Sunday, August 1, 2010

Ignoring the Garden.....

It's the first of August, and the garden is beginning to crank out some excellent bounty. It's been a weird summer....
-It rained incessantly throughout the month of June.
-We have been busy organizing/painting/living/hiking/etc. and have been, other than some weed-pulling frenzied touch-ups, ignoring the garden.

We bought landscape fabric for the vegetable area to avoid our usual weed-choked, high maintenance routine, as well as to avoid the incidence of 'cat visitations'. It started out like this....
....and it has filled in nicely. It has been a fairly successful Ignored Garden.
The landscape fabric has been great for keeping weeds and cats out of the vegetables, but it has been a bit difficult to water and, despite the five-year 'promise', the stuff is beginning to deteriorate. Still, it has kept the weeds at bay while we have been working on other things.

This summer we have enjoyed a decent raspberry harvest,
the Gravenstein apples are beginning to fall, and we've had a small but steady supply of blueberries. The yellow plums are on the cusp of ripeness, the basil is ready for a pesto-fest, the cucumber plants are offering a steady supply, and the zucchini is CRANKING it out.....
Annie made this:
And I sliced zucchini and dehydrated it with olive oil, garlic and salt. Mmmm.
I'm off now to fuss a bit in the Ignored Garden. The tomato plants are insanely tall/full/overgrown/unproductive, and I'm going to do some selective pruning. Maybe after a bit of pruning followed by ignoring, I'll get some tomatoes.




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