Our grape arbor is covered with bunches of fruit, a far cry from last year, when whatever it produced was devoured by birds in one afternoon. The lack of water and steady heat has been perfect for growing grapes, along with Jen’s judicious pruning earlier this year; now we just have to figure out how to protect them from varmints (a large bird net has been purchased already) and when to harvest them properly.

Because it’s a downright sucky day for Baltimore, I figured I’d post a picture of yesterday’s yield from the vegetable garden in the hopes that it would brighten things up a little. Seriously, we pulled about 5 lbs. of tomatoes off the vines yesterday, adding to the 5 lbs. we have on the counter in the kitchen already. We’re going to bust out the pots and cook us up some more sauce this weekend.

Jen planted a morning glory vine under our dining room window. It’s going absolutely insane this week.

the triplets below are new buds.

Hurricane Ernesto is going to dump a few gallons of water on us this weekend, so we took some time after lunch to shore up the plants in our garden. The cucumbers, which were coming on strong in the early part of the year, are getting long in the tooth and not producing as much (they were averaging about four cukes a week). However, the tomatoes are now in their prime and absolutely bursting with fruit—a rough count of six plants totalled at least 150 tomatoes in various states of completion. The basil Jen planted among the tomatoes is now waist-height and full with leaves.

We’re already planning the addition to the current garden—I’m thinking it will roughly double in size. We’re adding eggplant, red peppers, more soybeans, and pole beans to this year’s lineup, as we know that it’ll all do well here.

Further to the west, our neighbors engaged a landscaping company to wrestle control of their yard back from the weeds, brush, and poison ivy that have slowly been choking it to death. This week two men have used chainsaws, trimmers, clippers, chippers, and a Bobcat to haul off at least four trailers worth of yard debris, including the majority of our shared treeline. What was once a tangled “hedgerow” running the length of our west property line is now an open plain of dirt punctuated with a few startled-looking trees. Our cherry trees are intact, as well as a few sugar maples on their side of the line (and not the ones I’d have picked—I prefer trees that grow straight up and down), but all the ivy on both sides of the law has been scraped off with the blade of the Bobcat.

(August, 2003)

What was once a private, enclosed (and somewhat untidy) side yard is now a public space, visible and audible from the road, which has us concerned. Because the driveway side is less than aesthetically pleasing, we’ve been using the west side as our outdoor getaway, but that’s a thing of the past. It’s looking now like our plans to add a fence along the treeline just got bumped up in priority…

(April, 2005)

(August, 2006)

This is our garden as of this morning, before the blast wave hit us. It’s 100+ degrees out there now, and our cucumbers and tomatoes are love-love-loving it. The two plants up front are Big Boy tomatoes, the huge round beefy ones you see for $3/lb. at the store. The next two plants back are “Health Kick” tomatoes, which are low-to-the-ground Italian style tomatoes—long and dry, good for stuff like guacamole. Behind the tomatoes are four cucumber plants, which are going apeshit and climbing the ladders I built for them at the rate of about 6″/day. Each plant is throwing off blooms like crazy, and they have about 20 fruit between the three of them. Behind the cukes are four forlorn soybean plants, the ones the squirrels didn’t dig up. We had dreams of growing our own edamame, but obviously the yard critters love Japanese food as well. (that freaky cat statue is supposed to be some kind of deterrent, but I think it’s mainly serving as a perch for the local bird population, who seem to like to poop on its head.) Finally, in the far corner, we have two tomato plants grown from seed in our basement, which are finally coming into their own and putting off fruit.

Yesterday I made some hummus and we had cucumber-tomato-hummus sandwiches for dinner. While it wasn’t the most filling thing we could have eaten, it sure was tasty.

This is the first weekend I’ve had the rain barrel set up on the southeast corner of the house (where the majority of the runoff from the main roof empties out to the driveway.) I set it up and we left on a weekend where Maryland and D.C. saw some of the worst flooding in five years. When we got back on Monday night, the barrel was full and the overflow was shooting out of the side where I hadn’t plugged one of the threaded valve openings.

Tuesday I returned to the barrel with a handful of 3/4 PVC fittings and pipe length, and rigged up an overflow valve that empties into the driveway. The next project is to install the second rain barrel underneath the first to catch the overflow, and then rig up an overflow drain on that second barrel. That’s going to be trickier, because the second barrel is cheaper and lacks a threaded outlet at the top like the first barrel does, so I’m going to have to get creative.

Plus, the gravity platform I put in is not sturdy enough (it needs cross bracing) and needs a stronger platform to carry the weight of a full barrel.

Here’s a shot of one of our four tomato plants, with only a few of the fruit visible. The leaves are very dark, which could be some kind of tomato blight, or simply the way this particular variety grows—whatever the case, they’re getting much bigger. We have cukes coming in too, but the pictures I snapped of them didn’t come out so well. Maybe tomorrow.

