continuing to prepare the garden, and my bike

Summer. All of a sudden it’s summer–I only just turned off the boiler yesterday and the same day it was really tempting to turn on the air conditioner. Since my classes officially finished with the handing in of a project on Monday night, I have turned my attention to the garden big time. (If you want to check out my group’s final project, which was a digital library on community gardening, you can see it here:
http://classrm03.lis.illinois.edu:9018/greenstone/cgi-bin/library.cgi?a=p&p=home&l=en&w=utf-8)

I’m following the gardening method called “square foot gardening” this year. You mark out square foot sections (or thereabouts, one of my rows uses rectangular shape gardening!) and plant more or fewer plants in each square, depending on the plant size. It’s a highly productive method to use in small spaces, or so say the proponents. Trademark features of square foot gardening are the use of a raised bed with really good soil (this one is nearly all compost), a small enough area that you can reach across so you never step on the soil and compact it, and mixing up what you plant in each square every year in a crop rotation kind of way. You also plant companion plants like marigolds in some of the squares both to look nice and to keep away critters. You’ll see I also have a big net to keep away the critters.

I put a row of bricks in the middle for better reaching (I can lean one hand on the bricks while reaching) and also to free up a bit of compost I needed elsewhere.

Today, since I had the bird net built, I brought my seedlings outside for their first day outdoors. It was a field trip, they have gone back in for the night. We are expecting thunderstorms shortly and I’m not sure if they’re strong enough for that yet! It may get cooler over the weekend so I’ll wait on planting them until another week or so.

And John pointed out that I hadn’t posted the final pic of my new bike. Here it is! I’ve been riding it everywhere and love it. It’s amazing how easy it is to ride a bike when it’s light and nimble!!!