To Build a Table

My wife wanted a picnic table so we could spend some time eating out-doors this year. I figured it would be cheaper and more fun to build one than to buy one. We ended up using This Old House's plan, and were very pleased with the results:

This is just about my favorite time of year in the yard. Those purple flowers in the background migrated over the fence from where my neighbor planted them. They were blooming when we first bought the house and I've mowed around them ever since.

It was a different purple flower that helped me pick where to place the table.  My wife wanted it in a shady place. I recently finished reading Nancy Gift's A Weed by Any Other Name, where I learned that violets are a shade-loving "weed" and can tell you what parts of your yard or garden would be good for shade tolerant plantings. Violets have always been one of my favorite "weeds."  There's a nice one coming up in my side garden:

So, after my first mowing of the year, the violets under the grass were revealed. I searched the yard and picked out the area that had the highest concentration of them and that's where we've placed the picnic table. It's not the most shaded spot right now, but the tree it's under is not yet fully leaved, so it should be great by the time it starts to get really hot outside.