I didn’t get to write about it this past weekend because I was too busy riding, but last week we made some improvements to our garden. Since the garden that came with our house was is in the corner, next to a six-foot fence, the area didn’t receive full sun. This meant that most of the tomato plants wouldn’t produce until really late in the season. And since we have no use for so much lawn, we decided to put a couple of raised beds right on top of a grassy area where the grass wasn’t growing very well, anyway.

My friend Dan helped out with building the frames—without a truck nor any wood tools, it would have been difficult to do myself. Then Heather and I stained them and filled them with the rich compost dirt we’ve been cultivating since we moved here. Any organic matter we discard in the kitchen goes into the compost bin and eventually churned into the garden. We didn’t have enough to completely fill both 5’ x 10’ beds, but it’s plenty for the tomato, squash, and watermelon plants we planted.

Earlier in the year I also added three more fruit trees to our orchard. Now we have a total of 10! They are: Apple, Apricot, Aprium, Nectarine, Peach-plum, Pear, Plum (x2), Pluot (x2). I was lucky to score a two-year-old Pluot so we should have fruit from that one this year. That’ll be nice because our other Pluot, while producing incredibly delicious fruit, only yielded two or three dozen. But the other two additions, the Aprium and the Peach-plum are both one-year-old, so they won’t produce until next year.