The Garden

I am spending most of the next couple of days in the garden…  It is spectacular.  Yesterday was the longest day of the year, the solstice… I have an urge to strip down and paint myself blue…  (please ignore that… )

For too long  I have ignored the back yard… instead I spent my weekends and my weekdays at work caring for a different house.

The vegetable garden is beginning to pop… I was late getting it in this year… I planted tomatoes  in May instead of late March or early April…  but they are getting big, and there is one tomato ripe, ready to pick… it’s a cherry, so not a big deal, but it is a tomato in June…  the first squash is ready too… a yellow crookneck… unlike the tomatoes there are many more squash nearly ready.

I picked a cup of blue berries last weekend… I will pick a cup again this weekend…  Yummy blue berries… 

I had to extend the bean trellis… they grow as much as a foot a day… This is promising…

The sisters garden (corn, beans, and pumpkins in a single bed) is growing, but I will plant more corn and beans today…  filling in the spots where the feral cats disrupted the seeds in search of a cat box…  I have a feeling that this year the concept may work (the sisters garden, not the “garden as cat box”…).

The cats (indoor cats, not the outdoor feral beasts…) have finished off the second pot of cat grass… there are two more planted, just sprouting…  nearby are sunflower and lettuces seedlings… for some reason a tray of nasturtiums never sprouted…  I planted two varieties from two different seed packets…  and nothing happened… I may replant…  I moved 4 pots of the sunflowers seedlings to a large pot… at the edge of the grape arbor… at 3 weeks they are over a foot tall…  I need to find homes for the other 12 pots of seedlings… then plant something new in the pots…

Meanwhile in back I continue to cut back the three years of ivy, and bottle brush, a Larch, and other fast growing green things that have taken over one side of the yard…  I ordered a second green bin from our local garbage company… at a cost of $3.00 per month… each green bin holds 4 garbage cans of green cuttings…  two hold just about what I want to cut back each week…  If I get very ambitious I will find a trailer and make a dump run or two…. Maybe later in the summer…  

I am building a couple of tall raised beds… laying pavers… running irrigation lines…  It is becoming a construction project.  I am looking thought my bins of supplies in the shed, finding that much of the needed material is there…  Finding forgotten tools… Even rebuilding the fence looks like fun.

The garden is my happy place.