summer summary

garden update

Early August, we’re harvesting peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, peas, beets, kale, chard, and just a few ripe tomatoes.

the summer that is

Let’s not talk about all the plans I had for this summer.  Let’s not mention the weekly beach trips that haven’t happened, the perennial beds that haven’t been mulched, all those fun programs at the library that we haven’t attended.  And let’s just ignore those hopes and plans I still have for the remaining summer season, which may or may not play out as I want.
Let’s just focus on this: the summer that is.

These girls.  I can hardly contain my love for these growing-up girls.  I can’t give them the attention they deserve right now (their brother demands more than his fair share).  But I hope they know that they are loved beyond measure.

We almost had a handful of raspberries this year (here’s the photographic evidence), but something else ate them before we got a chance.

It’s been a rainy summer, and for a while we had a big pile of dirt just hanging out in our yard, waiting to fill the raised beds and be made into a garden.  In the interim it was a wonderful, dirty, muddy place for all the neighborhood kids to play. Mud has played a big part in this summer.

This girl.  She’s a bookworm.

Look at all that hair!  Will has been losing his hair; he temporarily sported a faux hawk but now is mostly bald.  Bea loves to snuggle him.

I’ve been having some mental anguish about all the stuff that’s not getting done.  It has been an exercise in letting go, in admitting that I can’t control everything: each time I walk through the gardens while holding the baby, staring at all those weeds that I can’t pull or the eggplant I’ll have to come out and pick later because I can’t reach it now, or seeing how badly the floors need sweeping when I’m holding a sleeping baby and feeling so powerless to do anything (because as soon as I set that baby down he will wake up and I won’t be able to sweep the floor anyway).

Then in scrolling through the archives of this blog looking for baby pictures of the girls, I came across this post and remembered: Oh yeah, I’ve been through this before.  It’ll change soon enough.

And I’m often reminded of a conversation I had with our elderly neighbor at the last home we lived in.  She had a flower garden that, while still boasting a magnificent array of blooms, was also fairly choked with weeds.  And she told me how frustrated she felt that she was no longer able to do the work that garden required; she was dependent on someone else who didn’t do the job quite as well as she would have liked.  At that time Bea was an infant, and I remember thinking that I knew just how she felt, to be dependent on others when you can’t do the jobs you want to do — but in my case it wasn’t that I was physically incapable of doing the work, just that my time was taken up by this tiny person who depended on me for everything.

We will have tomatoes!!

In the early days of summer, the girls spent a lot of time preparing “salads” from the garden — lettuce, spinach, mint, dill, and other herbs, carefully arranged on a frisbee plate or bicycle helmet bowl.

Hula hooping.  It’s Adeline’s thing.  We even made our own (though they were possibly the most expensive hula hoops in existence).Yup.  Harry Potter.

We’re using the square foot gardening method this year for everything but tomatoes.

We finally found a piano!  Not just a piano, but also a piano bench filled with vintage lesson books, just the right level for Adeline.  She’s been over the moon about it.

We’ve got a lot of space in our backyard, but it wasn’t a happy place.  Not a place we liked to spend time in.  We’re slowly transforming it, with a patio expansion, a clothesline, a lattice fence for the hops to grow on (and perhaps some clematis as well).  It’s working: we spend more time out there already.

 

green! but only inside

We’ve been experiencing a typical spring — days of sunshine and mud and hope alternating with days of cold and snow boredom.  We’ve spotted a few slips of green outdoors — most notably our chives and some dandelions sprouting.  But we also decided to bring some green indoors.  We are conducting a twig study, with lilac, plum, and basswood branches clipped from our yard.  And we made a terrarium.  Just enough green and growing to get us through to the warmer side of spring.

small things

:: finally, red!

:: rediscovering the paper dolls

:: this 3-year-old’s fashion sense

:: eight pints, eight quarts: salsa!

::  potential caterpillars

:: fresh picked

 

growing

A garden update for early August.

One day we spotted a bunch of these little guys on our dill, but we haven’t seen them since.

Note the long sleeves and pants.  It has not been the scorching summer it was last year.

