Backyard Garden

Garden update July 5th. Lots of work in the garden as summer moves along. We had a long stretch of heat and no rain then days of rain, lots of growth and changes. I planted the empty row with our second round of lettuces, kales, chard, and more onions.We plan on one more set of planting in late July (before August but close to August) for early fall harvesting. It's hard to decide to pull plants from the garden but our lettuces had gotten very bitter, and the spinach was not producing anything. We had had a good run of eating lettuce everyday and then they started bolting.  The lettuce is a very tender variety and not great for cooking, if you have bitter lettuce you can soak it in cold water spin the water out and then cook it to get one last harvest. I let the sturdy and delicious asian greens go to seed (and they have such pretty flowers) to collect the seeds and try planting them.  We had out first harvest of lavender and mint to dry and store. Ginger growing in a tub. Cag...

Garden update from June 12th. Lavender bed Lettuce (asian greens mix) gone to flower already in the background and the salad we were eating in the foreground. Kale! The herb garden and the beautiful sage flowers. Napa cabbage. Tomato plants and marigolds in the large tubs, we grow them on the south side of the house by the driveway and they do very well there! Plus they don't crowd out the other plants...they get very large. Flowering chives int he herb garden. Storage cabbage. Beets coming up. Daikon radish coming up. White turnips ready to eat. More lettuce... Scarlet runner beans and pickling cukes in half barrels.

This post falls under the category of life in Maine. Thursday afternoon, April 9th, it started to snow. All the weather App's assured us it would rain, so we were hoping to just get rain. It didn't snow a lot by Maine standards, maybe five inches, but it was five inches of heavy spring snow. Five inches of stuff that was just light enough that you couldn't call it slush, but if you touched it, it turned to slush. Jen and I went for a walk around the college campus just after eight pm. The roads had not been plowed; the sidewalks were not cleared. It was slow walking but a good work out. We were dressed for it. On the walk, we saw the tree's weighted down from all the snow and a couple of ducks quacking on the pond as the big chunky snowflakes fell. Some of the college students who were not able to go home when the school closed because of the pandemic had built a couple of giant snowpeople and were throwing snowballs at each other. We got back to the house, threw som...

The composted manure garden soil was delivered in the rain, and then the rain continued for a couple of days. That produced a soggy wet soil pile in the middle of our driveway. Saturday morning, the rain had stopped, and we were ready to lay down some cardboard and maybe some paper to kill whatever grass we were not able to destroy hand tilling it. The whole plan was a failure. The hand tilling we had done last week was nowhere near the kind of shape we needed it to be. It's funny to feel defeated so early in the process of anything you want to do, but there we were soaking wet topsoil covering our driveway and hand tilled slightly turned up grass in the backyard. We realized the mix we had bought was going to hold too much moisture and it would likely not work well for a garden if it was sitting on top of composting cardboard, this would have been the easy and quick answer to our garden dreams but we knew it had flaws already. We had to get a second opinion even though we knew w...

We bought our house 12 years ago, and our backyard was filled with concrete and a giant pool. It lasted one year before we had it filled in because it was a pool, and we live in Maine. Our entire property is only .15 of an acre, and we've always wanted it to be a garden. You can see on this blog a few of the things we've tried with some success. Our first gardens were raised bed square foot gardens with the fluffiest soil we could put together. They looked cute, and they did alright. Those morphed as the wood we used to build the raised beds decayed like they were supposed to. For the past five years, we have had one long raised bed in the back yard. The first year it was full of vegetables, and it was insanely full. The following year we did the same, but weeds took over, and we ignored it. The next year we changed the raised bed into an herb garden, and it was perfect. We grew tomatoes in pots around the driveway and back porch, and the raised bed was full of mints, flower...