It’s amazing how much a nearly-invisible particle (and all its friends and relations) can affect your life. For us, the pollen has all but banished us to the indoors and we are really hoping we will soon see a decrease in levels. I am diligently eating as much minimally-cleaned garden produce as I can manage, keeping in mind that this process will take time… It is hard after all this down time to be patient and wait for this.
For the Garden Report: the lettuces are starting to wilt and or bolt in the higher heat, the radishes and spinach are well into bolting and I’m not sure that the fava beans are going to survive long enough to produce anything. I thought that the favas would be heat-happy based on their country of origin, but the package warned that they should be planted as soon as the ground could be worked and we were way past that point when we got that first bed cleared. Next year…
I regularly have forehead-slapping moments, and I had one today. I was out watering and lamented to Elijah that the peas were just producing but that one double row was turning yellow and dying. He picked a couple from a different row and fed them to Joseph, who gobbled them and then went on to pick some from the yellowing row and eat them. Elijah told him he shouldn’t eat those ones. As I was thinking back over the varieties I had planted (so as not to plant the dying variety again) I dragged from the mists of my mind that I had planted a pea variety with “golden” in the name. And so I tasted a pea pod. They were great—Golden Sweet Snowpeas if anyone wants to plant them. This was almost the same as two years ago when I was worried about and trying to remedy yellow spots on my melon leaves, only to realize that they were Moon and Stars melons. Once again, a feature, not a bug.
As we wait to get out in the garden again, I am trying to chip away at inside projects. Bethel and I moved the first of five kitchen cabinets up 2” to match the newly installed ones (long story) and Isaiah and I finally installed the barn doors to the piano room. I may do some before and afters as we complete these projects. I never did very much with the house back in CA. It was enormous and overwhelming and expensive to do anything to it. This house is human scale and we were able to avoid taking out a mortgage, so even though it needs a lot more work, I feel much less owned by it and much more content. It’s a little small for our current family size, but as we begin the process of launching soon, I suspect it will not remain so.
We had an exciting hay development these last two weeks. A neighbor mentioned that we might be able to sell our grass hay and got in touch with someone who agreed to cut and bale it for half the proceeds of the sale. Tomorrow evening the bales will be picked up and we should get around $300 just for letting the grass grow. This may be the most we have ever made from our little farmish efforts. Huzzah!
Consecration Acres 