Me and Farmer Ted

More gardening... we dug into the compost bin and found several surprises from previous tenants inside (plastic bags, balls of aluminum foil, pieces of plastic, broken glass, etc.). Who knows what else is in there that we couldn't identify. I don't want to think about it. Dave did the dirty work of picking through it as best he could and mixing it in with the soil. But all his hard work seems to have paid off, as the patch looks great--very rich and dark. We have high hopes for it.

We emptied out the compost bin and moved it behind the tree, which is a much better place for it than in front of the gate (we must've had some brilliant folks living here before us). Our pushy but knowledgeable neighbor, Hannah, corrected our placement of it a little bit, so we'll have to get to that tomorrow. She's from Croatia, and she studied Biology at university, but then she married an Englishman and moved to England, where she had a hard time finding a job, so she decided to stay home with her daughter and now puts all her biological knowledge into her garden. She works in an alterations shop during the day. Her English is very good now, but she was out of the job market for so long that she didn't feel confident enough to look for work in the sciences after such a long time away from it. Her husband Alan is being treated for cancer, so he's home a lot, and her life has been very rough lately. We chat over the fence a lot, usually starting off with her giving us a little gardening "advice" (like I said, she's a bit pushy). She also makes an excellent summer pudding with red and black currants and serves it to us with cream. Yummy.

So now the garden is looking great. I planted most of the rest of the seeds in pots for starting, although I'm going to put a few beans and carrots directly into the ground to see if that works any better, since I often have trouble transplanting seedlings. We made a new little path back to the new compost bin location behind the treee, and we reinforced the border on our little growing patch. Ready for bean and carrot seeds tomorrow?