There’s an untidiness to the garden at the moment. I’m not really happy about it – it has been so blasting hot that it’s been hard to go out and do a lot of heavy labor. But this morning, it’s cool and crisp. Fall is coming, to be trite. The leaves on the big pinoak out front are starting to drop. I am looking forward to getting them raked up and put into my soil pile for next year. I just need a way to chop them up without having to go buy a leaf mulcher.
I did, however, manage to get swiss chard cut back – it was woody and unappealing so I wanted to give them all a chance at bouncing back before it gets too cold. I also put out some rainbow chard – which is quite different from the Italian silver stemmed ones that dominate the bed at the moment.
I’ve put in lettuces next to the leeks that survived the cutworm’s destruction. There were about a dozen black seeded romaine (very forgiving and tasty). And I also direct seeded the favorite flashy troutback. I really find that seed starting in trays is just very fussy for me. I much prefer direct seeding. But it’s hard to get the seeds to break germination before a bird finds them. So I went to the restaurant supply and got the largest plastic cups I could find (made in USA) and pushed them, upside down, into the soil around the seeds. It might be too warm for them to break dormancy. We shall see. I also cut one open to use as a collar on a romaine. Again, an experiment.
It’s so fun to have cucumbers this late in summer. I am so happy we started some earlier this summer – sometimes your will over the garden wins!
A giant bamboo I planted from a root cutting is growing inches in a day. It’s so tall already! I am hoping to have fresh bamboo shoots from it one day. It would be awesome if I could plant some around the fence perimeter for some privacy. Our property line is razor thin though, so it would take the permission of our neighbor to encroach.
We had a power outage the other day. It was a great opportunity to test out our backup power. We had been working on this setup for quite some time – finding the generator, buying it, learning how to use and maintain it; figuring out how/where to get a housing for it; getting time with our plumber to run a natural gas line to it; getting time with our electrician to port into our electrical panel; labeling said panel (why are older homes never properly labeled!!?) – and so forth. It’s not automatic like a nice $15K+ system, but it works similarly. And it cost about $2K instead. 🙂
And it worked. IT WORKED! Goodness it worked! Within a few minutes, our precious freezers were powered. We had lights. Ceiling fans ran.
Wow. I never thought we could be so handy.
Now I am thinking about a Starlink because when the local power is out, so is our internet connection. And that’s rough on some gen-Xers. 🙂