So, after almost a year of neglect, I've decided to take over the blogging duties. It's more in line with my interests than Chris's anyway, and I find myself with a little more "free" time than him these days (can't imagine why!). We have completed a number of projects that I need to catch up on here, but I think I'll start with the outside, and especially our efforts to grow as much of our own food as we can.
Over the fall, we re-configured and expanded on our existing veggie garden to make better use of the space. Once the veggie beds were laid out, we tackled the last "wild" corner of our property by cutting down several trees, including all the Rose of Sharon, and eradicating the wintercreeper that had taken over every spare inch of ground space. We also pruned back the existing black raspberry canes and trained them into three hills.
In the
spring, we added a rhubarb and asparagus bed along the back fence, a watermelon/melon and potato bed along the side fence, and a large strawberry bed in the central area. We've had quite a bit of fruit already from the strawberry plants, and the kids love to go out and pick fresh raspberries every afternoon.
Back in the veggie garden, we got to work as soon as the ground was workable. We divided the three long beds up into smaller planting sections along the lines of the square-foot gardening plan. The south bed gets the most sun in early spring and becomes progressively shady as the trees fill out and summer comes on, so we focused on planting spring veggies here. We put in two sections of onion, some broccoli, lettuce, radish and two sections of peas. Things were looking really nice by mid-April, and we had our first home-grown salad by the end of the month.
We started on the rest of the garden in May, planting carrots, scallion, chard, bush and pole beans, daikon radish and two more rows of peas in the central bed, and potatoes, mid- and late-season corn, five varieties of tomatoes,
red bell pepper and cucumbers in the north bed. Pumpkins, storage onions and indian corn went in the large west bed along the fence, as well as a few sunflowers and nasturium.
By June, most of the spring crops were harvested, and we prepped the bed for a second planting. We plan to put in a few bell pepper plants, and hopefully they'll get enough direct sun to flourish. All of our hot peppers are growing closer to the house, in one of the flower gardens along the driveway. We also have a couple of volunteer tomato plants from last year's volunteer tomato, some storage onions, and our herb garden planted up by the back door. Oh, and we discovered yet another volunteer tomato growing over by the new apple tree - we have no idea what kind it is, but it seems to be thriving! And speaking of apple, I forgot to mention that we put in a 5-year-old Macintosh along the north fence of our yard to replace an old, rotted pear tree that we'd had to cut down. We're planning to put in another tree, probably golden delicious, next spring. We'd also like to put in a few blueberry bushes, but we'll need to fiddle with soil acidity to get them to grow here. All in all, the edible portion of our landscape seems to be coming along nicely!
As mentioned in previous posts, one of the first things we did after closing on the house was to repaint every room. In most cases, it was surprisingly easy to select just the right color for the room, and when we were done I only had misgivings about two rooms. The quest to select the perfect dining room color was chronicled in the last post, and here I want to talk about the sunroom/former office/sleeping porch. It was pretty clear that the room hadn't been used very much by the previous owner, and in fact some of our neighbors told us that the owners before them had used it only to store plants and books - for the entire 50 years they occupied the house! Other than the addition of windows at some point in the 1960s or so, not much had changed from its days as a sleeping porch.
The excessive amount of lead paint in the room made it fairly unusable at first, so Chris worked on ripping out the walls and putting in new drywall. He also refinished the painted floors, taking them back to bare wood and putting down 3 coats of poly. At that point, we painted the brand new walls a nice, sunny shade of yellow (B.Moore, Delilah) with bright white trim. For a while it seemed like a fairly happy room, but then the yellow started to fade and become more egg-like (similar to the dining room), and the utter lack of storage started to get to us. In addition, I had set up my sewing table in the corner and had a hard time keeping Sophie out of it and my craft cabinet.
At that point, we planned to simply mount the craft cabinet on the wall and maybe look into repainting the walls a different color. But then inspiration hit, and we pulled out some of the old kitchen wall cabinets from the basement, cleaned them up, painted them white, and mounted them on a footer to form customized, built-in base cabinets to store games, movies, and office supplies. Next, we built a deep storage unit behind the couch and under the south bank of windows that serves as a hidden closet to store a variety of random things. The table surface of the storage unit will house overwintering plants and maybe some winter lettuce and herbs later this year. We also installed a ceiling fan, which added a much-needed, hard-wired overhead light, and we put in a few new outlets. Chris also put up some beautiful crown molding that helped to finish off the room. Oh, and last but not least, we painted the walls a happy teal color
