Whiling away a week without a computer

So last week our computer died which pretty much led to the end of life as I know it. I know that sounds a bit dramatic, but the first couple of days without the Internet almost had me convinced I was the last man on earth.

Besides the panicked scrambling around trying to figure out was wrong and hoping it was all just a bad dream I would wake up from, I had to find other things to do. After the initial shock this wasn't so bad. I put together the basic plan for another blog I will be writing about my lazy square foot garden. I also took some before and after pictures with our our new camera and will continue journaling my amateur experiences both good and bad.

Now this will not be an opportunity for others to learn great gardening secrets, but you can learn from my mistakes or just laugh at my bumbling idiocy.

As I mentioned in a previous post my goals are to provide some fresh food for our family with as little work as possible. This also allows my children to see that food does not come from the supermarket. In addition, I hope to help lower our energy bill this summer by providing additional shade for the windows on the sunny side of our house as well as the deck which reflects heat into our living room.

If you would like to watch or just point and laugh, come check out my lazy square foot garden.

Along with some minor work on the garden I have been learning how to use vista which is the operating system that came with this new computer. Now for the cool part, this whole post was dictated into the voice recognition software. This has been a bit of a challenge and fortunately for my head I keep my hair cut short. Otherwise the baldness I am experiencing would probably be patchy and accompanied by much pain.


Photos taken with Canon Powershot A570is

Growing your own

This past summer I started my first garden and it was pretty big success in my opinion. We didn't get huge returns as far as food is concerned, but I did learn without a doubt that an average guy can pretty successfully grow some of his own food without much fuss.

Because we are renters I went with the square foot gardening method or SFG. We had permission to plant, but the fact is our back deck takes up about 1/3 of our yard space and the garden would take away from our kids play area which is a key reason we chose this place over others.

So what I did was build 4 of Mel's boxes and put them up on legs on our deck. At some point this year I will put up some pic's, but briefly what I did was place them half on and half off of the deck so we still have almost full use of the deck and the yard.

They are raised enough that the top of the soil is roughly 2 feet above the deck to help limit some of the bending associated with gardening and the kids can enjoy standing to pick things.

At any rate, the work was minimal and we were able to enjoy fresh lettuce, sugar snap peas radishes/greens and garlic greens through a good part of the summer. I also planted tomatoes, cucumbers, corn and broccoli with less success, but still had the same enjoyment watching them grow.

This year I will try a few things differently and see how it goes, but key among the differences is to plant peas and beans directly in front of our back windows to help keep out the hot sun and lower the need to use the air conditioner. As it is, the garden boxes themselves helped a lot last year by preventing so much of the suns heat from reflecting off of the deck into our home.

So for us, the garden provided fresh food, entertainment, shade and lower energy bills. Not a bad trade off and really very little work involved. Not only that, but our kids saw first hand that vegetables do not come from a can. Now to convince my wife to let me raise some rabbits.

Photography by Linda DuBose