Posts in: Sanity Project

Newly built window box is up. Lean out the window and there’s a salad waiting for you.


Green Man’s Grotto is showing signs of life! Phlox is blooming:

Yarrow is back and is spreading around the pond:



Two paths ahead of us with regard to climate change

Early on in At Work in the Ruins, Dougald Hine discusses the overall response to climate change. He says we have entered a new phase of the process in which the dominant institutions have accepted the reality of climate change and are at least talking about acting accordingly. (I take him to mean that the era of climate change denialism is substantially over. I do not take him to mean that our institutions are acting in suitably radical ways.

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We finished the grape arbor. Now it just needs some paint and we’ll be ready to plant grapes next spring. We’ve raked the leaves up there to kill the grass over the winter so we can do more planting in that area.


It’s going to be a beautiful weekend here so one more big push to finish a few projects: finish the grape arbor, fill the final raised bed, put out some Halloween decorations. But first, coffee and The Biggest Little Farm (thanks for the recommendation, Tim).


Monarch on (what we believe to be) Jerusalem artichoke.


Expanding Green Man’s Grotto

We’ve started expanding Green Man’s Grotto. We emptied one of the old raised beds by transplanting some orange butterfly weed, hairy woodmint, and swamp milkweed partly into the existing GMG and partly into a new section. Next we’ll double the depth of that old raised bed and use it for a kitchen garden next year. Then we’ll transplant what remains in the other old raised bed into that expanded section of GMG and then double the depth of that raised bed for the other half of the kitchen garden.

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We’ve been hoping for a dragonfly or two to find out little wildlife pond. Well, tonight we have a swarm. I assume they’re feeding on mosquitoes, which are plentiful on a humid evening like tonight. I have no idea if they’ll come back but watching dozens of them swooping and swerving is amazing.