the first fall harvest

My husband’s Southern farmboy-ness is finally rubbing off on me. While I have attempted cooking my own mustard greens before, this time was wholly successful. The mustard greens are from our netted fall beds. While we nibbled out of it when I thinned the sproutlings, this is the first mature harvesting. My husband makes amazing […]

greeeeeeeeeeeeeeens!

The bug netting experiment seems to be a huge success. I think I’d like to explore an alternative to shoving the netting edge back into the dirt. Perhaps boards attached to the netting that clip to the bed… The PEX piping functions well, even if it doesn’t exactly hold the original shape. I’m rather proud […]

out of the garden…

…with the tastes of summer October! Pulling vine-ripened tomatoes on October 6th. The basil got blasted in the last cool spell, so I have to seek out good leaves, but about half of the tomato plants have lost their place on the calendar. This. This is the garden living we’ve been moving toward…

the great flower migration

Now that the garden’s fence is built, I need to develop flower beds in front of the fenceline. When we first bought our wabi-sabi cottage, we brought flowers with us from the old house. We also received a generous offer from my father-in-law to transplant any flowers we dug up from his farm. That brought […]

rainy days on sundays

…don’t get me down. not in the garden, anyway.

thinning the crop

I thinned out some of the fall brassicae, this time those I pulled to make room are large enough for food. The screen netting is working well to this point. Healthy, lush, greens are filling in and climbing taller in the crisp cool air. A broad mix of brassicae, with two varieties of Swiss chard […]

closing the fence

The fence is ninety-eight percent finished, but it is one hundred percent puppy safe now. Tiger can join us in the garden off-leash. Yesterday, I closed in the gate frames with lattice, mounted the latch, and drilled the driveway for the drop post. Today, I framed out the gates including the top rail, started cutting […]

back to the garden…

Another week off from work: this time the summer heat has broken, meaning it’s easier to spend more time on garden projects. I spent yesterday morning working on the last gate of the fence project. The cooler weather this week should help me check this item off the list. The bottom of our drive will […]

getting saucy

I made tomato sauce today. This was my first time ever blanching and peeling tomatoes. It might be an okay task… Per usual, I started with a recipe, but more for steps and times the measurements. Two cloves of garlic? No, one whole head. I also added more carrots than listed, mostly since we’re growing […]

the garden of happy accidents…

Sometimes, I simply let things happen in the garden and see what they do. Last year, I installed cedar lattice down the property line fence. Virginia creeper showed itself the prior year, and I encouraged it to grow upward. It flourished this spring. When the Japanese beetles hit this year, they decimated the creeper, but […]