{pretty, happy, funny, real} ~ garden progress and vacuuming old beans
What is this {pretty, happy, funny, real} you speak of?
~ {pretty, happy, funny, real} ~
Capturing the context of contentment in everyday life ~
Every Thursday, here at Like Mother, Like Daughter!
{pretty and happy}
Every day this spring since our return has been a waking up and tackling the bathrooms or the garden. And thus my blogging rhythm has been a bit off, but I know you will hang in there with me.
But let’s update the garden now!
Don’t you find garden pictures hard? Even in magazines… it’s one thing to look at a room, quite another to look at a garden bed.
It’s all um, yes, lots of green things, looking all quite similar, how interesting…
But I still try. I hope you will share a picture or two with us in the link-up!
For me, the garden is a huge pleasure — and a source of humility. Sometimes I do okay, usually it’s a lot of work for not much reward. And I always feel that I’m doing it all wrong — that you will look at these pictures and laugh!
Ah well, if I can try, so can you!
(Above, just some flowers getting started in the bed below the porch.)
We’ve mowed, weed-whacked, mulched, trimmed, and weeded. There is still a wilderness of weeds and brush encroaching all around, but until someone hands me a tractor, my hope is just to keep it all at bay.
Over to the right of the porch we have the herb garden, tended by Habou. Having the herbs right there outside my kitchen door is awesome. And it’s easy to water the little things you want to get started, without going down with the hose.
(You can consult the very first picture if you get lost on this tour.)
If I walk down, across the driveway, and turn with the house on my left and the clothesline right behind me, this is what I see:
If we number the beds 1-7 and go from left, below that green wagon, to right and top to bottom:
1. lettuce, peas, I dunno, maybe tomatoes? But if so, where are the eggplants I seeded? All the tags got mixed up.
2. cucumbers, peppers (I guess, or are those the eggplants? too small to tell right now), tomatoes
3. the bigger bushier tomato is from my Atrium kids, so of course it looks the best, a row of shallots, some Thai basil tucked in behind those, and then a row of tomatoes — the tomatoes I seeded are San Marzano, chocolate pear (little ones), and Brandywine, but no clue right now as to which are which
4. (we’re back and to the right of the compost — you can’t really see this bed in the photo) — garlic, zinnias, more tomatoes that didn’t fit anywhere else, rhubarb
5. green beans (and red and white)
6. tomatoes, basil, parsley which is so microscopic as to render any hope it will grow barely nil
7. tomatoes, bell peppers, a Hungarian pepper
A different view:
This picture is with the house on the right, now, and that compost set-up just to the right, out of the picture:
The Hungarian pepper plant, from a friend, “A little hot and sweet and delicious.” You know me, I’m a wimp about peppers, but I think the others will like it.
The shallots are growing well:
Our mulches are compost, horse manure from a nearby farm, and lawn and leaf clippings. The mulch for the paths is wood chips; I am sooooo lucky that my neighbor is a tree guy.
Now if I go beyond the clothesline, you see almost the whole garden. The house is on the left, the pictures that you saw above are at the top of the picture here, and then we have, moving down: clothesline, asparagus and strawberry beds (terrible this year, with the weird warm-then-freezing-then-raining-then-dry), raspberry bed (finally weed-controlled, we shall see), and then the last three beds that don’t actually get full sun, but in which I can grow some things, I hope.
Already there: in the left bed, a healthy row of kale; in the middle bed, seeding some lettuce and beets, with yet another row of tomatoes; on the right, kale from last year, eggplants from the nursery, peppers, another tomato, and a ground cherry (also known as Cape gooseberry, also from the friend with the Hungarian pepper, whom I may or may not have given all my eggplant that I started from seed).
That last bed was me just not knowing what to do with all the plants.
In a fit of despair over the weedy asparagus bed and frustration over the strawberries growing where they ought not, I combined the two. The theory is that the asparagus has deep roots and the strawberries have shallow roots, so they should get on. So far I think that they need to be heavily mulched with manure in the fall, because this year is a bust. Also, re: strawberry excuses: birds, squirrels, even Roxie had her nose in there…
From the other side, now with the asparagus and clothesline and what I call “the upper garden” (closer to the house) behind me:
In the early spring, when I seeded that kale, I also sowed some lettuce. The lettuce in the upper garden did super well; this bed only gave me two, and that’s because it’s hard to get the hose down here/get to these beds when I’ve spent my time on the others, and the seeds dried out utterly:
But then I transplanted a bunch to this row. I hope that they won’t fry before they take. This bed — “the far garden” — gets shaded early from the trees that are beyond it and from the leach field (hill) which is above it (on the right of the picture, out of sight), so in theory, kale and lettuce should be good here.
Getting the raspberries under control was a huge boost. They need to fill in this bed on this side (one year a bunch died for some reason) so that the grasses don’t take over. Thanks to Bridget’s hard work, the wood chips give me the sense that things might prosper. Under the chips are all the grasses we cut, so hopefully the nitrogen from those will prevent the chips from pulling out nitrogen from the soil (and away from the raspberries) as they decompose.
I put the squashes in random places that were weedy and sunny. They aren’t proper beds, but last year when I did this I had huge success (with 24 butternut squashes from one plant!).
If any of this looks perfect to you (I only bring this up because somehow, people do seem to think it does), well, you are forgetting our country weeds and that any garden can look okay in June after many man-hours of work. We shall see in a month.
{funny and real}
Not garden related: I have two ovens in my range. I was making fixings for a fajita supper and was keeping things warm in the upper oven, including a glass pyrex with black beans. Of course, being me, I shoved stuff around in that hasty way of mine, and the pyrex fell over (but thankfully! didn’t break).
The beans spilled way in the back; and then we had to eat and then I had to garden and weed and paint stuff in the bathrooms and then I remembered.
So I put the oven on its clean cycle, which oddly did not rid me of my beans, although they were ashy and hard.
(There was a big pile, but I had already started sort of wiping them out with a paper towel when I remembered to take a picture for your amusement.)
Paper-toweling wasn’t really working all that well.
So I vacuumed them out.
(Don’t worry, I emptied the vacuum and washed the filter!)
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