me the wheels a couple years back. He thought I could use them to build a bike trailer.

I never really needed a trailer with the xtracycle, but last year we hauled a bunch of bags of compost and potting soil from our local nursery. Plus we get straw bales for mulch from our feed store. Since we don't have a pick up truck we haul it in Monica's car and this leaves a big mess that I end up cleaning. I could get the compost in the xtracycle but the straw bales were to big.

My work is really slow right now so I decided to go for it. I'm trying to use only material I have on hand, It looks like I will only need to buy one short stick of tubing for the tongue and some bolts to hold down the floor. Its pretty heavy but I will be towing it with my electric assist xtracycle. Hopefully next week it will be completely welded, painted and getting put to work.

New compost area and sheet mulching

Our compost pile has been just that "a pile". it sat in the corner, with a very sad look. It was hard to see because in front of it was a dilapidated raised bed from years past, the raised bed was overgrown with weeds and had tomato cages and cardboard stacked on top of it. I've been wanting to do something with this area for a while, but have not had the chance. This morning I was up early with plans to do something else and this mess caught my eye, and now it is history.

I don't have any before photos, it was just too ugly to take its picture. First I built this compost area from two pallets, some used 2 x 4's, a gate leftover from when we rebuilt our fence and some used corrugated roofing tin.

Then I dug up the old bed and spread the dirt, and weeds around. I covered the whole mess with cardboard and watered it really well. I then spread straw over the cardboard and watered it again. My plan is to continue layering compost and mulch onto the straw. Hopefully by next year this will be usable soil. It took all day but it was worth it.