To The Surbiton Manor Born

Note the quarter in the foreground on the left for scale. There have not been many blog entries, because we have been occupied with rushing around trying to batten the hatches for winter. We've had a series of projects, some of which have been caused by major setbacks. I'd been working on the paths crossing the bottom of the hill since early September. They are finally on the very edge of being complete. The garlic needed to be planted this week, which necessitated fencing in one of the moved 4x4 raised beds to keep the squirrels off. But that's done. You can clearly see the garlic here underneath the two inches of leaf mulch One thing that we were not planning on doing was moving three raised beds that we'd built next to the garage. You see, we have been facing a mouse infestation. The pest control people suggested that putting the beds there gave them shelter. You could clearly see the little neon signs pointing at cracks in the pavement and the bricks at the foundati...

Hardscape construction continues, as we enter the final stage of the season. Over the past few weeks (it's taken a while because there was a marathon to run and we've been caged by heavy rain), I built this. It's not an expansion, but a relocation of beds under the tree on the other side of the yard. Tiny tomatoes are still producing, which is getting a little irritating because they are so difficult to harvest. Thoughts are turning to next season. Where to plant the garlic? I think it's going in the top bed that was just relocated, upper left in the pic. above.  When taking apart the beds to relocate them out of the shade, I realized that they had been heavily infiltrated by roots as well. This explains why the garlic didn't work last year. Another idea that came to me: The area in the picture above gets absolutely baked in the mid-summer sun. I'm mixing some vermiculite into the soil to help it to retain moisture next year. We'll see. Things are getting pr...

  I've been dealing with my dad's estate over the summer, which has impacted my work on the garden. One of the most obnoxious things that I've discovered is that he receives about half a dozen solicitations for support from liberal causes every single day.  According to the Sierra Club ,  [ A] n American adult receives 41 pounds of junk mail a year . To produce this much paper requires cutting down  somewhere between 80 million and 100 million trees annually . If left standing, these trees would absorb 1.7 million tons of CO2 a year.  In an ironic twist, many of these solicitations are for environmental causes. I began my campaign to eliminate his and my own junk mail pile by responding with a note - many times in their postage-paid envelope - asking to be removed from the mailing list. I also found a series of resources to get rid of it here.   I won't rehash the details, but everyone should be getting rid of this rubbish.

You see those innocent looking little salad tomatoes? Sprinkle tomatoes as Trader Joe's calls them. Mexican Midget variety as Seed Savers Exchange names them (somewhat unfortunately).  Well they are not so innocent. Last spring, the seedlings were the strongest. So I planted some in every tomato bed. They've gone berserk. They are just an incredible pain to harvest. Delicious, but a real pain. Next year, just a couple of plants.  I've started working on moving two of the 4x4 beds in the lower garden to a place that gets a good deal more sun. Both beds have produced nothing for two years, and I'm pretty sure its because they spend a lot of time in the shade. The ambition here is to then level the area around these beds and lay down a gravel path that connects to the stairs. Construction began in earnest this weekend. (The two beds not producing, where the garlic and potimaron squash went to die, They are being cannibalized for parts of the new bed.) It's been hot (ne...

 So, yes, we had a little reminder about the perils of not having a prefrontal cortex. Some of the neighbor kids acted a bit thoughtlessly towards me and mine. This event had me consider the whole free garden idea- really, nobody was interested in it this year and it was producing a lot of cherry tomatoes that were either going to waste or just going into the growing pile of tomatoes that we need to use ourselves. I decided to clean up the garden and we'll be moving the dirt to a bed in the back and doing a different thing (probably clover) in the space where hope once stood. (sooooo dramatic- sorry) I am going to be heading back to work next week and so getting the bed cleared out is a perfectly acceptable job to do now before I get busy, and it suddenly gets frosty. Already long story short, I removed all the green cherry tomatoes as I yanked the remaining plants. I've made green tomato pie and crisp from larger tomatoes and it is a very fine thing, indeed, to do. I was hopef...

The unfortunately named "Mexican Midget" tomatoes are producing magnificently. I've been a little neglectful of the blog as the summer has been full of travel. This has caused a little bit of neglect in the garden (but not too much), and some reflections on the environmental impact of travel. First off, the garden is doing pretty well this year.  The zucchini are a real standout. How do they grow from a nice, but slightly too small fruit into something that could potentially threaten Tokyo over the course of a night? Last week I took in the last of the snow peas (which produced for a surprisingly long time), and set some to dry into next year's seeds. The few cucumber plants that I did this year are starting to blossom. While the tiny salad tomatoes are producing heavily, the larger tomatoes have run into some serious blossom rot this year. Haven't harvested one yet. Maybe it is the draught and the uneven watering? Maybe it is a lack of nutrients in the soil? Ther...

Yesterday afternoon, a sudden thunderstorm whipped up, and as the initial blast of wind came through, it snapped this limb off of the neighbor's ash tree, which landed, fortunately I guess, mostly on the strawberry bed. Though it did break the cover. We'll have to have a chat with the neighbors about getting it out of our yard, always awkward. That said, it is literal windfall, and I think we'll saw up and stack the larger pieces for firewood in two years. Summer is short. I'm counting it down this year by my marathon training schedule. In just nine short weeks, it will be Sept. 23, and time to run the Ely Marathon . That'll mark the end of summer. But before then, next week is going to fall on us like the flaming sword of the archangel Gabriel. 90's predicted all week, with just a few bouts of thunderstorms. It's going to be hot, and it is going to be dry. What I've noticed about the storms this year is that they only spit a little bit of water. It isn...