How has it been a month and a half?!

Good grief. Worst blogger ever. I don't really have a great excuse, other than the fact that not a ton had happened indoors on the house until recently. And I never carry my phone with me anymore (currently it isn't even charged) so I never take pictures of anything. The result is that I don't write posts because they're not very interesting without pics. Or maybe that means I'm a bad writer. I'd tell my students that meant they need to use more descriptive language.

So, I'm going to try catching up on the last two months in two paragraphs; here we go.

Amazing red knobs on white cabinets! I loves them. And having the knobs back on  gives me a place to hang herbs.

Attached to the wall! Like in a normal house!

May was cooler than I anticipated, and I was glad I waited out the warm April before setting out tomato and pepper seedlings. I headed to a friend's wedding in Ohio behind a cheese factory, taught a maymester course every day, and then it was June. In June I went to Sweden for an academic conference; it was beautiful, warm, and I learned a lot about myself from solo travel. We also travelled to a ranch in Colorado for another friend's nuptials. Then I had a week long faculty technology workshop, where I learned a lot about what I was doing wrong in the classroom and how to make it better. No work had happened on the house by the last week in June, but the garden had exploded. No fewer than 100 green tomatoes. Then my parents came to visit! We fixed the squeaky ceiling fan, affixed a duct cover in the hallway after removing the masking tape that held it in place since before we bought the place [Least you think I am admonishing the previous owner, I should share that we detached the tape from the wall, but then just rested it on the floor instead of screwing it to the wall. For a year. And a half.] and tried in vain to fix the vacuum.

This is the dirt and bunny hair collectied from vacuuming just the stairs. Terrifying.

The vacuum should get it's own paragraph, but instead I will say this: it stopped working in April and we didn't buy a new one until last weekend. Let that sink in and then be glad you didn't visit during that period. I will call it "the filth period" at Frayne Street. We also spray painted the cabinet knobs for the kitchen cabinets that I started (and never finished) painting MONTHS ago. They are purty. I was so emboldened by experiencing what it was like to be productive on the house again that we painted the kitchen and all the rest of the cabinets this past holiday weekend. They look great but, as usual, I haven't taken a picture. But I will! And I will post that picture soon(ish).

Updates and Lessons for Next Year

Things are going pretty well. The dried Calypso beans are ready, though a combination of deer, rabbits, and being shaded out by other plants means there will only be a very few of them, which sucks. 

I've been pickling things little by little. Above we have a HUGE cucumber that got away from us, which I turned into sandwich stackers, and two batches of lemon cucumbers I pickled with a jalapeno and onions. All from the garden. Hooray! I think cucumbers and rutabaga are really the only two things we'll truly have enough of to get through the whole year. Tomatoes will be close.

This is what a typical daily harvest looks like now. There are always tomatoes, and either beans or cucumbers every other day. The beans are gorgeous, but we aren't putting any by because we eat them faster than we can pick them. The soy beans did pretty well, but I'll need quadruple the amount next year if I want edamame for the year. I have a serious soy habit.

 The ladies are growing pretty steadily. They are trying to cluck now, which comes out more like a honk, which is pretty hilarious. They are much more comfortable with being petted, and a few days ago one of the girls hopped up onto my arm to perch unsolicited. I didn't even have any treats!

LESSONS I'VE LEARNED THIS FIRST YEAR:

1) French intensive planting is pretty awesome, but for beans the productivity of the plant is lowered since they are so dense. Plant fewer beans per square next year, given them more trellises, and don't do the sisters planting with corn. I need 4-5 times as many bean plants as I planted this year to be set for the year, which is probably not going to happen. I'll try though.

2) Rutabagas are huge, and should be planted much later than I planted them. Same with brussel sprouts.

3) Beets need protection when they are just seeded, because both times, birds ate all the seeds. The few survivors were overshadowed by other plants and then died.

4) Tiger Stripe tomatoes are yummy, but grow too close to the ground. They need to be in a pot so the ripe fruit doesn't rot before I can get to it.

5) I need to start my tomatoes sooner, and not plant cucumbers so close. The cukes are using the tomatoes to grow up, which is great for the established plants, but not great for the little ones I started from seed.

6) Speaking of tomatoes, I need double the amount of Amish Paste tomatoes to make my year quota. The early girls are huge producers, and I want another one next year, even though the tomatoes themselves are not the best, they are still good and I've gotten 30 so far from one plant, no where near done producing.

7) Although the squash worked really well in the raised bed and aren't messing with other plants the way the cukes are, I think I will put them in a separate area next year just for the sake of space. They can go in the new melon mound.

8) Caterpillars are the big April scourge, but now that I have neem I am ready to rock and roll. But the deer have eaten 3/4 of the bean plants, across the board. And all of the Kale. I need to think of a solution for this. More plants they don't like. More of that horrible garlic/egg spray, and maybe a mechanical deterrent, like a motion-detector sprayer.