Vacationing at Home: Day 6

Day 6: Saturday

Today was a great day to sleep in, hang around the house and garden and talk with neighbors. Spent a fun day relaxing, watched a couple of movies, and had some friends over tonight for gaming. I, of course, play a Druid in D&D and it's lots of fun to play and write a story with our friends.

I finished my project and uploaded my final for the Permaculture class. Now I would like to find another challenge, another place to design and work toward teaching abundance, food security, and sustainability. I look forward to where this new perspective on everything will take me.

For house projects today, I gathered together laundry and washed, dried, hung up and folded everything I could find in this house that needed to be cleaned. With everything for the week ready to go, tomorrow I work on the next project - gathering all paperwork, books and magazines to the basement to sort, trash, donate and shred where appropriate.

One project a day seems to work well - nice days on outdoor projects, and rainy days on indoor projects. The difference this time, is that when these bigger indoor projects are done - I won't have to do them again. There won't be a junk drawer or closet left untouched and when I'm done, there will only be what is necessary and needed.

For today's pictures - veggies and fruit from the garden. The perennials are growing: trees, vines, berries, nuts, and other plants.  The raised beds change day to day. We dug up the red potatoes and canned 27 pint jars for winter. The other beds have a variety of plants - we keep trying a few different things in each to find what will grow best for us.  The squashes are thriving this year and I am looking forward to a pumpkin harvest in the autumn.  Our cherry tomatoes are just starting to flower and the canning tomatoes just might make it.

Jerusalem Artichoke (Sunchoke) 

Zucchini

Sugar Pumpkins

Gala Apples

Eggplant

Cherry Tomatoes finally starting to flower

Hot peppers!

Small Red beans for drying

Carrots growing, growing, growing

June Garden and Volunteer Plants

Over the past few weeks we have had much rain, and in between the rain storms we added a few new plants and a few more volunteered in the garden!

New Rhubarb 

New Raspberry

Blueberry from last year has berries! 

Vetch is everywhere

The Paw-Paw is doing nicely - just planted this year!

We planted this 4x8 bed with corn and beans and found that MANY pumpkins came up from last year. As well as an overachieving butternut squash...so we decided that a new bed was needed!

Notice the large volunteer Mammoth Sunflower behind the bed. 

I love these and will find a way to have them all over the garden next year =)

So I took some newspaper and placed it down in the front yard  and wet it with a watering can.

And then I put cardboard over that and wet it down with water.

We filled the circle up with soil...

And moved the many rogue pumpin and butternut squash plants into the new bed...

We watered it in and it looks good as a starting point to replacing the front lawn...

Notice the Sunchokes are about four feet tall in the background!

in the back garden, trees are growing like crazy, grape vines are vining....

In the beds, canning tomatoes, cherry tomatoes and amaranth, carrots, radishes, sea kale,

and eggplant, etc. are all growing. Intermingled hot peppers in each bed as well as 

marigolds, poppies, herbs and flowers all perking up after a week of rain.

And the first of our apple trees is fruiting - I pruned off about 25-30 fruits

and we are letting a few grow near to the trunk where they won't break the branches.

I can't wait to try this fruit!

Observations

If you are reading this and not tiring of my toad stories - I am grateful...

For the last two nights, we have picked up our watering cans and watered the garden beds, fruiting trees, containers, vines and bushes as well as the volunteers that showed up this year. Each night, I have   watered the pumpkins (previously in the corn and squash bed as volunteers and moved to different locations) and a pretty large toad has been cooling himself under one of the pumpkin plants.

I can't help  it - I squeal like a little kid with delight whenever I see the toads in the yard. What we are doing is making a difference! The toad doesn't actually like being watered, so he hops along under the Juniper bush in front of the house until I am done. What I think is actually happening, is that the toad is feeding on bugs in the bed we just recently planted with  corn, beans and squash (and apparently about 6 other volunteer sweet pumpkins that I can't move now) There are also several places in the garden that I put water dishes and fill them when we water each night, and that fill with each rain.

It's very important to me to attract amphibians to the garden, to eat slugs and other pests that may hurt the plants we are growing. We haven't seen a snake yet - but there are lots of toads - or at least I think there are based on the number of holes around the herb spiral and other plants.

Everything is an experiment. With each day that passes, I learn more and more about how to set things up to attract certain predators or pollinators, and watch and wait to see if it works...and so far - it is!

The potatoes are at least a foot above the raised bed and we keep adding soil, to grow more potatoes. Of course, we were watering the new grape vines along the fence and noticed that there are potatoes growing there...which means the potatoes we left (because they were too small) last year have seeded a new bed? So potatoes are perennial?

What I do know is that we really need to forget anything we have read or watched and observe how plants act in our particular garden. With the ridiculous winter we have had - I would not have thought that potatoes, tomatoes, and amaranth would have seeded themselves and grown this spring.

It's all quite amazing and magical! And this little guy is apparently very happy !

Corn can grow in the city?

Last Summer I was going down Pleasant St. and saw a yard with 2 or 3 rows of corn growing! I have to say that this was really surprising to me and led to research and planning...because who doesn't love the taste of corn fresh out of the garden?

