(starting sunflower head)
The past couple of days have been gorgeous now that the heat wave has passed! The mornings are cooler, giving way to the mid-80s by afternoon. It's acceptable, I'll give it that. My perfect temperature is still anywhere between 60 and 75, but I'll take the mid-80s over pushing 100 any day.
The garden is coming along well. Much better than I would have ever thought. The sunflowers and corn are taller than me and already showing flower heads and silk (respectively). I'm very pleased. I have to admit, I was a bit intimidated by the thought of planting a garden this year. I remember helping my mom as a little girl in her garden, but many years went by without one. I inherited my mom's green thumb, but still have never planted my very own garden before. Sure, there's all sorts of science behind it, but it really can be as simple as popping a seed in the ground, watering it, and watching it grow. We've already reaped some of the harvest with fresh zucchini and cucumbers for dinner tonight. It might be small by comparison, but it's thriving despite the heat. Let me give you a closer tour...
(Sunflowers from outside the fence)
(Cucumbers, Zucchini, and yellow Zucchini Squash)
(overflowing tomatoes - hoping to can some)
(sweet potatoes)
(beets and other varieties of potatoes)
(cornsilk, folks!)
We also decided to move the compost pile closer to the garden for easier access and better lawn aesthetics. It was on a small hill just above the chicken coop. The chickens loved to dig through it, making a huge mess that I raked up each evening. The plot that our landlord left for our garden is slightly triangular and sloped. We used the bottom square for the garden and the top now holds our compost. I think it looks much better, and the chickens wasted no time in relocating it as well. No need to worry about their messes here.
(digging through the 'new' compost pile)
(sometimes the chickens get stuck in the garden fence)
(oh, and we finally broke down and bought a grill - that zucchini is from our garden!)
Here's our worm bin. We built it about a month ago, and have had worms eating our garbage for the past three weeks. I have to say, I'm quite impressed at the voracious appetites these little creatures have! Do you see all the little flecks of brown below? That is worm poop! We started the bin with moistened shredded newspaper and cardboard, a few leaves, a bit of dirt, and some food scraps. More food scraps were added as we accumulated them. And I have to admit, we had no real clue what we were doing. But it looked easy enough to start, and it was.
Our journey in composting started about three years ago. We lived in a barn (yes literally) turned apartments and had a small area outside along the barn to plant and compost. We were becoming more aware of all the garbage that we produced and wanted to start to do our part in decreasing our footprint on the earth. Actually it was recycling that we started first. Though recycling seemed to become big in the 90s (at least that's when I remember it becoming big), I've been astonished by the number of communities that DON'T offer a recycling program. At least no longer offer one that allows you to put bins out with your trash to be collected. In my opinion, sadly, it's made a lot of us lazy. And I had fallen into that category as well. So we made our own bins. Nothing fancy; we just cut some holes in large Rubbermaid containers and stacked them, designating each for what we recycled (plastic, glass, tin/aluminum, and paper). We made the effort (not much effort at all) to find a local drop off for recyclables, and once they were full, we took them to the recycling center. We were amazed how even just that little bit decreased the amount of garbage that we generated. So we took it a step further and started a compost pile in a 3X3 square outside our kitchen. We had now decreased our trash production from a couple bags of garbage per week to maybe one every three weeks! I couldn't believe how much of a difference composting and recycling made! I was so proud of my compost pile that when we moved, I packed it up in a bin and took it with me. 
