More backyard.

My backyard is a mess and there’s a foundation with a single wall sprouting from it at the moment. I hope by the time I go home today there will be at least two more walls – and a doorway from the patio into the enclosure. They say the roof trusses have been ordered, I’m hoping by Monday we’ve got the roof going up. Which would mean the shell of the new structure could be done as early as Tuesday or Wednesday of next week. I’ve got pictures of the first two days, having trouble getting home in time for there still to be light – but will eventually post the project start to finish. At the moment everything looks like a bit of a disaster, but I’m confident that once the guys come and get rid of the detrius, it won’t be quite so scary for me.

In other backyard news, I’ve discovered that it *is* legal to keep honeybees even if you aren’t 25 feet away from your neighbour’s property line as long as you have a six foot high fence where the hives are located. That means if I simply trellis along my back fence I’ll have an enclosure that’s within city guidelines for keeping two hives. My friend Sam wants bees as well so I’m thinking two hives, but looking into low-impact beekeeping ala the barefoot beekeeper. Apparently it’s easier and less chemically than the standard victorian frame-hive beekeeping we’re all so familiar with, not to mention better for natural bee/honey production!

Upshot being, I’m very distracted by my backyard at the moment, and as much as I have lots of work to do I just want to rush home and start reading more, planting more seed starts (oh – did I mention that I’ve got shallot, herb, tomato starts on the go in my little windowsill greenhouse?), watching the shed/studio go up. Really, by May when things are growing and we’ve got it mostly cleaned up, our yard is going to be quite the refuge from the city. That’s the plan anyway, even though it’s hard to see in the gloom of January now that my patio is covered in building detrius and there are old roofing tiles littering the lawn.