As Dirt to Dinner Begins

I’m cleaning things up around the garden for our final Dirt to Dinner lunch of the Spring session. A lot has changed around here since we started. Here’s what it looked like when all we had growing was the Spring Pea Trial vs. where the kids growing box and the rest of the front garden area are today.

Lots of Growing Changes!

We’ve added additional beds, trellis, arbors and teepee support structures, and, of course, lots of plants. We’ve let the lawn dry up and the mulch and straw take over to the point where I’m starting to wonder if I have 50 feet of defensible space around the house in case the suburb is consumed by wildfire. ;-)

Tomorrow we are going to put in several different varieties of gourds on an arbor we’ve constructed over the bench. It’s a tad late for gourds since they like such a long season, but we could still get lucky, and we could always try covering them with season extenders. Could be a good challenge for the new crew starting in September. One of the neighbors gets tomatoes until November, so I’m hopeful.

Eternal optimism is very helpful when it comes to experimenting with agriculture.

We’re also going to experiment with various ways of ripening green tomatoes, clean up around the garden a bit to see what we have to add to the compost bins, and we’ll probably tuck in some surprises for the folks who are coming back in the Fall.

Lunch is a Summer picnic theme so we are making tomato basil salad, potato salad, green beans, chopped green salad with veggies and some folks are also bringing a bit of potluck to spice things up. Should be a wonderful time to celebrate what we have accomplished and review the kids suggestions for what to do differently next year.