Our research led to the corn, sunflower, squash and bean bed and it is working! The sunflowers are opening and are huge, the Zucchini, Butternut, and Pumpkin all flowering like crazy and starting to produce fruit, and oh the beans...they are winding up around the stalks of the Sunflowers and Corn and every leaf we turn over has small flowers and beans under it! They are a small red Mexican bean that can be dried or canned. I would like to try canning them, just because I haven't done that yet.

beans growing up the sunflower

bean

Yesterday, we picked the corn and froze a couple of servings and canned the rest. Quite an amazing process to see. This year is an experiment to see what we can grow - and next year I will definitely include corn in the plan for the garden. Changing a couple of things would work better. The Sunflowers are ridiculously large and should be in the back row of the bed, with the Corn in the front so it is not shaded by them. The squash and beans are working perfectly so no change is needed for them.

Where it all began...

Today =)

Corn! Each plant grew about 2 ears of corn, some of the plants were stunted
by the Sunflowers

Corn! We were able to can 5 pints of corn and froze a couple of servings.

This is the summer of learning how to do all of this, and the vision of this corn (along with potatoes, beans, carrots, etc.) in a stew in the middle of Winter fills my heart with something that only going through this whole process can produce. Reading has been a great tool for learning the theory of how things work - but actually doing it, even on a small scale like we have, has given us experience that is invaluable.

First Zucchini starting to grow

First Pumpkin

Sunflowers, Corn, Squash and Pumpkin

Justin is dwarfed at 6 '3"...

From Exhaustion to Exhilaration...

"When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have been doing with my own hands."  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a limit that everyone reaches, and this weekend I hit that limit and wall. The stress of work, the busy pace of life and pushing myself to do it all – caught up with me and I started the weekend exhausted and with a migraine.

On Saturday, I woke with a headache, but still wanted to go out to lunch, so we went to the Boynton, which was amazing as always. It’s encouraging to walk into a local place where people are friendly and remember you and your favorite drink or meal and suggest things you will actually enjoy. After lunch we went to Wooberry for frozen yogurt. I had Lemon with fresh strawberries and little chocolate curls. Another favorite, and so delicious.

But after that, I felt sapped, like my strength was gone completely and I couldn’t do anything else. This being a long weekend, I knew I had to get some rest! We got home and took a 3 hour nap, and then went into the garden to water and look around. I spent a lot of time just walking from tree to tree and plant to plant and found some of what I needed was restored. This connection is crucial for me to keep sane. I had lived so long without gardening and now that it is such a big part of my life, I cannot imagine a day that I don’t walk in the garden.

As the weekend has passed, I am feeling calmer and healthier and I have enjoyed this time home to work on little projects and rest for the coming week.

2 weeks ago

Ready for companion plantings

We worked on the next step of our 4x8 bed with the Sunflowers and Corn. They had grown enough in just two weeks, that we added three squashes (butternut, zucchini, and pumpkin) and filled in the spaces with Mexican Dry Red Bean, an heirloom bean for storing.  We also replanted some Sunflowers because some of them are being eaten and we haven't been able to see what is snacking on them.

There is room behind the bed - and around it to either trellis the squashes or train them to the front yard - which is largely untouched right now and would be lovely full of squash plants and flowers.

It was so refreshing to sit on the back patio (after the shade returned) with a cold drink and just look at the green that has appeared over the past couple of weeks. The tree trunks are all thickening and the leaves are growing like crazy. The stars of the garden are the two beds of peas. The shelling peas are in the Hugelkultur bed and are doing great - the Snap peas are in a far bed and just started flowering this week - and have also grown to more than 4 feet tall.

Shelling peas

In the center of the garden, is the herb spiral, everything was planted by seed and had sprouted. Some are growing very quickly and others are taking their time, but all sprouted, and that was something new for me. I had never planted herbs from seed. I find this such a beautiful addition to the garden.

Fruit trees and vegetable beds in the back yard. 

Last Autumn, I planted Jerusalem Artichokes (Sunchokes) in an unused side bed near our front steps and they are now more than 12 inches high...however, the bed had been taken over by weeds and grasses, so I did a little work today to make it more attractive and useful.  Because it is a fairly new bed, nothing was deep rooted, so I just pulled up the grass and other weeds that were making themselves useful until I did something with the space. I planted Nasturtium and Green Beans in around the Sunchokes and then covered everything again with straw. 

Sad little forgotten bed.

Something else had changed - the 50 gallon rain barrel in the back left corner of the picture is new this week,  and the hose will be on the inside of the fence, so I wanted to put a path in that would give me a sure place to walk when I need to water the plants.  Rob sliced up some of the Pine tree that my sister Kim gave to us and I made a small path in an area that nothing ever grows.  Also, one step into the middle so I can reach to water all the plants. I pulled out grass and weeds and planted Nasturtium along the little white (dog proofing) fence and hope to keep the weeds out by growing something beautiful and useful.

All in all, it is a huge improvement and just the beginning of our work with the front yard. We did get another 50 gallon rain barrel and put that near the 4x8 bed which is the center of the house and with the 65 gallon that we have been using (and using up quickly) in the back garden, we should have enough water for all of the beds. 

One of the nicest things about this weekend was that our neighbors were home celebrating Memorial Day in their yards, hanging out in their pools and it made it a pleasant weekend. Even though our houses are very close to each other, I don't mind. We have some really great people to live near. Chatting early in the morning with one neighbor - he asked if he could come in and see how things are going and it was fun to show him around and hear his story about being born in Italy and always having a garden - up until recently.

It made me happy that someone else could come and enjoy with us.

When you see how the yard used to look - it's really not surprising that we stayed inside and no one really stopped by.  It's been transformed and it is just the beginning!