August Life
I'm in the middle of a major project for the business and on top of a poor night's sleep last night it feels like my brain is leaking out of my ears this afternoon. The fact that it's also harvest season and there's a 3100 square foot garden outside is adding to that, as you might imagine. My only saving grace lately is the fact it's been such a dry year that the garden is producing very slowly - the paste tomatoes are still ripening and I might be able to pick some green beans tonight, roughly 3 weeks later than usual. Even at that, there won't be many beans to pick, since the 8 foot plus pole beans actually ended up more like 2 - 4 feet despite watering efforts. And these are the same seed I grew last year which did just fine... under much wetter conditions.
Melon that's STILL not ripe
So harvest season at this point consists largely checking the zucchini and cucumber plants twice a day, keeping an eye on the pumpkins to make sure things are fertilized, checking the melons for ripening progress, picking small (but tasty) tomatoes, and checking for tomato/tobacco hornworms. I stopped the time consuming watering a few weeks back and there was one good rain of about 3/4" but other than that it's largely been 90+ degrees and dry. Considering that and the complete lack of food they've been provided, what the plants in the garden have been living on remains a mystery. Other than the cucumbers anyway - I took pity on them once they started producing more than the zucchini plants, so they're getting some water every other day and the same weekly fertilizer as the flowers.
Speaking of flowers, it turns out the kind in containers need fed. Through a small series of misadventures, I ended up with 4 hanging baskets this spring plus 4 washtubs planted with calendula and 2 hanging-baskets-with-their-own-stands of black-eyed susan vine. Two of the hanging baskets were petunias that I very nearly starved to death before I figured out that weekly fertilizer was not, in fact, a nice bonus but an actual necessity. Whoops. So now I have seven hanging baskets, since I bought three replacements at 50% off when it looked like the first two weren't going to make it but have since made a slow, but miraculous recovery. The only problem now is I like them, so next year I'm either going to have to buy a lot of hanging baskets or start a lot more flowers from seed.
Petunias looking vastly improved versus a month ago
Meanwhile I'm going to have to decide what to do with the washtub space because it's not going to be calendulas, which don't seem to like the hours and hours of intense sun they're getting, have required a lot of dead heading daily, and just aren't doing it for me.
So that's the growing things. Tomatoes continue to loom but it's going to be a small crop considering the number of plants. There's a ridiculous number of melons out there if they ever get around to ripening up, but everything else has been manageable. I'd like to plant some kale and chard for the winter but the garden is going to have some manure tilled in late fall, so I'm not sure where to put them in at.
Baby long pie pumpkin
It's a quiet harvest but that's okay because the business is taking up alllll the slack. The major project is setting up a Shopify site, which didn't have to be done now but a stand alone site is long overdue* and will be beneficial going into fall and the holiday season. Part of it was designing an actual logo at long last and redesigning the business cards, which involved downloading and opening Inkscape and relearning it and Photoshop and doing things with graphics I half learned over a decade ago (vectors. oi.) But that was just the start and there has been a mountain of new information shoved in my poor brain the last few weeks.
*Feel free to not remember how long this has been a work in progress. There have been... numerous complications.
Cheerfully, I'm on track to have things live at the end of this week! Which is awesome! Then I can roll right on in to inventory! ...Not so awesome. But it really needs to happen before the fall buying that gets kicked off Labor Day weekend, the flea markets where things are actually sold, and the rapidly approaching holiday selling season. With all the shiny new website and blog tasks I'll have just added on top. Right now, though, there's some watering cans to haul around. :)
Crossposted to Dreamwidth. Comment here or there. ♥ Blue :)
Melon that's STILL not ripe
So harvest season at this point consists largely checking the zucchini and cucumber plants twice a day, keeping an eye on the pumpkins to make sure things are fertilized, checking the melons for ripening progress, picking small (but tasty) tomatoes, and checking for tomato/tobacco hornworms. I stopped the time consuming watering a few weeks back and there was one good rain of about 3/4" but other than that it's largely been 90+ degrees and dry. Considering that and the complete lack of food they've been provided, what the plants in the garden have been living on remains a mystery. Other than the cucumbers anyway - I took pity on them once they started producing more than the zucchini plants, so they're getting some water every other day and the same weekly fertilizer as the flowers.
Speaking of flowers, it turns out the kind in containers need fed. Through a small series of misadventures, I ended up with 4 hanging baskets this spring plus 4 washtubs planted with calendula and 2 hanging-baskets-with-their-own-stands of black-eyed susan vine. Two of the hanging baskets were petunias that I very nearly starved to death before I figured out that weekly fertilizer was not, in fact, a nice bonus but an actual necessity. Whoops. So now I have seven hanging baskets, since I bought three replacements at 50% off when it looked like the first two weren't going to make it but have since made a slow, but miraculous recovery. The only problem now is I like them, so next year I'm either going to have to buy a lot of hanging baskets or start a lot more flowers from seed.
Petunias looking vastly improved versus a month ago
Meanwhile I'm going to have to decide what to do with the washtub space because it's not going to be calendulas, which don't seem to like the hours and hours of intense sun they're getting, have required a lot of dead heading daily, and just aren't doing it for me.
So that's the growing things. Tomatoes continue to loom but it's going to be a small crop considering the number of plants. There's a ridiculous number of melons out there if they ever get around to ripening up, but everything else has been manageable. I'd like to plant some kale and chard for the winter but the garden is going to have some manure tilled in late fall, so I'm not sure where to put them in at.
Baby long pie pumpkin
It's a quiet harvest but that's okay because the business is taking up alllll the slack. The major project is setting up a Shopify site, which didn't have to be done now but a stand alone site is long overdue* and will be beneficial going into fall and the holiday season. Part of it was designing an actual logo at long last and redesigning the business cards, which involved downloading and opening Inkscape and relearning it and Photoshop and doing things with graphics I half learned over a decade ago (vectors. oi.) But that was just the start and there has been a mountain of new information shoved in my poor brain the last few weeks.
*Feel free to not remember how long this has been a work in progress. There have been... numerous complications.
Cheerfully, I'm on track to have things live at the end of this week! Which is awesome! Then I can roll right on in to inventory! ...Not so awesome. But it really needs to happen before the fall buying that gets kicked off Labor Day weekend, the flea markets where things are actually sold, and the rapidly approaching holiday selling season. With all the shiny new website and blog tasks I'll have just added on top. Right now, though, there's some watering cans to haul around. :)
Crossposted to Dreamwidth. Comment here or there. ♥ Blue :)