Finishing Touches on the Hardscape

 

Over the long 4th of July weekend, we put some finishing touches on the hardscape. We must be nearing the end of what we can do with hardscaping. 

The squash and pumpkin bed is exploding. I think it is the pumpkins that are trailing vines everywhere and climbing up and over the sides such that it seemed like a good idea to add a trellis to the back of the bed. I did so this morning in the blazing heat. It's 94 degrees and sunny and very humid right now, sort of topping out a long, hot, dry week. 

This heat and dryness means that the plants need water, and the single rain barrel was woefully inadequate to the task, empty in a minute. 

We've added a second one to the shed at not inconsiderable expense and labor. The shed had no gutter, so I had to salvage one from the gutters we had replaced last summer. It was painted butter yellow, which would have clashed badly with the shed. So it needed to be cut to size, sanded, and painted. It then had to be mounted to the shed. Because it is made of thin tin or something, we devised a treated wood sandwich - one block on the outside, one block on the inside, and then screwed on the gutter. 

Here are before and after pictures:

Before

After

Underneath the rain barrel you can just make out the support that I built for it out of mostly 2x6 and 4x4 treated lumber. It was a surprising pain in the neck, and in retrospect not as thoroughly planned out as it might have been. It should work out in the end, though, and we are looking forward to catching some rain in it as soon as tomorrow, when the weather is due to turn much, much cooler and wetter. 

On another note, the first peppers have shown up:

Banana peppers for salads. What is interesting here is that these plants were started in February - I remember it. They were some of the very, very earliest put under the lamps because I knew from last year that they would take forever to grow. It looks like this will pay off soon.

Some other random notes:

• There are a lot of green tomatoes - at least three different varieties - threatening to ripen. I've begun to slightly fear the avalanche that may be coming.
• Similarly, there are a lot of squash forming. I expect to harvest the first zucchini tomorrow. I saw it down there while I was visiting the plants this morning, and it is nearly ready.
• The beans are producing. I harvested a handful this morning, and there were quite a few skinny ones that should be coming along in the next few days.
• I'm starting to wonder what it would take to really and truly get ahead with food production. It feels like we are a long, long way from self-sufficiency. We've eaten the beets that we harvested. There are more on the way, and the seeds that I put down to replace the beets we took have germinated. 

Carrots seem to take an extraordinary amount of time. The last batch that I put in rows in the pepper bed have germinated pretty well and will need to be thinned soon.

Going back to the self-sufficiency conundrum, an entire bed of peas has failed to yield more than a snacking handful a day. It's been easy to eat every single one that we've picked. Half a bed of beets has produced, so far, a single meal (though the greens have made quite a few salads, we've been able to keep up with them as well.) Two feet by four feet of beans has managed to produce a few snacking handfuls, certainly not enough to worry about canning. The three tiny blueberry shrubs have combined to give us a handful of berries. We ate a single raspberry yesterday which we cut in half and shared, and I got another one this morning. There are quite a few blossoms on the cucumbers, but, again, I seriously doubt we'll be growing more than we can eat. We've noticed exactly zero dip in our grocery bill.

The tomatoes and the summer squash are our hope for getting ahead. We really do have a lot of that planted. 

We need to plant more food.

Part of the solution is going to be edible landscaping in the front. We've got a plan to mulch quite a bit more of the yard, thus eliminating more mowing and enhancing curb appeal at the same time.

One side of the driveway gets quite a lot of sun, and we envision planting a long row of blueberry bushes, flanked on the east side by a long double row of strawberries. It should take a long time for the apple trees to grow large enough to worry about. Some planning is in order.

It's difficult to sit inside and work on a computer when the sun is shining, but it really isn't very nice outside with that kind of heat. The plants will need another round of watering tonight.