27 Jun
I’m finally done preparing the beds in my Sholom Community Garden plot, which makes me want to cry tears of joy. A couple weird things I’m trying include artichoke, celery, and uchiki kuri.
I’m loving watching all the different gardens come along. There are so many ways to make a garden grow!
5 May
I’m going on a fantastic adventure to Bolivia for the next couple weeks, and I can’t help but feel a [tiny] bit sad that I’m going to come back and my garden will be almost an entirely different creature.
My cascade hops are now growing 6-12 inches a day, and even though I’ve strung up lines for them to crawl, I have no doubt when I get back I’ll have to reroute them.
By the time I get back, my lettuce and radishes will be ready to harvest, and I probably will not recognize my swiss chard, kale, and beets. My experimental square foot of oats and barley will probably have another foot or so on them (more on the grain, later), and my strawberries will have set fruit that might even be starting to ripen!
Every morning before I go to work, and every evening when I get home, I can’t help but stroll around and examine every bed for the tiniest changed details. So when I get back from this journey, I will have missed a lot…and that is just a little bit sad.
In any case, I gotta get to the airport, but here are some recent pics of the yard:
Pea and Fava & lettuce beds
apple tree, raspberries, blackberries, and thyme…and some decorative stuff I don’t know the name of 
I am so-very excited for this trip. Catchya in two weeks!
28 Jul
So I’ve been a lazy gardener recently, and an even lazier blogger. But don’t you worry, my veggies are punishing me for it. Winter squash all appears to be in the process of dying, Weird Leaves are pretty much the name of the game for my green bean and rocoto pepper plants, a couple of my tomato plants seem to be experiencing depression, and I do not appear to have any quinoa. But, those items are for the next posts. In this post, here is my long overdue yard update. My, how things change in the month:
June 23rd Front Yard Left
July 5th Front Yard Left
July 27th Front Yard Left
June 23rd Front Yard Right
July 5th Front Yard Right
July 27th Front Yard Right
June 23rd Boulevard
July 27th Boulevard
June 23rd Raised Bed
July 5th Raised Bed
July 27th Left Raised Bed
In other news, the house on our right has been vacant for quite some time, and now a family is moving in. They do not appear to hate the front yard and, in fact, seem to even be supportive of it. This is good news. I’m really hoping that they are generally organic-lov’in hippie-types. Maybe we will be BFFs and share chickens or bees or something. *sigh* one can dream
16 Jun
I added a trellis and a potted lime tree to the left side of the yard. The trellis is just a three-legged bamboo trellis, where I just used lashing to bind the poles together. Not that I know how to, but I gave it the ol’ college try. This eHow How to Make a Bamboo Trellis article is basically the same thing. I also wrapped string around the three poles from the bottom to the top, so the cucumbers and climbing beans have something smaller to latch on to. 
As you can probably tell, I’m in the process of painting the lime tree pot…but I hate painting, so I’m guessing it will take a while. That’s the same color of the cold frame I made…which is also not totally painted yet, either.
My Jesus Blueberry Bushes that I moved to the front yard did okay…with the sad, sad exception of the middle one, which passed away last week. It was totally my fault, I kept being reckless while watering the other plants and knocked off the few tiny leaves that were there. I deeply regret this.
However, I was lucky enough to get five amazing organic heirloom tomato plants (and I am too obsessed with unique tomatoes to turn them down) and am trying to find places for them, so I guess my new black plum paste tomato is taking over the blueberry bush spot. C’est la vie.
14 Jun
Last week I finished my boulevard melon patch, which is nice because this senorita is running out of steam. And I use the word “melon” to include gourds, because I’m too lazy to type “melon and gourd” patch. nevermind.
The black strip is composted manure. Since I didn’t have the energy to dig more than one planting bed, I’m hoping the compost will be rich enough to sustain the four or five gourds. *sigh* maybe I should dig another bed. You’ve convinced me.
I didn’t realize that the generic light-colored mulch that I was using was not pine bark…so when I bought a bag of pine bark down the street and opened it to find a rich, dark brown bark, I was a bit surprised. If I were more creative and had the time and ambition I might make the two-shades of mulch into a funky design. But I don’t. I tell you, juggling the day job, running home to garden, researching gardening, eating, and hoping to find some time to blog about the gardening is really wearing on me. So thank goodness my conversion is basically FINI.
I still have to figure out where to put three tomato plants that I just don’t have the stomach to not include. Maybe I’ll sneak a couple on the boulevard…
31 May
I’ve mulched the vegetable beds on the left side of the front yard because the soil dries out quickly and I’m too lazy to water the plants, like, every day. I decided to use cocoa shells because they were on sale and, while I’m not a chocolate fiend, I definitely appreciate a front lawn that smells like a candy bar. Cocoa mulch is generally much more expensive than other types of mulch, but because of the microscopic size of my yard, it’s still a pretty tame investment. To cover the beds on the left side of the yard was only one bag of mulch.
And, I have no idea why, but since mulching the beds the squirrels have not made their requisite daily visit to dig up root vegetables and kill my transplants. That would be awesome if my affinity for chocolatey goodness was also squirrel control (and, please understand, I am by no means minimizing the importance of Mac in this squirrely battle).
The conversion of the right side of my front yard has also been progressing, and I’m just about done. Naturally, the right side went much faster than the left side because 1) it’s smaller and 2) even though I still don’t know what I’m doing, I know how to do what I’m doing with a little more efficiency.
This time around as I laid out the newspaper over the grass, I used many more layers. The 4-5 layers that I used on the right side was too thin, and I’m getting some very-determined grass poking through to the sunlight. I have to specially thank my friend Mandy who apparently keeps up with the news much better than I, and saved stacks and stacks of newspaper for me.
Also, instead of keeping the newspapers weighed down with rocks this time around, I just used the hose to dampen the newspapers so they wouldn’t blow away. Much more efficient.
Finally, I filled the holes with the soil, peat moss, and vermiculite mix before I mulched the newspaper, so that not as much mulch would fall into the holes. I did run out of vermiculite, though, so I guess I will need to buy more. *sigh* Running to gardening stores imposes on my planting time.
The plan changed substantially from my drawn-up plan and now looks something like this: 
As I was digging, it just seemed to look better and give me more space. So it goes.
