To The Surbiton Manor Born

  Oh sure, it looks innocent. We placed the last stair stringer of the year, four steps this time, into the side of the cliff that we call our back yard. The digging revealed no gold Krugerrands buried by the hated previous owners. This may be a repeat of the last blog entry, but the dig did reveal a layer of heavy clay and rocks, probably last unearthed by a glacier thousands of years ago as it retreated, that was almost immovable.  Almost. It just took most of Saturday and most of Sunday to get deep enough into the hill to make the stairway level. 200 lbs. of Quickcrete (TM)   was poured.  The orange level tool was used extensively.  While the stairs were then in place, at last, a couple of problems remained.  1) What to do with all of the earth moved out of the hole?  2) How to build a wooden retainer to keep the dirt walls along the stairs from caving in. It's made tricky by the fact that the stairs are too short to use a 2x6, and too tall to use a...

There are more stairs to add. It's a long way up the Steepmeadow Mountain. And today we hit a layer of rock in the heavy clay. So I was reduced to actually using a pick axe. I'm nursing a blister. I'd wanted to install one more 2x6 plank, but I'd got to the point where I actually couldn't lift the pick axe to hit the unyielding ground one more time. It will yield, it is just a matter of time . I also can't believe that I'm actually digging a hole and forgetting the sun.  Still, the sun is the same in a relative way and we're older. Winter is closing in. You can tell, because the garden is in some pretty hard shape. Witness these diseased tomato plants.  This does not necessarily mean that they've stopped producing tomatoes, of which we have many. We spent a merry weekend processing zucchini into 2 cup frozen bags and blanching tomatoes. Soon, we will be eating another tomato pie. And four quarts of refrigerator pickles.  It is satisfying to have enou...

Dwindling Returns While today is deceptively lovely, a clear blue sky and 86 degrees, we know that worse is on the way. September mourn .  It might look like we're still getting food from the garden, but things are falling off drastically. It's weird.  The tomatoes are mostly diseased, and we're planning to rip most of them out this weekend. The peppers that are producing (the habaneros and Anaheim chilis) are inedible hot.  The lettuce is one of the few success stories this year. Succession planting is working, and there's plenty for salads, probably through September. Weirdly, the lovely sunflowers planted in front of the deck are failing to flower. Great stalks. No flowers.  Something is eating our pumpkins before they have a chance to grow. Cucumbers are few and far between. Kale is doing alright. One row, 4' long is plenty more than enough. Spices are starting to go to seed. Next year, we MUST learn how to fertilize/feed better. It's the best explanation fo...

 Just a quick glance off the side of the deck during a morning coffee break allowed me to see the contrast of red against the green...and there's a lot of it.  I believe all that will happen to these will be the blanching and the freezing. I don't foresee the patience for much more than that. Just some frozen tomatoes to toss into chili or soup later this fall.  There is a lot of stuff out there besides tomatoes. Everything seems to have stretched out after the days of downpours. The winner of the most entertaining plant simply has to be the pumpkin that has been making its way across the deck. No signs of pumpkins yet but I imagine the deck in October will resemble a scene from one of my favorite children's books, "Too Many Pumpkins" by Linda White. 

 Read that in two different ways...long a and a schwa, okay?  It has been a tomato kind of day. With Tom off on a well earned vacation, I received a sudden and temporary promotion to head gardener. It has come at a time when there is an abundance of rain...and as a result, an abundance of split tomatoes. Poor dears, so parched, so starved for moisture all summer and then force fed in a way that must have felt like taking a sip from a firehose. There has been a lot of a broken hearts out there. They will find redemption in the compost pile.  Those that were safe or passable, made it to a boiling cauldron this morning where they soaked luxuriously for a minute or two before a polar plunge wrinkled the skin off them. At least, the start of the skin removal. I had to release the many tomatoes from their jackets until my fingers resembled their puckered tattered coats. Ish. That's about all I can say, "ish." I take that back, I actually can't describe the satisfying "...

Stairway to Heaven , partially completed It is not for nothing that Steepmeadow is named "Steepmeadow." The thing about the back yard here is that it is, in fact, on a steep slope. Even when you are training for a marathon, you can get winded going up and down. For some time now, I've been scouring examples of stairs and gardens built into hillsides on Pinterest.  At last, I found the solution: stair stringers that come pre-cut, available at big-box hardware stores, with matching 48" stair pieces with no-slip cuts. Some leveling required. Combine this with a fair amount of quality time spent with a shovel and some weed-blocking fabric and pebbles, and behold, the Stairway to Heaven. Looking down on the Stairway to Heaven Before the Stairway to Heaven The Steepmeadow Hillside, photo taken from the shed, pre-Stairway One of the lessons learned in this exercise is that we would very much like to meet that lady who is sure all that glitters is gold so that she  could pay...

  It's been a slow start this year. May was freezing, and everything was about two weeks behind. There's been draught. Diseased yellow leaves had to be removed en-masse from the bottom reaches of the upper tomato bed. And yet, we're starting to crank out some veg.  Tomatoes & mild chili peppers in today's take. There was a lot of rain over the weekend, so we've been able to not water for the past few days, which is a good thing, as I've been out of commission with a funny-bone surgery. We did have a chance to make a tasty salsa over the weekend. Recipe is here . I don't recommend the variation with three blades of grass and a baseball.