So long, lawn!

Well the good news is, the lawn is gone! This is how it look after a week's worth of work.

Hello Again

We here at This Old Blog are about to boldly go where very few home owners in our neighborhood have gone before - to the land of no front lawn! The neighbors may hate us, but hopefully mother nature may love us more. Here we go!

Photo from a few months ago, when we tried to get someone else to take care of this huge problem!

Early Summer Garden Pictures

Young Master House standing amidst the various plants in the garden.  Foreground: Radishes and Onions, Background: Tomatoes, Tomatillos, peppers, sweet potatoes, melon, corn, zucchini, and one lonely bean plant.  The Tomatillos and most of the tomatoes are courtesy of Josh. The soil they came with was so black it almost made me cry to plant them in my grey clay soil.  They seem to be doing ok though.

The Radishes are doing quite well as you can see in this next picture:
 

 We also have a volunteer pumpkin plant, growing out of the side of the compost pile.  Correspondingly, the plant is huge and the three pumpkins are quite large. The one pictured is larger than my (large) head.

 Above are the many many sunflower plants, growing along our new garden wall. Note also the purslane, which apparently does not want to go away.  And yes, the caps on the wall are loose, they need to be re-mortared.

This one almost needs its own post.  Our white nectarine tree had a fairly heavy set this year, something on the order of 200 pieces.  After some weather and thinning, we had approximately 75.  A fake hawk watched the tree, and netting was deployed over the choicest fruit (the tree being too tall to net the whole thing).

This is the only piece of fruit that Mrs. House got to taste, a single cut from a bird downed fruit.  She was not happy, although she did declare it "the most delicious fruit ever" or some such.  Squirrels, birds, and at least one possum got the rest. Next year I think we are hiring some weasels to guard the tree.

Garden Update

 Just a quick post on the status of the garden.  We harvested our first radish yesterday, because it was starting to bolt.  About a dozen more to go, most fairly large, so we seem to have found something else that will grow in our soil.  The onions are also doing well.  Pretty much everything else we grew from seeds or planted as seeds has died, so it is off to the nursery soon for us.

Mrs. House spent some time juicing lemons yesterday, as you can see from the picture above.   She made about half a pitcher of pure lemon juice, which we will combine with simple syrup when needed to make lemonade. Grapefruit still available in substantial quantities to those interested...

Cuttings

One of the biggest issues with taking plant cuttings is disease.

This tip says to use cinnamon to alleviate the chances of getting fungal infections in your cutting, improving your chances of success.  Since I know that some of us are interested in rooting plants, it should be worth a try.

In other garden news, only our radishes and onions came up, all the other seeds planted in the garden were failures (save possibly a single nasturtium, but we will see with that one).  Next up is transplanting our seedlings from inside, which historically has had about a 20% success rate.  So we will see.