Summer 2009

2009 has been a wet year in Durham, NC. We have enjoyed spectacular thunderstorms and torrential downpours. A bit of a contrast to the 2 year drought that only cleared up in the hurricane season last year!

The good things about all the wetness: the veggie garden is growing prolifically, there have been fireflies in amazing abundance, frogs in tremendous quantities, more snakes and turtles around than we've ever seen before...the bad bit is that the heat arrived about 2 days ago, and 65% humidity and 38 degree weather is... as bad as we remember from other years.

Zinnia, chard, blueberries... before the birds found them

Other than the veggies, we've been enjoying a gorgeous flower bed filled with a "hummingbird" mix of flowers. Haven't seen any hummingbirds yet, but the mini zinnias have been lovely. Silver beet is growing like stink, and we had a huge yield of blueberries - most of which, unfortunately, went to feeding the local birds. We might need a net next year.

The front yard and what we hope will one day be our "meadow".

You'd never know that behind that grassy bank lurks a large veggie garden! There are a few experiments going on out the front of our place - Nic got sick of cutting the grass there so we're trying to follow the adage: "don't plant a lawn, plant a meadow". Our meadow has been started with mint, bee balm, veronicas, sun flowers, lambs ears and probably heaps of other stuff that I don't remember. There's still a lot of lawn in there though...

Nic fixes up the side of the retaining wall, while Emma watches with great interest.

Nic of course is still the engine behind most of the heavy moving. Action shots!

How to be a sweet potato farmer: land, check! sweet potato plants, check! tractor o'Mexicans, check!

Of course, although Nic works hard most of the time, sometimes its just easier to hire a group of farm labourers to do your work for you...
Ok, I'm joking. Here Nic was visiting a sweet potato farmer, and its the farmer's team of workers. They're planting sweet potatoes, by hand, from the back of the tractor. If Nic's research succeeds then we might be able to plant sweet potatoes like regular spuds, (mechanically), greatly reducing costs. But also, depriving these sorts of guys farm labour gigs. "How do you grow sweet potatoes" people ask Nic all the time. "You get a tractor and a bunch of Mexicans..." he replies, in all sincerity.

I think I mentioned that this has been a wildly fecund summer? Things reached a new height of reproductive madness a couple of days ago when we found that a toad had spawned in the dog's water dish. I thought that was exciting enough, but when I told Nic you could see a light bulb go off above his head, and he raced around the side of the house. To where the wheelbarrow had been catching the water that floods out of an undersized gutter...

Mosquito problem? What mosquito problem?

Sure enough, the brimful barrow was home to hundreds of newly hatched tadpoles! Nic's over the moon and having a ball experimenting with different sorts of food. Dog food might be winning so far.

Taddies! I'm excited because I recently heard the phrase: "like trying to push a wheelbarrow full of frogs" (an alternative to "like herding cats")... and now we will be the proud owners of our own wheelbarrow full of frogs! (ok, toads)

An honorable mention from our "only in America" series... we got quite excited the other day when we realized that a cafe in walking distance, Fosters, sells beer! We've been a bit down about the lack of a "local". So we headed on down a few Friday's ago, with the dog. Fosters is this great cafe full of delicious food and very popular. But it has this one perculiarity: it is situated on a highway and has a large lawn area out the front. This lawn area is filled with tables and deck chairs... all of which also face the highway. I'm reasonably sure that anywhere else in the world, a large fence or hedge or garden would have been put up, and we'd all face away from the highway. Not here, folks. Here you enjoy your drinks face to face with the terrifying road users of Durham County...

The bizarre "highway" view behind me at Fosters. Luckily it was very quiet that evening!

Finally, one of the best things about the ginormous garden is when you get to harvest stuff. We just dug up some 10-20 kg of spuds. And they look gooooooooooooooooooood...

Nic digs a row of spudsThe spud harvest