When I was around the age of eight or nine, gas and heating oil got really expensive. I didn’t know about the oil crisis, of course, but the reality made its way into our lives in different places. My father gave up driving his monstrous green Ford station wagon (a Country Squire, if I remember correctly) and started a carpool at work, which meant we had a monstrous green Ford van in the driveway instead—the kind with seventeen rows of hard vinyl seats and a minimum of passenger comfort. My mother’s ’66 Buick convertible stayed mostly in the garage.

We also had a woodstove in our basement that suddenly started getting used. He may have had it installed just for the purpose of heating the house; I can’t remember clearly. Whatever the case, one of our new chores became wood-hauling on crisp fall mornings. In addition to his other Ford vehicles, my father had a (monstrous, green) Ford F350 stakebody truck, something I’d wager very few other dads parked in their driveways. Besides doing duty as a moving vehicle, frequent trips to the lumberyard (I come by this home renovation shit honestly), and hauling our camper in a homebuilt method which voided any manufacturer’s warranty, we used the truck on weekends to carry lumber back to the house. At some point, being the thrifty man he is, he answered an ad in the paper for a chainsaw and came home with the first model McCulloch built in 1939. It featured an engine the size of a dishwasher, and roared to life in the garage with the subtlety of a steam locomotive. He had a deal with someone who owned acres of forest, and let him cut dead wood off the property for firewood. He’d pack us kids into the cab of the Ford, heave the dishwasher chainsaw onto the bed of the truck, and off we’d go for an exciting afternoon of hauling wood through the underbrush.

Time is fluid as a child of eight or nine, so I don’t remember exactly how long we were out in the woods with him on these trips. It could have been hours, days or weeks. I do remember countless trips back and forth from the truck towards the screaming, gnashing sound of the dishwasher chainsaw, finding him sweating with the effort of holding 500 lbs. of bucking pig iron four feet off the ground. When we’d carried enough wood (and my father had worn his arms into useless jelly), we’d pack up the truck and head for home.

Evenings included my favorite chore of all, the nightly trip to the woodpile in the dark with a wheelbarrow. I’d lift the tarp, sure that I’d be consumed by rabid, angry snakes or raccoons, and fill the barrow with split wood, (He must have split the wood when we were sleeping, because I don’t remember that part) then bring it up to the basement window to heave it in to my Dad, who stacked it against the wall next to the hot stove. Then, I’d return out to the woodpile and get another load. In this quaint but character-building way, our family rode out the oil crisis of the late 70’s.

I gained a huge amount of respect for my Dad this weekend when I finished cutting the final section of elm tree in our backyard on Saturday. I’d rented a 14′ Stihl chainsaw after a frustrating failure to revive Dave’s on Friday night, and fired it up for the first time with a healthy sense of apprehension. This was no dishwasher, but the potential to self-mutilate was still as great. The first few cuts were tentative, meek stabs at the wood, but after a half-hour of familiarity, I was splitting fat chunks of the elm into bite-sized half-rounds for lining the garden. When I’d finished that part, I cut the other sections down into quarters for splitting in the fall (everything is still soaking wet.)

By the end of the day, my arms were tired, my back was singing Ave Maria, and only the timely intervention by my wife with an afternoon meal kept me from passing out next to the woodpile. But the majority of the felled tree is now off the lawn, and I made it through the day without severing a leg.

Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on pre-grown plants at the Friendly Neighborhood Home Superstore this year, Jen and I decided to start our own seed in the basement. Partially inspired by my father’s success (the man can make plants grow from moon dust) and partially inspired by our lack of funds, we bought several mini-greenhouses, their accompanying heating mats, and a bagful of seed. Unfortunately, hubris clouded our better judgement, because after reviewing the space and height requirements for each species of plant we’re starting, it became clear that we don’t have the massive acreage needed to cultivate everything we bought.

For the record, we’re putting in three species of tomatoes (we love our tomatoes here), eggplant (I’m a recent and avid convert), cucumber, pole beans, soybeans (edamame is the shiznit) and a Blackwater-sized army of marigolds and nasturtium to fend off the bugs. We also have an additional pile of pretty flowers to start in a few weeks for the other gardens.

Jen has spent hours poring over book after book, collating information about friendly plant species, best planting practices, soil composition, and harvesting tips. Even so, we spent the better part of Sunday planning out the timing—different seed goes in on different dates, sort of like following the Olympics or reading a complicated train schedule—we then plotted the size, shape, location and arrangement of our vegetable garden-to-be in the backyard for maximum sun exposure and drainage requirements. (Unfortunately, we are cursed with a sloping, shaded, and unevenly drained yard, with a minimum of southern exposure and a swamp in the corner.)

Last night, we put 72 seeds in to bake for six weeks under a grow lamp in the basement, and I transferred our schedule to iCal so that we’re on track with the plants. Let’s hope our efforts are not in vain.