More yard work and preparing for guests

The garden and yard are almost ready for the guests we will be receiving in a couple weeks. I am sure my wife would have loved for the house to look more presentable (this weekend, she called it a "disheveled hole", I was offended) but I guess there is only so much that can be done between work, family, holidays, birthdays and other obligations. I did not do much this weekend, since we were away for most of it but I did get to finish the screen door to the basement and did some much-needed cleanup near the rear gate.
I learned quite a bit with the screen door project - I am not sure I would attempt to do a real door for an existing (and crooked) house but I think this one will be fine once I get some weather stripping to fill the gaps. I need to add: the door is very quaint and the spring-loaded hinges give it that creek when it opens and make it snap shut with a crack. It makes me think of the sound of the front door in "The Waltons".
I also took the time to check out the rest of the yard and a lot of my transplants are doing well. The sunflowers look great. I hope the ones in the front get just as tall. Maybe I don't need to repair the garage - just plant sunflowers in front of it next year.
The flowers in the front look nice too. There is quite a variety and only a few have bloomed but I bet it will look great in another week or so. There were on too many zinnias out front so I thinned them out a bit to let some of the other things grow. I moved the zinnias to pots and put them in and around the raspberries.

By the way, our raspberries are infested and the leaves are all getting eaten. If anyone has and suggestions that can help us salvage them for the rest of the season, I am all ears.

I also built some trusses and tripods for the african black-eyed susans in the back. These are doing really well and look pretty cool. I wish I had anticipated how good they would do and I would have been more creative with the trellising.

We also dug into the garden and had some cucumbers and squash this weekend. To my surprise, we have a lot of cucumbers and a few squash. I did not think these would do well at all. I just can't wait until we can start harvesting tomatoes.

Attack of the Cucumbers!!!

I should have known better than to try and grow squash and cucumbers in such a confined space. What I didn’t expect was our cucumber plant attacking all of it’s neighbors. I am still not sure it is worth it but I re-located a tomato plant and am trying to train our cucumber to not destroy its neighbors.One of my problems with gardening is that I can’t leave well enough alone. After transplanting the tomato, I decided to move a few other things around as well. I know this is generally not a good idea with the warm weather we have been having. I created an actual herb garden by moving all the herbs to one corner. I also tried to move all the sunflowers to one location (the random sunflower here and there just looked a little crazy). I’ll let you know in a week if any of these plants survive.
Work on the bedroom also continued slowly. I only spent a few hours but am almost finished with the closet door casing and molding. All I have left is a 4’ section of baseboard, the closet door and the windows and I am done stripping in this room. If I squint hard enough, I can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel.
During nap time I constructed a fold-away work table out of an old bi-fold door from the basement and got my garage a bit more organized. I also started on the screen door for the basement. I am making it out of 1x2 cedar strips. It is actually pretty simple and makes me think I can do my own window screens… …hmmm, but what about the storm windows?