Port Potager

It’s hard to get excited about a drought , but if there’s a silver lining, it’s that this was as good a summer as any to work on a pretty intense side project. Since I am now working from home as a full-time writer, Kirk built me a tiny office in the back yard. He started this project back before school ended, and today the interior is finally complete! Here’s my new view of the garden from inside: That window used to be on the back of the garage, but Kirk salvaged it, closed the hole, and added an 8’ x 8’ room to the back of the garage with its own entrance to the garden. Here’s what that garage wall looks like now:  That’s a flip-down table that we installed to be a standing desk , plus a few other office-y fixtures to hold my (very minimal) stuff. Mostly I just use a laptop. Here’s the view from the garden: This office is basically a tiny house with no plumbing. That chair  still needs a side table, which we decided to make out of a big slice of t...

The very cold temperatures we’ve had lately (not to mention late-season snows!) have set us back by at least two weeks in our planting schedule. Because nighttime temperatures have been in the 20s, we’re not able to keep seedlings outside to harden off, which means they aren’t ready to plant.  You can also see that the weather has frozen our daffodils and tulips in their tracks, and nothing is blooming: But if you look closely in the photo, you’ll also be able to tell how we’ve been spending our time instead. Did you notice that the house is yellow? We finally  got started on this enormous project this weekend, even though we’ve known for years that A) the house needs paint, and B) that it’s destined to be yellow. So before the perennial border plants get too big to work around — and while we don’t have anything to plant — we got out there and started scraping off the old paint: If you look closely. you can tell that we have crushed some of our ...