Hatches Battened
Do not be too proud of this technological terror you have constructed
Today will be a day long remembered. Or maybe it won't. I don't know. It was, pointedly, probably the last decent day to get any yard work done. And yard work we did. Over the past three days, Kiki and I have been to the leaf drop-off, picked up most of the leaves, cleaned the gutters, cleared out and re-stacked the shed, blown leaves off the patio, cleared out the raised beds. Top dressed the raised beds with some fresh compost for next year, picked up all of the garden pots, and put a wrap on the raised bed/leveling project for the year.
The middle row on the right will be filled with day lilies next summer.
K. and I have been discussing what to grow next year. The beds in the photo immediately above are going to be the berry patch. The raspberries in the 4x4 bed (and spilling out all around it) at the end are going to get to expand into two more 4x8 beds. The runners from this year will form the core of that. We'll transplant those canes early spring. We are going to interplant them with strawberries, which apparently works just fine. So we will be expanding the raspberries by 400%, and the strawberries by 200%. This whole section of the garden will be given over to perennial fruit production. Berries are expensive. It should be putting the garden to good use.
Elsewhere, we'll be growing a lot fewer tiny tomatoes. Too difficult to harvest. We're going to want a lot more big tomatoes. We're going to double the number of snow peas and cut out cucumber altogether. Beets are going to play a bigger role. Herbs. We're going to make a more concerted effort at herbs. Probably in containers so that we can move them around to find where they do best. Salad veg, of course. But I think I could give the kale a miss next year. I'd really like to get a large crop of banana peppers, and maybe some hotter peppers than we grew this summer. Lots more of them.
I think I'm going to continue the construction in an effort to a) get rid of lawn that needs to be mowed and b) make it much easier to get around the demonstrably steep meadow that our garden is planted in. The thing about Steepmeadow is that it is steep. When you come in from working out there, your ankles are stressed. The stairs that I put in last year and the level paths that I put in this year have made it a lot easier. More stairs and terraces are in order.
Looking back, it does get to be sort of stupefying how much labor we've put into this yard.
The stairs and beds in Sept., 2022
The wood is piled. The beds have been put to sleep. Dreams of next year are dancing in our heads.
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