September 2016

The garden continued it's fairly successful attempt at imitating a tropical jungle.  Other than running in and out to pick things, we didn't spend a lot of time here, but were always surprised at how hard to get around it was when we did.  Despite the lack of maintenance, it was one of our most productive gardens ever.

I truth though, with a lot of cool, rainy weather in early to mid summer, it wasn't our best year of tomatoes, and they didn't start arriving until September, but everything was delicious, and the variety at this time of year makes cooking both easy (plenty to choose from) and difficult (choices, choices, choices!)

We gave some away, but we dried a lot of these zucchinis too, and found out later that the goats love dried zucchini chips in the middle of winter.  It's important to have treats that goats really love at milking time, so I'm sure we'll try to grow even more next summer (this summer was around 6 lbs/day during the harvest season).

We're getting more and more into starting plants for the garden inside our cabin greenhouse (here we've got winter greens started for the hoophouse).  We have something (pill bugs for one) that tends to eat tiny greens as they first come up outside, but here we can often grow them big enough to be able to withstand some insect predation once transplanted.

Linc and PJ demolished the roof, walls and floor of an old porch on the south side of this year's green renovation project house.  The porch had been used as a commercial dog kennel, and smelled like it.  Linc repaired the water damaged frame and made the structure into an attached greenhouse for some passive solar heating and a nice place to start garden plants and sit outside on a sunny winter day.  We also added the solar hot water collector above, and with the help of friends back in the spring, replaced the decaying asphalt roofing shingles on the house and garage with metal.  Still to go - painting the exterior, repairing sheds, and reclaiming the yard from years of neglect.

Feeling caught up on the renovation house, we dug up our front yard and added a frost free hydrant hooked up to the irrigation system for filling goat water buckets, etc.

And designed/installed a county approved legal greywater system for the cabin.

We didn't make it up to the mountains much this year.  When we did, Jeanne would get SO excited to be there.  For good reason too, it's spectacular, and much of it within a 30 minute drive from home.