The neighbor kids keep asking if they can pick our one red tomato, to which I always reply (perhaps a bit over-eagerly), “NO!  It’s not ripe enough yet.”

It has also not been the very dry summer it was last year (check out the crunchy lawns in this post).  For the past week we’ve had rain more days than not!  Rejoice!  Everything is so very green!

These are the sprouts of a late beet crop where the lettuce used to be.

Some little green worms are eating our kale all to shreds, which I’m not too broken up about because I inadvertently planted flat leaf kale.  And I’ve come to the realization that I’m a curly kale kind of person.

For the life of me, I can’t get a photo that really captures the color of these zinnias, no matter what time of day or what lighting or what camera setting I try.  They are called giant purple zinnia, and though they don’t really seem purple to me, they are not quite as pink as they always come out in the photos.

 

Here’s hoping that August’s good weather continues.

 

 

{these moments}

Joining Amanda for: {this moment} – A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor, and remember.

growing

With moving in May, we didn’t have time to plant a vegetable garden this year.  Sure, we could have rushed in and put some plants in the ground, but we don’t have any particular spot in our new yard that cries out, “Garden!  Here!”  It’s going to take planning, building, soil preparation.  So it was put on the back burner while we put the house in order.

But . . . before our move, I had optimistically purchased a bunch of tomato plants and herbs that desperately needed planting, even though the boxes were only just being opened and we were still digging out essential kitchen tools.  So somehow we found time to do a little container gardening.  And add to the flower bed.  Because those boxes . . . they’ll be fine til autumn.  Or winter.  But staring at a brown patch of empty soil all summer would have been a kind of torture.

As a result of the need to get those plants in some soil as quickly as possible, and in an effort to use what we had on hand, some of the tomatoes were put into containers that are probably far too small.  They’re fairing ok for now, but I don’t expect them to produce as well as the others.  We’ve lost a few already to pests and blossom end-rot, but I’m hopeful that we’ll get a decent crop.

There is some kind of squash plant growing out of our compost bin, which is odd because I don’t remember putting any squash seeds in there.

Our chard rebounded after being mowed down by one of the hundreds of bunnies that populate this neighborhood.

For future harvests, we’ve started a patch of chamomile.  And the raspberries.

And the flower garden is an odd mix of the few perennials here that survived last year’s drought; a few packets of seeds we sowed; a surprising number of volunteer petunias, moss roses, and marigolds (it’s amazing what you’ll find if you don’t weed!); and a handful of plants we bought at the nursery on a whim and then planted willy-nilly with no real plan or design scheme.  We’ll see how that turns out.  My efforts to create a second flower bed were thwarted when I found that a majority of our yard to the west of the driveway has a layer of bricks laid out just a few inches beneath the surface of the soil.  Far too many bricks to dig out.  Perplexing and frustrating . . . guess we’ll have to come up with a Plan B.

In the meantime, there is no shortage of flowers to look at.  Our next door neighbor has a meadow for a yard.

In other outdoor-related news, today I went outside and was startled (and admittedly a little creeped out) to see a black squirrel.  But a quick Google search assured my that they really do exist, and this was not (as I momentarily suspected)  some kind of evil demon squirrel or the unfortunate victim of an oil spill.

snippets

Just a few snippets of our summer thus far, a summer that feels as though it’s barely started and at the same time is slipping quickly away.

Jake put up a swing.  It is lovely.  The girls adore it.  There is only one problem: 1 swing, 2 girls.  You do the math.

Bea can often be heard saying, “How bout you be Goliath and I’ll be WoodGul.”

Adeline has ditched her training wheels, and Bea has got the hang of pedaling.

The other day two young boys from across the street came over while I was planting some raspberry plants (a housewarming/ordination gift from friends), and fertilizing them with worm castings and bone meal.  Yes that’s right, worm poop and ground up bones.  Needless to say they were impressed.

Adeline has learned that, although the tennis court next door seems like it’s in our yard, it is actually owned by the city and the city mowers will mow over your flip-flops if you leave them in the grass there.

{these moments}

Joining Amanda for: {this moment} – A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor, and remember.