Morning Treats

Sometimes, (well, a lot of the time), the best part of all this gardening is the all the beautiful stuff there is to look at. This morning, I was out the door at 6:30 to water the raised beds before the heat of the day got here. There was a nice, muted sunrise through the trees.

Loads of flowers to admire.

Even the dill was flowering.

A dead seedhead from an early season allium still looks gorgeous.

Taking just a few minutes to really look at all this beauty makes the day a lot easier to deal with.

Finally

The first real sign of summer has finally made it's way to our house: A huge, ripe tomato.

Backporch Bonanza

Mostly tomatoes and herbs, but also a few sunflowers, some rhubarb and an okra plant.

We got hit with three pretty bad hail storms in about two weeks, so I'm surprised how well these plants are doing.

We brought in two types of zucchini and red and green tomatoes today. The zucchini will probably go on the grill, and we've already made some fried green tomatoes. This is our first ripe tomato to come off, so that's pretty exciting. It's hard to describe how much better food tastes when it's really and truly fresh.

Raised Beds, redux

So, this season, we added two more raised beds to our arsenal. I've changed the design a bit from last years model, and I think it works a lot better. These were all built from lumber from the big box home improvement place down the road, and filled with a mixture of cheap garden soil, Black Kow-brand manure and compost.

I do want to note that this is regular lumber, not the pressure treated stuff. I'm willing to forgo some longevity in order to avoid the chemicals found in pressure treated lumber. Design-wise, I skipped the hinges this year and made a track to allow the door to slide in and out. This makes access easier and simplifies the construction quite a bit. I think I can slap one of these together in less than an hour now.

And that's the take in the old bed: Chard, kale, pak choy, carrots, wando peas, beets and radishes, and a few other things. It's an incredible thing to be able to grow your own food, to take the kids out to pull a pea off the vine and eat it, right there in the garden. It reconnects us to what's real, and what's important.

Pallet planter

I had access to a big stack of pallets, and I thought to myself, "Hey, let's make something!" My grandiose dreams of a free four bedroom house quickly dwindled when I found I could only fit four pallets in the back of my Subaru Outback. You know the saying: When life limits your cargo capacity, make something smaller. So, I present the pallet planter!



So, it's rustic... Which is fine. It's also sitting in a recessed area beside the house on a base of gravel. It's about three feet high and a foot deep. The top has a false bottom, so there's only about 18 inches of soil.



This particular planter took about two and a half pallets to make, although I had a small amount of broken slats that I couldn't use. If you decide to try one for yourself, look around for good pallets. Two of the ones I picked up were oak, which makes for a good, sturdy and nearly completely weatherproof box. Also, unbelievably hard to disassemble. The other two were pine, which is much easier to use but also much softer and less resistant to the elements. Most of the pine is on the back and inside, where it can be slightly protected.

Here's my two and a half year old for scale...





Once it was put together, I decided to make a little scene out of , although that's still a work in progress. Basic ingredients: Some rocks, a small hosta transplanted from somewhere else, lots of moss and a tiny little Japanese holly.