• Thoughts

    Life Lately | Late July 2016

    Today’s photo is brought to you by the Turner River in Big Cypress National Preserve and Everglades National Park, circa 2008. +In My Head Let’s go with some random bulleted thoughts…. I think the story of my life is being emotionally connected to time passing. Speaking of time, I have a post to write that has been jingling in my head for months about synesthesia and time. Just need to sit down and parse it out. I’m trying not to get too excited about autumn and cooler weather but I am looking forward to hiking and camping again. And fall baking…*sigh* I love autumn! The last two days we have…

  • Gardening

    What’s Growing in the Vegetable Garden

    We’ve reached that point in the season where not much is being productive in the vegetable garden but the peppers and cucumbers, and even the cucumbers are worn out and fading. Most plants out there are just putting on growth and holding on for slightly cooler temperatures to start producing flowers for reproduction. These are sweet potato squash that I’m excited to try out when we get fruit. I planted them in the hugelkultur perimeter beds. Like I said, the cucumbers are barely hanging on. Several vines have up and died but a couple are still trying to grow and put on flowers. I started new seeds and will try…

  • Gardening

    The Compost Gourd

    It is pretty common for random plants, including weeds of course, to sprout in our compost. Tomatoes, melons, potatoes, we’ve seen all sorts of things sprouting. This year a gourd sprouted in the right compost bin, the side that we’re currently not resupplying and are using in the garden when we need compost. The vine grew up and over the side of the compost bin before we knew it and since we weren’t actively adding to that side we opted to let the gourd continue growing. I’ve had to maneuver it off of the water hose multiple times, redirecting it to head for the fence and vegetation on the neighbors…

  • Gardening

    The Long View of the Garden

    I’ve been missing the gym this summer, the working out. My body feels it too. But while I’ve forgone building muscle and cardio I have really enjoyed my lunch hours in the garden. It’s a workout, in a way. Mostly it is a method of losing water weight via sweat because sometimes I am not even moving much but still find myself dripping by the time my lunch break is over and I need to clean up to head back to work. A lot of times I’ve planned for it, going whole-hog into a good 30-40 minutes of gardening, getting dirty, with the plan on jumping in the shower to…

  • Gardening

    Rehoming Monarch Caterpillars

    Several years ago when I got on Twitter there was a chat called #seedchat that I would pop onto most Wednesdays. That chat is now dormant but I ended up ‘meeting’ a lot of great gardeners through that chat. One of those was BMT 108. I’m keeping her real name on the downlow because of her husband’s occupation and she likes to keep it sorta anonymous online, as much as one can get these days. Remember when everyone used to only go by handles? Those were the days! Anyway, she lives about thirty minutes from me so it was nice to have a local person to talk to about gardening…

  • Gardening

    Mulching the Vegetable Garden

    About a week ago I was finally able to say I was ‘done’ weeding the paths in the vegetable garden, except for a tough spot of Bermuda grass near the gate entrance. I had Chris get mulch one morning and I was able to mulch most of the paths. I didn’t have quite enough to cover all of the area but I got the worst places. I opted to experiment with sheet mulching in the worst section, the Bermuda grass section, that extends from the gate down one of the rows. Bermuda grass is an incredibly stubborn plant to get rid of and I’m hoping this will tame that area…

  • Thoughts

    Sunday Reads & Listens

    Happy Sunday! Reads: ‘Monarch Promise’ variegated milkweed. I need this! Baltimore Jack’s obituary from the Applachian Trail Conservancy. No more war in the garden from You Grow Girl. The Quiet Extinction: Stories of North America’s Rare and Threatened Plants a book about the loss of plant species on this continent. While some plants may have federal or state protection they don’t come with the same tight regulations that protected animals do unless they are located on a public property. Protected plants located on private lands are generally eradicated without consequence or knowledge (because most people are unable to identify plants for one), thus we have a problem with the loss…