endless summer

We're partly wishing for endless summer around here.  It's been 3 months now living at the little blue house.  In spite of all the work, we have so enjoyed the sun and the dirt and the outdoor (and indoor!) adventures this year.  I can't remember a summer in the last 10 years I spent this much time outside.  What a gift we gave ourselves and our family.  The garden has been the highlight.

This past weekend we started the second generation of our garden.  A fall garden! 5 raised beds, for a total of 80 square feet.  And this time entirely from seed, so fingers crossed. 

For the summer garden we started about 3/4 of our plants from seed.  We added fledgling tomato plants and marigolds and one zucchini that we bought out front at Whole Foods.  The green beans, melons, second round of zucchini, and failed broccoli and brussels sprouts were all seeds.  We did amazingly well with all of that, including an astonishing yield of sungold tomatoes and the gargantuan zucchini that produced over a dozen squash for us over the summer.  Romas were less successful and a bit crowded.  The cherokee purples were delicious but had trouble making it to ripe on the vine.  The green beans were good but burned out quickly.  The broccoli and brussels just never sprouted.  Our mini-watermelons were easy and a crowd-pleaser.

Here we are for round 2 in the fall, and I'm armed with a little more confidence after our long-lived summer success.  But the veggies will be a bit different this season.  Our plan includes lots of greens and root vegetables.  Some sweet potatoes and cauliflower are already in the ground.  We'll try broccoli again (tiny sprouts coming through!).  We're also attempting sugar snap peas on a wire-and-jute trellis that my mom constructed.  

I'm already planning for 6 months from now when we start again in spring.  At an outdoor workshop hosted by local landscapers Bountiful Backyards, I learned all about starting a real-deal, no-frills compost pile for a fall garden.  No worms or additives.  Just straw, leaves, and other carbon material to decompose, plus our kitchen and garden waste for nitrogen.  (He says most people have way too much nitrogen material and not enough carbon.  It should be 30:1.  So I guess that means add lots of straw and leaves this fall!)  So at home we pulled from old hay bales and created a "volcano" of straw so we can add kitchen waste in the middle to "cook," plus a little hay lid on top.  

The boys took so much pride in helping to build our compost pile, wielding the tiny pitchfork and directed traffic for the pickup to dump out some of the hay on top.  It was a family project in the best way, with absolutely no expectations for how it should look at the end.  I'm hoping for good results after a few months so we can add compost to our garden bed, but if it doesn't work out, no big deal.  It's our own personal landfill.  Frankly, this space we occupy is too big to be throwing all of that stuff in the trash to be driven to another person's land. I'm hopeful we can handle it more responsibly. 

I also loved the trick Keith showed us at the workshop for planting teeny, almost-invisible lettuce seeds for a salad mix.  He prepared the bed by loosening and amending the soil with compost.  Then he scooped a shovel full of soil into a bucket.  He dumped 3 packets of lettuce seeds, different types, into the dirt and mixed it all together with his hands.  Then he sprinkled out all of that soil mixture evenly over the prepared bed.  A sprinkle of straw on top and good saturating first water.  DONE.  He doesn't even water after they sprout.  Just let it be.  

We have big dreams for expanding to flowers, fruit trees, and blueberry rows someday.  Right now our main outdoor agenda is getting this garden started and-- brace yourself-- BUSH HOG.  We have our sights set on a big tractor and attachments to get through this massive job and handle it more regularly.  After owning this land for almost 9 months, it's incredible how tall and thick the grass has gotten in the areas that weren't being mowed.  A professional quoted us $3900 just to do it once.  So, yes, clearly, a tractor has moved to the top of the list.  We probably should have done it sooner but, hey, it's been a little busy around here.  Buying a big tractor is expensive but exciting and fun and part of the plan all along.  We factored it in the mortgage, basically, when we figured all of this out last fall.

So, wish us luck while we broker the tractor deal and wait for little seedlings to emerge.  Right now it feels like summer could last forever and I'd be ok with that.  It's been the best one yet.