Garden of Eating
Aug. 6th, 2015 09:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivoMeant to post these yesterday, but stuff got in the way. Like, getting them out of my cell phone to somewhere I could post them from.
This year's vegetable garden is smaller, squeezed in between the barn and the arena. We have not done well with a larger garden out behind the woodlot because it is so far from the house and requires us to run about 400 feet of hose to get water out there for the dry months of July and August. Also, the deer, rabbits, and woodchucks are less reticent to visit out there.
I decided to set up some containers and raised beds in the spot where a gap in the oak canopy allows sunlight for several hours on clear days. In spite of excessive rain until the end of June, it looks promising. In the photo above, from left: cucumbers and miniature sweet peppers in the red "growbox," potatoes in three blue plastic tubs, okra (not easy to see) behind the potatoes, tomatoes (back) and melons and eggplant (front,) and at the extreme right section of the raised beds, more cucumbers, Brussels sprouts, and peppers.
This view shows to the left of the previous, or a bit farther west. These are pole beans that got a late start and are trying to make up for it now. The soil is about 8 inches of aged sheep manure from when the sheep pen was located here. It was spongy and loaded with water until late June, so the beans didn't go in until a month later than usual. If the frost holds off, I still expect a good crop. The purple pods are heavy bearers, and I'm trying a couple of other varieties. The larger leaves at the right end of the trellis are scarlet runners. Not only do those have tasty pods, but they have beautiful red blossoms. Zucchini and butternut squash are between this trellis and the other photo, and the hot frame (uncovered) in the background will get a planting with kale, kohlrabi, and lettuce for the fall. I had lettuce in it for spring but the insects were voracious and devoured it all.
And this bonus photo shows today's baking. I made the peach and blueberry pie using blueberries from out in the old garden. Gary made the sourdough bread with dried sour cherries and chopped pecans.
In other news, after much teeth grinding I have mostly beaten Gentoo into submission. I still haven't managed to create a custom kernel that will boot, but I figured out how to make the generic kernel from the installation CD do my bidding for now. Only the basic command line system is installed, but it's all working and I can even run backups to another drive from the console if I boot into the proper model. I figured out the boot configurations and can boot from either data partition that I created, with or without an intermediate ramdisk image. Next: get X11 installed and working. But I'm taking a break for a day or two to do other things first.
This year's vegetable garden is smaller, squeezed in between the barn and the arena. We have not done well with a larger garden out behind the woodlot because it is so far from the house and requires us to run about 400 feet of hose to get water out there for the dry months of July and August. Also, the deer, rabbits, and woodchucks are less reticent to visit out there.
I decided to set up some containers and raised beds in the spot where a gap in the oak canopy allows sunlight for several hours on clear days. In spite of excessive rain until the end of June, it looks promising. In the photo above, from left: cucumbers and miniature sweet peppers in the red "growbox," potatoes in three blue plastic tubs, okra (not easy to see) behind the potatoes, tomatoes (back) and melons and eggplant (front,) and at the extreme right section of the raised beds, more cucumbers, Brussels sprouts, and peppers.
This view shows to the left of the previous, or a bit farther west. These are pole beans that got a late start and are trying to make up for it now. The soil is about 8 inches of aged sheep manure from when the sheep pen was located here. It was spongy and loaded with water until late June, so the beans didn't go in until a month later than usual. If the frost holds off, I still expect a good crop. The purple pods are heavy bearers, and I'm trying a couple of other varieties. The larger leaves at the right end of the trellis are scarlet runners. Not only do those have tasty pods, but they have beautiful red blossoms. Zucchini and butternut squash are between this trellis and the other photo, and the hot frame (uncovered) in the background will get a planting with kale, kohlrabi, and lettuce for the fall. I had lettuce in it for spring but the insects were voracious and devoured it all.
And this bonus photo shows today's baking. I made the peach and blueberry pie using blueberries from out in the old garden. Gary made the sourdough bread with dried sour cherries and chopped pecans.
In other news, after much teeth grinding I have mostly beaten Gentoo into submission. I still haven't managed to create a custom kernel that will boot, but I figured out how to make the generic kernel from the installation CD do my bidding for now. Only the basic command line system is installed, but it's all working and I can even run backups to another drive from the console if I boot into the proper model. I figured out the boot configurations and can boot from either data partition that I created, with or without an intermediate ramdisk image. Next: get X11 installed and working. But I'm taking a break for a day or two to do other things first.
