Carl Pettit
Carl Pettit is a columnist, editor and writer working for an array of colorful publications. He specializes in cultural and social issues, as well as East Asia, politics and satire.
A great way to incorporate some greenery into the architecture of your garden is to build a trellis. By setting one up in your backyard, you’ll be adding a wonderful, eye-catching piece of art, perfect for climbing plants and vines, and with sturdier trellises, hanging pots full of flowers and herbs as well.
If you want to get your kids outside, away from their Xbox or Wii, and interested in some of your backyard garden projects, you’ll probably need to be somewhat inventive with your gardening ideas. Pulling weeds and planting flowerbeds just won’t cut it for most of children. Think incentive here.
We have some ideas.
Dogs, as the saying goes, are man’s best friend, so it's only right and logical that we might want to spend some quality time with our buds. Walks in the park and tossing the Frisbee on the beach are great, but if you really want to engage the human-canine relationship—and have a really good time while you’re at it—you might want to think about setting up a dog agility course in your backyard or garden.
Sure, you could take the easy route and head on over to Ikea or your local lawn-and-garden shop and pick up a few pieces of outdoor furniture for your backyard. But if you really want to impress your friends and indulge your creative flair, you might want to consider some of these more unusual options:
Sometimes gardens are for growing things, and sometimes gardens are for constructing massive playgrounds for you and your friends.
You can add a lot more to your backyard garden than border stones, flower beds and creatively shaped patches of lawn. If you really want to transform your outdoor sanctuary into something special, why not turn it into a mancave paradise?
Nothing adds character to your garden—at least in a caveman-like, primordial sense—than an outdoor fire pit.
For well-traveled souls who’ve seen one too many European cathedrals in their lifetime, it can be easy to dismiss them as old news. The massive Catedral de Santa María de la Sede in Seville, Spain isn’t just another old church, though. It happens to be the largest Gothic cathedral on the planet, and the third largest church in the world. If you're a fan of impressive architecture, this one is hard to beat.
Once upon a time, the rulers of China, especially the Ming Dynasty emperors, decided to build a very big and very long wall, in order to keep the Manchurian and Mongolian raiders at bay. Maybe you’ve heard of this “Great Wall of China?” It’s kind of well known.
Everyone wants to amaze their friends now and again, making them jealous of your adventure-filled life. You could post photos of you and your parents sitting camelback in front of the pyramids in Egypt, or maybe make your pals sit through a video of you riding a zipline across a tropical canyon somewhere. But hey, we’ve all done that, right? Let's kick it up a notch.
Man is widely considered to be the deadliest animal on the planet, mostly because it's hard to match the killing power of our guns and nuclear bombs. Even so, there are plenty of lethal predators out there that are more than willing to take us on and, if fortune favors these creates in battle, rip a chunk out of our flesh, or even end our lives.