We have way more space than we could handle this year. So we have stuck with tomatoes, basil, a pepper plant, some squash, green beans, catnip, kale, and some wild flower seeds to fill in some space. We are still discovering the state of the soil and such, so the tomatoes grew so large and so fast that the pepper plant is completely covered and we had to move the basil. The tomatoes apparently have plenty of nitrogen, which encourages foliage and growth, and maybe not enough calcium which leads to blossom end rot (BER.) I say “maybe” because apparently the same thing is happening to other tomato plants all over Portland, and even small farms whose tenants Teressa and I talk to at the markets. Not all of our tomatoes are ailing as such. The smaller varieties seem to be fine, and we have some pretty decent sized ones that are fine. Anyway, we added ground-up Tums and eggshells to the soil, both full of calcium. I trimmed off all the green tomatoes with the BER, chopped off the affected bits and made a chutney. (Freakin’ yummy!)
In the photos you can see the 9 plants, (there are 3 more in the front of the house) when they were young. They are now taller than me, but laying over and venturing out into the rest of the neighborhood. Even with tomato cages in place, I have had to put in tall spikes for them to be tied to. And the resulting web of twine is its own matrix. A tomato matrix. A tomatrix. (That one goes out to Teressa.)
I made the fencing on the beds from wood we found buried under a big pile of lawn debris left by previous tenants. The point was to keep our dog, Guido, from getting all mixed up in there. But we also needed to get in there ourselves to weed etc. so I made cross bars removable.
Also from the found wood, I made this compost bin. We are pretty excited about that. It is nice and big and composting is very satisfying. We generate alot of food waste when we process veggies for chutnies and soups and potato gratins and whatnot. And instead of pitching it into the garbage and getting an awful smell, we dump it in the compost bin and throw a shovel full of dirt on it and return all the nutrients we didn’t eat to the soil for next year and the year after that and so on.
In the photo of the side of the house you can see the spirea, (I love that plant.) and the mint and where we put up a simple fence around the wild flower seed beds. And the others are of the front yard. There was quite a bit of lavender and rosemary and some sage, oregeno and thyme existing when we moved in. I love that stuff. Lots of yellowjackets buzzing about. They love it too. The roses over against the fence struggled earlier this summer with some spots but Teressa has taken good care of them and helped them out alot. She also planted some calendula seeds in the front too, near the tomatoes. Perhaps the most dynamic growers are the squash plants. These photos are from before the planting of the beans. They are just now starting to mature.
Well the housing market is starting to pick up. I sold my first birdhouse today. (The one with the random paint on it.) I have been making them all summer… missing the nesting season, it seems.
So this one is perhaps the wierdest, a hybrid of chimeric ilk. (Heh, Heh.) It started with a film reel canister, (an old Eastman Kodak tin.) Just like all the others, it has a “neck-thru” structure. The tail-piece is a 3-holed hinge. I made the head stock out of some 1/4 inch plywood, and it is going to be glued on and bolted on. The hardware there is a challenge right now. I am trying to get the profile low so that it does not interfere with the strings as they travel from the nutt to the tuning pegs. And I hope to preserve some of the design elements there, using an old washer I found on the ground, etc.
