All of the berry bushes and plants have begun to flower. We have about fifty strawberries plants scattered around the garden. We heard that they can be invasive (and what’s better than invasive food), so we were somewhat concerned that they would spread far beyond their designated areas. But this has never happened. So my wife transplanted many of them to a better location in hopes that they will spread and be more productive. We harvest around 1 gallon of strawberries per year.

We have two varieties of blueberry bushes: low bush and mid bush. The low bush produce very small blueberries, and the mid bush produce medium-sized blueberries. My parents had a high bush blueberry that was ten feet tall, so we decided against that variety, since we wanted blueberry bushes that could serve as an understory for other trees. And with just the few low and mid-sized blueberry bushes, we harvest 3-4 gallons of blueberries each year.

 

The raspberry bushes are spreading around very well—they run much, much more than the strawberries do, so we remove or relocate them as needed. They are super easy to propagate from cuttings. We harvest around 2 gallons of raspberries each year from one patch, and we started another patch on the other side of the house.

 

 

We’ve had a 4 ft. × 8 ft. corn, beans, and squash bed on the south side of our house, for many years, on a narrow strip of ground between the stone foundation and the driveway. In time, the wood that held the bed together rotted, so it had to be replaced. I decided to try a new prefab plastic-wood hybrid frame. Really easy to assemble, and I’m hoping since we’re told all the time that plastic won’t break down for thousands of years that this frame will last at least a fraction of that.

 

With one of our rain barrels so close to the corn bed, I’m thinking of adding a splitter to the base of the barrel and some kind of irrigation setup, so I don’t have to water the bed by hand.

Hard to say how much corn and beans we’ve grown in these. Enough I guess… we usually have lots of corn on the cob at the end of summer, and freeze the rest. The beans we dry out and rehydrate when we remember to—otherwise, they just store for a long, long time.

 

Finally, we had our basement door replaced. This door used to be three single-panes of glass in a wood frame, which was nice for letting afternoon sunlight into the basement. But it wasn’t well insulated or weatherproofed and a lot of heat escaped from it in the winter. One drawback is that we couldn’t keep the storm door because it no longer fit the frame. So we’ll have to figure out something to use in place of that. Perhaps one of those magnetic screen doors.

 

This is a tiny door. Here I am standing next to it. When you come in or go out, you have to stoop and avoid hitting your head. Moving any appliances in and out of the basement has been tricky. The door is slightly more than 4 feet high and less that 3 feet wide, leading down an even shorter flight of stairs into the half-finished basement, or conversely leading directly outside to the garden. We call it our “hobbit” door.

 

And by association, for your listening pleasure…