With all of our talking about looking into alternative heating arrangements, we’ve been looking at a time horizon of installation in May or so to beat the need for air conditioning in July or August. The A/C has to be in before summer – we just don’t want any more emergency vet visits because hot [...]
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Finally, progress. The weather has been warm enough, in the 40s, to allow for digging trenches.Working with giant powered trenchers in the rain just isn’t a good idea, so we had to wait for the winter to turn a corner. And last weekend, it certainly did it’s job. My husband and I have been talking for a while about how to reduce our energy costs. This house is really expensive to heat in the winter and nearly impossible to cool. Solar gain is great on sunny days with our South facing windows which is both a blessing and a curse. Putting shades on [...] The landscaper guy from Cascadian Edible Landscapes has gone home. He left me with a ton of books, some catalogs, and a plan for how to water the garden beds. It’s a brilliant freaking plan, in large part because it’s flexible. Also, I am an idiot for being so blocked on this thing. Progress has been made! I’m going to try growing peppers this year, despite our terribly short and cool season. In poking around on the Seed Savers Exchange, I was able to find some varieties listed for short seasons. And with the shipping charges the way they are, it made sense to load up a few [...] Getting seeds late last year meant that I wasn’t able to find all the items I’d hoped for and was forced to settle for some unexpected items. This was particularly true with the squash selection. I wasn’t able to find some of my first picks – butternut and acorn squash were all gone by the [...] We had very mixed success with the leafy greens this year. I think part of that was not knowing the light of the new garden plot very well and part of it was the spectacular fail of watering on my part. But for the greens that actually came up, it was an interesting lot. When looking for beans to plant this year, I was late to the party and had no idea what I wanted. Honestly, I think this led to a large portion of the mistakes this year, but learning from success unusual, so I’m counting this as a teaching year. Sounds better that way. Building out this garden has had a very interested set of unintended consequences. Fortunately, they’ve almost all been good. But I would have never guessed at their diversity or breadth. The biggest lesson this year was around tomatos. I did so many things wrong, it’s almost impossible to count them. Nearly every step along the way, I made a mistake. Most were recoverable, but it meant that we ended up with a crop of about a dozen tomatos from 16 plants. This is a miserable [...] |
Date: 02/28/2009 |
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