Potato - Fail

What you are looking at is our entire potato harvest for the year!  Yep, pretty much a failure of our potato experiment this year.

The wire bins that we filled with soil, compost, and straw as the potatoes grew, proved irresistible to the many burrowing moles, voles, ground squirrels and such that we have in multitudes here.  The hypothesis was that the loose enriched soil would make it easy for potatoes to grow and people to dig.  We'll never know for sure, because it made it even easier for these creatures to weasel through for their 24 hour buffet.  I'm surprised that they missed this one!

Considering that we harvested fewer potatoes than we planted the summer before leads us to the conclusion that we'll be buying our spuds at the grocery store from now on!

But our tomato crop more than made up for it.  We also lost all 3 baby Aspen trees to deer, and they found our 2 fruit trees very tasty.  I'm hoping they'll recover and that we can find a better way to protect them next summer.  We haven't gotten a single fruit from these either, in their 2nd year, so those too may be a failed experiment, but our raspberries and blueberries have already shown promise and produce!

I've spent a great deal of time in our beautiful fall weather doing my least favorite chore... pulling up dead plants, cleaning up and putting the garden to bed for the winter.  It's time now for some serious sewing!!

WIP Wed: Summer Sampler Continued

I have 2 more blocks done, and only 1 left to make!  Yipee!  I love how this quilt is coming together!  With only 21 days left until school starts, I hope to get some good chunks of time back to do some actual quilting soon (weather permitting).  I can't complain much though, as my kids are getting old enough that I no longer worry about keeping them out of trouble, but instead worry that they spend way too much time entertaining themselves on the computer.  I've been able to do more sewing this summer than ever before!  I've started the final block, and hope to finish it soon, and pack up my finished quilt blocks to make room for school supplies and veggies.

Speaking of veggies, our garden is coming along quite well.  I'm so glad my kids like veggies.  Each year, our garden gets bigger and bigger, and we have less and less of it to preserve.  Anyone with teen boys knows where it all goes :-).  I only planted a few flowers this year, none for cutting, so I'm enjoying instead the flowers in the garden.  Ever notice most are yellow?  I wonder why.  But I did find a few purple ones this week... an eggplant flower, and a yard-long bean flower.  Pretty!

We also have some young okra almost ready to pick (my favorite veggie), and some red starting to appear!

As usual, it's Wednesday, so I'm linking up with Freshly Pieced blog.  Come join us!

A Sign of Things to Come (veggies and vintage sheets)

I love the sight of this in our garden...

We will eat our first zucchini of the year in the next day or two!

Our shade cloth experiment is going nicely...

The only sewing going on lately is some "closet curtains" that I'm making for my oldest son.  We spent the better part of a day or 2 cleaning out his room, rearranging furniture and removing the bi-fold closet doors that I hate and that take up so much room.  I cut up some really fun vintage sheets that I had and I can't wait to show you what I'm planning with them. 

My boys have been busy too...

These tiny quail chicks are having the hardest time getting up over the street curb.  They're incredibly cute!  In a few days I'm sure they won't get so stuck!

But lately I've been spending time just about each day at this place...  I feel so lucky to have this in our community!!   How's your summer going?