Backyard

Most business owners believe in their products, and Alexa Corcoran is no different. Except that she also lives on the meals made by her Maryland enterprise, Let's Dish!, a meal-assembly store that has nine locations in the region and plans for more. Customers at the store put together their own meals to cook at home. "Since 2004, we have ... created over a million dishes," says Corcoran, 34, who invested in the business with her husband, Rick, and a couple of friends. "It's a concept that came when people were saying they wanted easy and convenient meals but also healthy."

As a hard-core griller, I try not to let bad weather stop me from starting backyard fires. For a time, I thought my winter grilling habit marked me as a smoky-smelling fanatic. Then I read the results of a national survey that reported 54 percent of grill owners say they fire up all year long. Of course, grilling on a sunny Florida patio in February is a much different experience than cooking in a frigid Maryland backyard. The pollsters did not ask these year-round grillers if, like me, they sometimes have to dress like they are climbing Mount Everest.

It's springtime, and I remember when the view from my kitchen window was a lovely little backyard tableau of green lawn and swing set, happy tomato garden and sunny marigolds in patio pots. It was a scene that gave me a sense of order and peace. Inside, there might be laundry-basket-shaped wads of permanently creased wash dumped on my bed, an office cluttered with charge cords for every electronic device in our home and a freezer stocked with unidentifiable lumps -- but at least our backyard was lovely, pleasant and inviting.

During a recent scorching evening, Peter Norman and I slipped into his downtown Baltimore backyard to watch his bees work. Like many residents of Baltimore, these honeybees were out on their "front porch," the lower part of their hive, where the air is cooler, Norman said. An estimated 50,000 to 60,000 honeybees reside in the 3-foot-tall hive, a squarish structure, ringed in handsome varnished pine. There is a hierarchy to the hive, he told me. The queen and nursery bees reside on the lower floor, or "brood"; the honey and its foragers can be found in the upper levels.

YOU KNOW IT is spring when the backyard faucet starts dripping. I came to this seasonal insight all by myself.It happened last Saturday as I was adjusting the monkey wrench, reading the label on the penetrating oil, and searching my tool box for a washer to replace the spent one in the leaky faucet.The drip reminded me that I had vowed to fix that faucet last year, but never got around to it. Over the winter, the water supply to the faucet was turned off, so I had forgotten about the drip.

Bored with your bedtime routine? You know the drill: You go to sleep in the same room, same bed and same PJs at the same time night after night.Now that it's warm outside, shake up the routine and go backyard camping all alone (we mean no parents; buds are a must). We recently had a few thrills, a few chills and best of all, lots of frills on our own backyard campout. Seven kids slept in the backyard on a balmy June night. Here's the low-down:The thrills: The fresh air was excellent, the extra company was outstanding and it was a blast to tell scary stories, stay up late and act silly.

Weekend building projects in the garden often have one major flaw -- they seem to take a month to complete.If the scale of the project and the scope of the gardener's ambition are at odds, the garden turns into a major construction site, and the result may scarcely seem worth the trouble. How-to expert David Tenenbaum never lets that happen.Tenenbaum's new book, "Backyard Building Projects" (Houghton Mifflin, 1997, $12.95), is full of plans and projects for people who like to make things themselves, but have limited time at their disposal.

I AM RELUCTANTLY getting ready for winter. The season of frozen pipes and freezing weather is still at least a month away. But bitter experience has taught me that you have to start battening down the household hatches while the autumn sun is still shining, however dimly.Each year, I seem to be more unwilling than before to acknowledge that winter is coming.For example, it wasn't until the temperature dipped into the 30s this week that I got around to replacing the screen on the back door with the warmer, tighter, panel of glass.

Frank and Shirley Mendez are thrilled -- and thankful -- that their Victorian home has a history.For them, it was more than merely interesting to be able to trace the ownership of their quarter-acre lot in Southwest Baltimore back to the Duchess of Leeds, a granddaughter of a signer of the Declaration of Independence.And it was more than simply appealing that under their linoleum floors were bits of newspapers with stories of President Roosevelt.For this couple, recently relocated from an earthquake-prone section of California, the history is downright reassuring.

In England, where they take gardening seriously, you aren't considered a real gardener unless you start your flower and vegetable plants from seed.And while starting plants from seed may seem a quaint notion, like tea and crumpets, it's one of the best and least-expensive ways to landscape around such backyard amenities as the grill, the swing set and that all-purpose playing field known as your lawn.Sometime this month you may find your mailbox stuffed with seed-company catalogs, their pages filled with colorful visions of the glories of gardening.

