The rain came, in a thunderstorm at night. It has cooled everything down a fair bit and saves me from having to water the garden this morning, for which I am thankful. But it barely half filled four of the five (food-grade) barrels (the second barrel in the line up on our most capacious downspout remains empty, because the first one in the line needs to fill up to overflow into it). Let’s see how long it lasts.
The bean beds (three of them) are looking neat. When Amie looked out the bedroom window she said: “The beans have finally squished out!” And isn’t that exactly what beans seem to do?
Here are some pictures, for your comparison.
This is what the veg garden looked when we moved in (summer 2008): leaves, stones, rusted pipes and fencing, lots of broken glass, poison ivy and pachysandra.
This is March 2009, when we had barely made a dent in the above jungle, but I love this picture so much:
I wish I had a picture of the peak of last summer – our first summer gardening. I’ll look around for some shots to cobble together. But this now is today:
I made a mistake in my calculations of the square footage of the garden yesterday. It’s not 650 sq.f. but 930 sq.f. of beds (which includes the terraced beds and some herb beds by the side of the house, but not the as yet untouched lower front garden or the area with the berry bushes and hazels in back).
As you can see, the hoop house has its new poly cover. The plastic arrived yesterday and we installed it in the evening. After pulling off the old plastic and putting on the new one DH and I were covered from head to toe with pollen. The stuff coated everything, until the rain washed it away. Something else to be thankful for.