Hot Summer, Way hot and the Garden starts to thrive

It has been a wild and crazy spring here in Oregon. Sun, rain, chilly, wind, clouds and unseasonably cool then burning heat. Could Mother Earth being going through 'the change' - menopause on a global scale. Poor gal.

Well the garden has been funky. Cold weather crops got going but most things have been setting. Now finally things are starting to take off. The grapes are one of the best looking crops this year. I spent a ton of time repairing and upgrading the garden beds in the greenhouse area. I need to do more repairs and buy some new plastic before the winter but we will have lots of yummy food this summer and some all through the winter.


This is a close up of the new grapes, they bloom and then the fruit sets. These are delicious Himrod grapes - incredible sweet flavor. We usually have 60 pounds or more easily just off the rail here by the house. There are 2 other kinds of grapes as well.




I have designed a new kind of garden bed that is really efficient = uses very little water, nutrients go just to my plants, no weeding and as you can see I can grow really intensively.


This is the tomato bed. There are 8 different tomatoes plants. By the end of the season they will be huge. They grow up and over the wooden frame on top and then come cascading down the sides so the the plants end up being 8 ft tall or so. They are filled with tomatoes and it is quite the job for Janai just to harvest them all. This year we will need a more effective way to preserve with all the high food prices. The quality is supreme - yummy Organic, picked at the peek of ripe prefection. Oregon has cool nights so I like to grow small sweet tomatoes. The big red ones are okay but do not develop the acidic bite that you get growing in the middle of the US or south.


Here are 2 potatoes beds with Yokon Gold type potatoes and some chard. They are 2 kinds of raspberries in the far bed. The backdrop is some of my bamboo collection.


This was another huge spring project. This is firewood for the sauna. It is packed up high. I also use it to start the woodstove in the house. The really rotten old wood left over from tops of trees that we logged back in 1996 burn fast and hot.



This is a much prettier view of the sauna. I have about 26 different kinds of bamboo. I like the prettier kind. Some are clumpers and some are spreaders. I have some that I spread around our land and some that I can trade or share with others.


This is the bamboo shading the river gravel walkway to the sauna. It is cool and refreshing. Nice leaf songs if there is a breeze blowing. It is really cool at night as well.



Here is a naughty little new timber bamboo - Vivax, that is trying to creep up through the deck. I will just smack it and it will die. Some varieties could do damage.



This is my herb garden on the deck. Makes food insanely delicious when you use fresh herbs. I need to come up with a way to transfer into the house this winter so we can sustain them and their yummy flavor.



This is another area of bamboo that I am growing near the lined pond - fire danger resource and has fish growing in it. I have on bamboo that is quite rare. The others are a little more common and very pretty.


This is firewood that I have cut and split from the selective harvest of trees that we did last fall. I am building a new storage area so I can stack it in to keep it out of the rain. Man we blew through the firewood last winter when it was soooooooooo cold.

bye
ciao