That’s because I _am_ unproductive. I did harvest 4 baskets of strawberries and some greens today (plus I helped a bit with the potatoes), but I didn’t harvest blackberries, broccoli, cabbage, etc. I did a tiny bit of weeding in the north pumpkins and in my sad attempt at a late planting of pumpkins and green beans. But I have like 41 yards of compost to spread and plants to pull (bolting kale, tho) before I start a new compost. I have like 5 buckets full of stuff outside the house, plus several around the garden.

The 40 yards of compost that I ended up ordering from the place in the next county over where our green waste is theoretically trucked to looks pretty good. There is some trash in it, but it doesn’t seem like as much as the stuff I used to buy. There seem to be more “fines,” but I wonder if that stuff is going to just blow away (ideally we would tarp the 4 piles, huh?). The compost is pretty warm. I’ve been hearing from people that the compost they’ve gotten from various companies has been too “hot,” meaning that it hasn’t quite finished breaking down. That’s ok, I still have a yard or so of compost left from last year… ok, that won’t get me very far!

Some thoughts about the potatoes: we turned off the water like 2 weeks ago because the gophers had started eating the plants and tates. The ground is still wet down there. There were not a lot of potatoes- a large one, and medium one, and a tiny one per plant — but the gophers ate parts of the biggest ones :(. Z’s dad commented that they weren’t very deep. I hadn’t gotten to hill them up more than once. We picked tates from where Z had planted (he opened up the ground with a sledgehammer. Yes, he hurt his back doing it). There are still more to pick. Z baked some of them with olive oil, some herbs de provence, and salt. They were delicious. A bit sweet.

We saw our first sunflowers and pumpkin flower this week! Both tend to have pollinators stuck to them!

I came to the realization today that it is really time to stop trying to plant summer crops (I never finished the north sunflower row, and the latest planting of pumpkins is not growing much and was likely a waste of seed). I got pretty sad when I realized that. I hate winter, and the fog came in hard this evening. This month it’s time to get peas and greens into the ground, and see what else I can plant while I’m at it. In another world I would harvest all that lambsquarter seed and use it for food, but I’ll be lucky to get it all hoed and out of the pea bed before it plants itself again…