Awards and Gardening Notes
My mead that I’d posted about earlier this year was recently awarded the bronze medal in the traditional mead category for the winemaker magazine international wine competition. We’re pretty excited! Now I’m in the process of narrowing down where I’ll source my honey from and attempt to improve on last years recipe. I simply cannot wait to get that new fermentation rolling along.
In other news, it’s been quite a busy time in my garden. All this wet weather has been really helping some of my plants and making other’s struggle. I certainly could probably grow champions next year during the spring.
I’ve decided to halt the potato box at it’s current height and see how it goes.I really want to have a good yield, but I don’t want to have the lower bed taters suffer. After some excellently warm weather yesterday and today, my cucumbers have finally come to life. The sweet potatoes are rallying and my newly mulched melon beds are doing much better. The grape vines have come to life and have started climbing. I can’t wait for the sunflowers and peas to start blooming in earnest.
Living in Maryland, we get a lot of very humid and hot days. I constructed a rain water collection system, but once the rain lets up I’m going to be harder pressed to use only rain water for my garden. I’m going to be looking into storing some of the city water in the barrel when it starts to get dry. I think that leaving the top off of the barrel will help to get rid of most of the chlorine (hopefully) before I have to use it on the garden.
The next big project that I’m looking to undertake is a sidepath from my front to my backyard that will help improve the drainage around my home as well as to minimize the mud during the wetter parts of the spring.
Anyone else doing fun things in their garden so far?
