eternal optimist about my to-do list that i am, i was convinced when we moved out here that by July, having had a good four months in portland, the boy and i would have finished repainting the interior of the house, ripped out the carpet, installed wood floors, bought all the furniture we need, planted the garden, installed flowers in the front yard, and would be all set on smug homeowner front. ha. i won't list all the projects still on the to-do list, but i will say that one of these days we really will replace that cardboard moving box we've been using as a nightstand. uh-huh. right.
mercifully, we did manage to get a vegetable garden built and planted shortly after we moved in, and the garden is thriving, even if some of our other projects are temporarily stalled. (both of us having to retake the bar exam at the end of this month isn't helping any). so to distract y'all from the requests for cute house pictures that i still can't give you, here's some garden-y eye candy.
here's a side view of the main bed. we built a six-ft by six-ft raised box, with a little cinderblock island in the middle, so we can perch there and reach everything. using the square foot gardening book as a guide (i think it's a good book in theory, though the author is a little unnecessarily fanatical about some of this stuff), we sectioned it off into one foot squares, and intensively planted each one of those.
coming at it from a different side, you can see what we've got growing -- a big broccoli plant in the left corner, bush green beans hiding behind it, a tomatillo plant (the tall one with the flowers that's particularly visible in the picture above), chard, carrots and fennel in the back. in the center front, we have a bunch of spicy mizuna greens (actually harvested now, and frozen to become winter soup greens), midget pea plants surrounding the cinder blocks, and chioggia beets in the way back.
and the other side, baby lettuces next to more broccoli, a bunch of red chard in front of the tuscan kale, more midget peas, and - hardly visible - bok choy, cucumber seedlings, and squash way in the back.
i'm amazed at the yield we've been getting. when the bok choy was in full swing, there was enough to feed a small army. we've now eaten our way through the first planting, and we've got seedlings ready to go in for a second planting as soon as they get a little bigger. we've also got extra space where the spicy greens were, and we'll probably be clearing out some of the broccoli soon, so we need to figure out what we want to put in for our second plantings. at the very least, there will be more green beans (to be pickled into bloody mary stirrers).
finally, we've got the tomato and herb patch holding down the deck, and a small asparagus patch that i can't seem to get a good picture of.
we've been eating out of the garden for a while now, and for the last month of so, we've been using garden produce at least daily. trading in nyc for dirty hippiedom has certainly been tasty.
happy fourth this weekend - we've got beer and fried chicken makings in the fridge. it'll be a good weekend.
