Monthly Archives: August 2010

The Deck

The back of our house looks very different now than it did just a few short weeks ago. We had the guys at Stevens General Contractors design and build a custom Trex deck for us. They really did a nice job. After seeing the seriousness of the substructure they built, I’m guessing I could park a car (or two) on top of it. I was surprised how much work was needed to make everything fit just right. We are extremely happy with the results.

Before

After

Out of control

The garden is out of control. Some lack of control is good, such as the beans growing up over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. We can’t eat them as fast as we have to pick them. The same is true for the zucchini. But there are bad aspects to having no control. We had a huge storm over the weekend that snapped one of our biggest pepper plants. I put a bamboo pole next to it, but never got around to tying it up. The squash bugs are everywhere. I find and kill at least 10 adults every day, and now the babies are hatching. I had to kill several hundred this week already, and it only getting worse. We even have a million aphids on the Brussels sprouts. I think I may end up going nuclear on some of them.

But we did harvest a whole bunch of stuff this week.
6 bell peppers
20 banana peppers
10 anaheim peppers
10 peperoncini peppers
2 poblano peppers
100 cherry tomatoes
20 roma tomatoes
20 yukon gold potatoes
12 cups of purple beans