Eliza Toomey's backyard is about the size of a postage stamp, and it is bathed in shadows cast by a thick canopy of trees. Clearly, if she were to have a vegetable garden, it would have to be planted in someone else's yard. So she passed out fliers, had a meeting and, now, Toomey is planting vegetables in the backyards of 21 of her neighbors in Murray Hill in Annapolis. The 25-year-old middle school teacher is planting the seeds and the seedlings and, though she is asking for a little help with watering, she will care for the gardens, harvest the vegetables and distribute the bounty to her 21 new friends every week this summer.

Scouring Federal Hill, Don Smith and Bob Marciak hoped they would find a spacious rowhouse, a little different in style, that would accommodate their wish for a backyard as a soothing refuge from the bustling city. They looked at about 50 houses, Smith recalled, before opening the door to a renovated century-old residence where a gas fireplace exuded a welcome feeling, where the wide living room had a wall of built-in cabinets and shelves, and where a graceful staircase and decorative columns drew the eye toward the rest of the house.

The poor NHL. Even when the league ties a hard-rocking outfit to its opening games, some kind of glitch happens. As part of the champion Detroit Red Wings' first game, the NHL set up to televise a piece of a Def Leppard concert, also happening in Detroit on Thursday night, in NHL Face-Off Rocks. During the show, the Stanley Cup was handed to the band's singer, Joe Elliott, who held it aloft for the benefit of the crowd and then proceeded to put it on a pedestal - upside down. At least he didn't try to pour some sugar from the Cup. Fertile thinking Helen Barnes wants to compete in the Olympics.

The Q: Kathleen Chance wants to put an above-ground pool in the back of her Baltimore home, but she says that utility lines droop dangerously low through her yard. "The electrical line has been this way for 40 years and has prevented us from doing anything with our backyard," Chance said. "We have tried over the years to get this wire moved, but have failed. And not only does that electrical line cross over the backyard to the utility pole, but we also have four other wires that cross our backyard to that same pole from our neighbors' yards."

The Maryland Department of Agriculture, with the University of Maryland Cooperative Extension's Home and Garden Information Center, has launched a campaign, "Take It From Maryland Farmers: Backyard Actions for a Cleaner Chesapeake Bay." The campaign offers easy backyard actions that homeowners can take to help the Chesapeake Bay. Tips for homeowners include: taking a soil test, reading a fertilizer bag, water conservation, grass-cycling, and proper mulching techniques for gardens and for trees, and integrated pest management.

The predawn bang woke them both up. At first, Tom and Pat Walker were afraid that the other had fallen out of bed. The truth was more frightful: An intruder had broken a glass sliding door of their Pasadena home and was rifling through their belongings. The homeowners reacted quickly, and soon the pair -- he 74, she 63 -- had chased a man less than half their age around the backyard and through the house and held him for police. "I've hunted bear. I ain't scared of nothing like that," said Tom Walker yesterday as he and his wife cleaned up after the incident.

Creating the ambience of a campfire with a fire pit is one of the hottest trends in backyard recreation. Jim Jarvis of Weatherford, Texas, owner of an online fire-pit accessories company, says the trend was sparked by the clay chimeneas that started showing up in Mexican import stores a few years back. Alex Bandon, multimedia editor of This Old House magazine, helped show readers how to build a fire pit from cast-concrete stone for about $500 in the September issue. "People are turning their yards into outdoor rooms, and a fire pit is better than a barbecue because it's generally circular, which makes it very social."

Glenn Colgrove awoke to the familiar thud of a car crash on Route 99 at the edge of his backyard. But unlike previous accidents there, he heard a driver screaming, "Help me." He dreaded what he would find outside. He locked the doors to his house and began walking to the wreckage of the head-on collision. A few minutes later, as he spoke with a 911 dispatcher, he watched the driver of the other vehicle, 20-year-old Doug Dellinger, die. The crash, which occurred about 2:30 a.m. Aug. 15, was not the first time smashed vehicles and injured people had ended up in Colgrove's tree-lined backyard.

When a headline leaps off the sports pages, squirms its way out of our world entirely and finds itself oozing out of the mouth of Bill O'Reilly or Nancy Grace -- visualize: gums flapping like a flag in a hurricane -- we're all in grave danger. Not because of any specific blabbermouth, per se, but because of their influence over an audience that generally can't distinguish pigskin from pork rinds. The unversed don't know better, and when the subject is someone such as Michael Vick, they're handed a painter's palette with a single color and one giant broad brush.

During a recent scorching evening, Peter Norman and I slipped into his downtown Baltimore backyard to watch his bees work. Like many residents of Baltimore, these honeybees were out on their "front porch," the lower part of their hive, where the air is cooler, Norman said. An estimated 50,000 to 60,000 honeybees reside in the 3-foot-tall hive, a squarish structure, ringed in handsome varnished pine. There is a hierarchy to the hive, he told me. The queen and nursery bees reside on the lower floor, or "brood"; the honey and its foragers can be found in the upper levels.