Twisp of Fate

We are co-gardening vegetables this year at the home of some neighbors up the road, since we don’t have a vegetable garden spot developed here yet.  So far we have been harvesting a lot of Swiss chard, lettuce, cucumbers, carrots, Walla Walla sweet onions, beets and squash – the peas didn’t do spectacularly well.  When I bring the produce home, I have a great little stainless sink set up in the back yard to do the rough washing and trimming.  It’s so nice not having to do that first messy job in the kitchen!  Eventually, we will build it into a permanent base with the water hooked up and some kind of drain (now it just runs into a bucket).

The last couple of days have seen things move forward with our plans for some borders around the perimeter of the lawn.  We have had a big pile of dirt and some rocks out there for over a year, without a clear idea of what to do with it.  Our friends from the coast came over, he is a landscape architect and knows exactly what to do!  We went to work with the tractor, shovels and rakes and got the first border laid out.  Rick and I still need to move more dirt over to fill on some other areas, but we are on our way.  We also went up to Wild Hearts Nursery near Winthrop yesterday and got some ideas of what kinds of shrubs and perennials to start planting in the new borders.  Very exciting!

tractor girl

Rick is getting pretty good with that tractor – you should have seen him move those big rocks into place.

Here’s my Sitting Rock set into place, with Chris’s contribution to the garden ambience – the classical and the primitive female forms:

There is supposed to be a 6-foot solid fence going in across the back some time this year (the owner of the farm next door is doing it, not us) – so that will make a huge difference in what we see from the deck and the back yard.

Lots of thunder and lightning over here yesterday afternoon.  It came right over us at one point and we all sat out on the deck and watched the show.  A couple of fires started up the road from us, so there were fire crews coming up soon after, and helicopters with water buckets, and evidently some smoke jumpers dropped in as well.  It seems to be under control today, although there is still a little smoke visible.