Just some quick scenes from around the yard. The buckwheat around the dogwood tree was about ready to flower when I took these pics, and has now flowered. It's a cover crop that will add biomass and nitrogen to that little patch of earth in anticipation of some cool-weather crops this fall:
Some Brandywine heirloom tomatoes looking healthy:
Blueberries (darker pine straw mulch) and tomatoes (wheat straw mulch) along the back fence (all growing poorly, if I do say so):
Compost "bin" slowly gaining mass:
The ambient temperature was 80 and the interior temp of the pile was only 94 -- not enough mass yet to generate considerable heat. It should get up around 130 degrees if it ever gets cooking correctly (which it probably won't at the slow rate I'm adding raw material):
I trimmed the decimated leaves (from the cabbage butterfly caterpillars) off the kale and it's coming back! And I haven't seen the white butterflies around for about a week so I hope this new growth will last into the Fall:
A burgeoning aloe vera plant:
A wasp and butterfly (moth?) on the buckwheat:
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Beautiful Buckwheat!
ReplyDeleteDaniel
Thanks -- I trimmed the top half and let it fall around the base of the plants, hopefully as a mulch and ultimately to deteriorate. I think when I get ready to put some fall transplants in that small bed I'll leave the buckwheat growing, trimmed down to 5-6" and just put the transplants in/among it -- leave the buckwheat "alive" so hopefully it will keep fixing nitrogen into the fall. We'll see -- I really like it. I've seeded some in a space in the front beds where I had tomatoes this summer -- sticking it in wherever there's a place. I've even thought about seeding the whole yard in it this fall. I would LOVE that!
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