Summer Continues!

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.

High Summer in the PNW

The PV array on the roof produced 620 KWH of energy in June. That's more than 20 KWH per day! The next several days are forecast to yield completely sunny weather. Today I read the meter and did my monthly Green Tags attestation ritual. The regional energy monopoly, PSE will be calculating net-metering payments in July. This is the sunny season.

Two weeks ago, I climbed on my good extension ladder and using a L O N G pole and synthetic sheep's wool window washer-thing and a hose w/ a nozzle attached, cleaned dust and bird droppings from the PV array. The panels are visibly cleaner and since our big construction projects are done (for now at least) less dust will be flying around. Clean panels make for better power generation.

I received the soil analysis back from Twiss Labs. As I suspected, the soil in our main garden area is woefully deficient in Nitrogen. At a pH of 6.6 it's also a bit alkaline for some of the vegetables we've planted. Today I broadcast about 2 pounds of ammonium sulfate on our 320 sq ft garden. As instructed on the package, I then watered the fertilizer into the soil. As I type this Angel is giving the plants another drink.

Hopefully this will do the trick. We've had some spinach and some other greens but everything seems to be growing slowly.

The soil analysis indicated that we have plenty of organic material (that's good news, considering all the back-breaking work I did last summer). Phosphorous, potassium, and trace minerals are good too. Next year I'll emphasize organic supplements, but for now I decided to kick start the particular element that was lacking.

Since elemental sulphur is indicated as a way to lower the pH of the soil, I'm also hoping the application of ammonium sulfate may make the soil slightly more acidic as well. We'll see, won't we.

Our summer visitor dance card is filling up, which is exciting and fun. We have someone staying with us now (an old friend of Angel's) and have a near constant stream of friends and relatives staying in our guest quarters in the carriage house through mid September. Given all the changes in the past year, Angel and I are grateful for friends who have been able to make the trek up here to the 48th parallel.

The air is still, and the sky is blue and bright. It is just shy of 8:00PM.

Press On.