Reining In the Garden

Happy Thursday! I’d like to share with you my garden, and this year’s goals.

My veggie garden. When I say the rain was bad this year, it was "the field behind never got plowed" bad.

We planted the veggie garden late this year, closer to mid-June, rather than over Memorial Day weekend as I usually prefer. We (thought) we weeded the veggies well, and that the rest of our work for the year would be cleaning up the landscaping. Not so. Due to how wet this spring was here in SE Wisconsin, we didn’t keep up on mowing the grass, which allowed a lot more weeds to go to seed. So, my veggie garden has a thriving crop of lamb’s quarters, bindweed, and sow thistle.

There is more broccoli hiding

There is corn somewhere!

Tomatoes just don't care

The peas need no help

The tomatoes will make it, we lost a few of the pepper plants to the weeds, and the Napa cabbage I planted is a total loss. I have done some weeding around the peppers to rescue them and managed to uncover the Brussels sprouts in the process. I’m actually ok with losing the Napa cabbage, since it is attracting the cabbage moths to it, instead of them going after the sprouts and my broccoli and cauliflower. If you look closely, you can still see the pumpkin, cucumber, and corn plants. They don’t seem to be too bothered by the invaders. I had planned more green bean plants and even some black beans for drying, but the weeds got to be so bad, I never bothered to plant them. The peas I planted seem to be training themselves along the fencing without any need of encouragement from me.

Fight, cucumber, fight!

Peppers       --    Brussels Sprouts
Ahh, they can both breathe

So, end goal is to get a decent crop, keep the weedy hoards back, and then to mulch everything deeply in the fall. We would also like to work on a more permanent fence and a brick border around the garden to discourage the grass from creeping in, although it isn’t planned to be completed this year. In our area, this will mean a lot of work, because we will have to dig deep enough to lay gravel underneath, then sand, then the bricks. If we don’t take that extra care, the bricks will heave and shift a lot as the temperature changes.

Our decorative landscaping areas need a lot of work, as well. There is a garden bed that borders the driveway, planted with Birch trees and tulip bulbs, which I plan to simply weed and lay landscaping fabric and bark mulch. I would like to remove the large forsythia bush, as this year only one of the stems bloomed; the bed around that needs to be weeded and covered with the fabric and bark mulch. This year’s prolonged deep freeze seems to have significantly damaged the two burning bushes that frame our front door. I do not care for them, so I will not be sad to see them go. My husband and I would prefer edible landscaping, anyway, and have discussed planting blueberries. Even further down the road, we have talked about ripping out the yew hedges and honeysuckle along the front and side of the house and planting currants there instead. The more immediate goal for the bushes along the house is that they need to be trimmed back to make space for the window installers. This will also allow more light to get through to our basement.

My house and yard. Anyone want to lend a hand?

Back of the house from the right

The backyard landscaping along the house and garage is going to be a lot of work. We did zero weeding last year, and, as I have joked with my friends, we are paying penance for it now. Immediately behind the house is a lilac bush, a trellis with another honeysuckle. We have two volunteer oak trees, which I believe to be white oak. They are too close to the house and must be moved. We also have eager catnip and lemon balm plants which were not there last year. I’d like to move the lemon balm and catnip to containers, try to encourage the raspberries we planted earlier in the year between the honeysuckle and lilac, and again spread landscaping fabric and mulch everywhere. My goal is to get most of the landscaped areas into a holding pattern, while we work on setting up the veggie garden to our satisfaction. I don’t want to have to feel like I’m fighting back the forest directly next to my house. I also don’t want to have to worry about large roots damaging my foundation, even more so since our basement is 2/3 finished spaces.

Back of the house from the left

Of course, I am sharing all of these lofty goals, but today has been raining all day so far, and stopped just in time for me to come and take photos. It is supposed to be brutally hot where we are for the next several days, so any work I am able to complete will have to be when it is very early or very late in the day. It is not my favorite time to work, since that is also when the small biting bugs are out and most active, but the it needs to get done!

If it continues to rain or be too hot to spend long times outside on my days off, I will work more on some of the inside projects. First up is finishing the alterations on the curtains for my daughter’s bedroom and finishing a multi-tiered broom skirt for myself. Next week I will share photos of whatever progress is made.

Take care now!

New Beginnings

Hello and welcome to the first post from my blog reboot. Formerly known as Small Kitchen Cooking, I have decided to expand my wondering aloud to include everything I’m into. Which is a lot. I did have someone recommend Mental Whiplash Crafting to me as new title, since I have such diverse interests, but it just doesn’t have the right ring to it.

I live in Southeastern Wisconsin, in an area that is halfway between the suburbs and truly rural with my husband, daughter, and two cats. I have seen it written as the “exurbs” before, but that is not a commonly used term. My backyard is a farm field, and my next-door neighbor commonly shoots at the coyotes to scare them off. But I can get to Milwaukee or Chicago in less than an hour and a half, so I’m not really in a remote area.

In case anyone is curious just what my interests include, I am going to try and list them out here. I will probably forget a few.

- Knitting, crocheting, weaving, felting (and I have done some spinning, but am not that huge of a fan.) I like yarn

- Sewing, quilting, etc. I have altered my own curtains, made the majority of my own wedding dress, and own way too much fabric; I like that, too.

- Gaming. Board, role-playing (table-top, please. I don’t LARP anymore), video, mind…

- Cars and automotive things. I used to change my own oil, for both myself and my husband. I like cars and trucks. This winter I took apart the carburetor for our snow blower, cleaned it, and reassembled it. It works now.

- Gardening, mostly vegetable, but we bought a new-to-us home about a year ago and didn’t do anything to keep up with the garden last summer, so we really are having to make up for it now. I’ve been paying a lot of weeding penance.

- Food Storage (like canning) and recipes. My, how far down the list this has fallen!

- Home décor and improvement. This August we are getting our windows replaced. After a lot of research and reading, we decided to go with Okna windows and a contractor out of Milwaukee.

- To a limited extent, cleaning and organizing. We are still fiddling with how we want our home to look. There are a few boxes sitting around still, because of some of the planned décor and improvement projects.

- There will be some slice of life bits here and there. Because this is about my interests as they relate to my life, and how I manage to work on all of them.

I hope to be able to jump on here and publish weekly or biweekly, we will see how life’s schedule takes us in the next few months. I hope you will enjoy the ride, and check back to see how things go around my home.