We have booked our calendar full of summer visitors this year, and our dear friends and relatives have begun their journeys to the edge of the continent to share food, wine, music, and sights with us.
While each season has its charms, summer in the Olympic National Forest can be pretty amazing. Angel took these shots on a recent day trip. Wow!
It is hard to post when so much else is going on, but the venerable Friendly One will try...
At long last, the garden seems to be perking up. Yesterday we ate some kohlrabi. Zucchini are getting ready and we'll probably have some tonight. Salad greens have been flowing -- some doing better than others. Even the broccoli is producing.
We have met more long-time residents. The story is largely the same: the glacial til has few nutrients. "Compost, compost, compost" is the spell that seems best suited to the invocation of successful gardens. So we are getting as serious as we can with composting. I turned a big pile just this AM in fact. We try to enliven the soil by adding nutrients.
A friend's wife keeps rabbits as pets. They graze in the yard or are fed chemical-free "rabbit chow". We collect the manure and it goes, together with some straw from the hutches, into the compost bins. Kitchen and garden waste are added to the stew. Eventually, the right proportions of wet and dry, green and brown, hot and cold are approached. We turn the mix to add air.
It is but a matter of time, I suppose, but patience is not an easy lesson to learn.
Monday (weather and contractors willing) we will move a bit of soil around near the driveway. We will add a small concrete retaining wall to the south of the main vegetable garden. The result will be a minimum of nine feet of clearance between the bank and the south property line.
This will allow us to bring small trucks and building materials to the undeveloped parts of the property. The Old Amigo wants an even larger fenced garden area outside his office. This will feature raised beds and, if it all works out, rain-catchment-centric irrigation. Right now it is a massively scraggly weed patch, albeit a sunny one.
Step-by-step, we journey.
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Last weekend we set off to drive down to Carmel. We took 101 and planned to take 68 across to the coast. When we got to 68 the traffic was so intense that I missed the turnoff. We just kept going, deciding to take county roads across to the coast. We'd taken the road from Greenville to Carmel before, so I thought we'd try taking Jolon Rd through Fort Hunter Liggett over the mountains, coming out on Highway 1 just north of Big Sur. On our map this was shown as taking County Rd G14 to G18. We found G14 fine, but didn't really find the town of Jolon. After driving back and forth twice, we concluded that the G18 turnoff was also the road into the fort, through a security checkpoint.
We drove that, and continued up into the hills. We finally came to a camp site, where the road was marked with a sign saying "Milpitas Road Closed" due to mud and rock slides.
Looking later on Google Maps, we were at 36.141574,-121.537575, and
that road doesn't connect to the North Coast Ridge Trail, as shown at 36.144646,-121.550723.
Fortunately I'd filled up before we left, and the road was paved the whole way, so the ladies weren't too unhappy.
On the way home we stopped in Salinas, looking for a restaurant. We happened upon the Salinas Fish House, which was quite good. That made the trip a success.
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