mini yard update

Well I know things have been quiet around here lately but around our house they have been hectic! Tons of planting, transplanting, pulling of more spurge from the yard and lots and lots of work on the Permaculture Project. There aren't any pictures tonight, should be some tomorrow, but here's the deal anyway...

We finally had our first pollenated female squash blossom, it was a lovely spaghetti squash and I was so looking forward to eating it, but the squirrels got it. I won't lie and say I wasn't bummed, kinda makes me wanna take the lid off the compost again. The good news is that there are finally tons of female flowers so we should be getting lots of yummy stuff very shortly, better late than never right?

We have started harvesting our bush beans and the edamame and pole beans should all be ready in the next few days. We haven't decided whether or not we're just going to mulch the edamame, either way the plants are going to be chopped and dropped. It ended up being too late in the season for the snow peas, it was just too hot and only one plant still survives, I'm just glad they got their little roots into the soil.

It also ended up being too hot for the artichoke this year, and I'm pretty sure the ground was just too hard for it as well. It stopped growing entirely a few weeks ago and is now definitely done. I planted a bunch of chard and kale seeds in the area that was supposed to be taken up by the artichoke and pumpkins, the ground is ridiculously hard there as well, all of the wild plants were going at the soil though, hopefully they broke it up a little and left some organic matter as well.

Last thing, our zinnias are blooming! hooray for planting in the grass! Actually I think that the plants that were planted in the grass are the happiest ones in the yard. I'm sure that location also factors into that but the grass as ground cover idea has really seemed to work, and if it gets too long I just rip a bit off the top by hand, super easy. Besides the zinnias we have a bunch of basil, cilantro, dill, sunflower and lavender hyssop, and a few sage too, that bee mix has turned out to be quite awesome.

That's all for now, the next post is going to be on identifying and using our lovely native and naturalized "weeds", enjoy the outdoors tomorrow, there's really nothing like it!