Well, well. These past few days have been veeerrry interesting. First of all, we heard “through the grapevine” — I won’t identify the guilty party here — that podmates Dan and Logan, rather than returning from their three week road trip to the west coast on August 31, would extend it for two more weeks!
WHAT?
Okay. Regroup. Do stuff that would otherwise wait for Dan to come home.
Rebecca: “Sam! Will you fill in?”
Sam: “Yes.”
Rebecca: “Okay, read up on how to layer a compost pile.”
Not sure what Sam read, but here’s one:
For sure we do have all the ingredients: both brown (carbon: mostly sticks, leaves) and green (nitrogen: veggie and plant leavings), and manure to heat up the layers. But: we don’t have enough for all the compost we plan to make. So, thanks to Rebecca’s sleuthing, we used her trailer to haul spent grains —
donated from Big Woods Brewery, lots of table scraps from The Farm restaurant, and horse manure from Devonshire Stables. All local, of course!
Here’s Sam, as he willingly begins to tackle his immense task, accumulated from Dan being gone nearly three weeks.
Several hours later, here’s his finished, layered, compost pile (that’s a red onion skin on top).
And here’s the entire compost area. Neat. Organized.
Meanwhile, I was out in the garden cutting off the kale leaves which had been turned to lace by all the cabbage moths. Grrrr. . .
Rebecca says they will grow new leaves, but we’re going to cover them all with shade cloth meanwhile to keep out the moths.
Meanwhile, the beans, on their tripod structure that Dan made (which you can’t see, to the left) are producing mightily. See Sam in background, hard at work.
We’ve already harvested beans once, and podmate Andreas will harvest again, today, distributing to all three village homes.
That was Monday. On Tuesday, we held our regular work party, and decided to do a pod meeting afterwards, rather than wait two more weeks for Dan and Logan to return.
Rebecca huddles with Andreas, Sam, Dario, and John, as to what’s needed now.
Basically, this is a clean-up operation. Andreas and Sam dispatched to the chicken yard to take out little trees with our nifty Puller Bear.
And Dario and John remained next to the garage wall, asked to start dismantling the short brick section that’s crumbling next to it.
Seeing me with my camera, they decided to add some drama . . .
Meanwhile, I was futzing around, pulling plants we call “weeds” and taking more pics. Here’s the gigantic and very productive tomato patch (planted on the old chicken yard) now.
Here’s the greenhouse, temporarily just for storage. However, Rebecca is beginning to plant seeds for winter green production in the five new Garden Towers and their greenhouse. More on that soon.
I love this giant leaf!
Finally, here’s the latest addition to one of the stone sculptures. A mirror! “So I can pluck my chin hairs,” Rebecca tells me. (That’s “crone hairs,” to me. )
Oh yes, on to the “surprise! of this post: It turns out that our gossipmonger was wrong, Dan and Logan are on their way back now! When I texted Dan yesterday, the day of their scheduled return, asking, “Is it true that you won’t return for two more weeks?” I got back, “Huh, where did you get that? We’re heading to Denver now, probably Kansas City Friday, and back Saturday.”
Okay! So look what we got done in the meantime, just because we thought they weren’t coming home soon. At our pod meeting, BTW, we decided to begin our regularly weekly scheduled open dinner night on September 14, that’s a Thursday (note change from Wednesday), 6:30 p.m.