Longleaf Breeze

It’s still weeks away, but we can already begin to sense how near fall is on brisk mornings, and the days are now no longer so oppressively hot. (more)

Amanda and I visited a garden shop in Montgomery yesterday, an unremarkable event. Take a woman who loves to shop and who has discovered recently how much she loves to grow things, and it’s a natural fit. (more)

If part of expertise is understanding what you don’t know, we’re practically professionals. We’re painfully aware on a daily basis of how little we know, so we have high hopes for all we’ll learn in the Master Gardener program. (more)

When she was a child, our daughter Adrian and her female cousins loved to spend the night with their Gran, my Mom. Every time they did, they ate the same food, slept on the same pallet on the same spot in Gran’s bedroom, watched the same movies (Sarah Plain and Tall and Anne of Green Gables), and ate the same breakfast the next morning. We marveled that they found this monotony pleasant. Why didn’t they get tired of it? (more)

It was one night early. “Official” full moon isn’t until tonight, but you could’ve fooled us. It sure looked full enough as we reveled in it last night, watching the moonshine play with the ground-bound objects that have become so familiar to us here at Longleaf Breeze. (more)

Muscadines grow wild here at Longleaf Breeze, so we have high hopes for cultivating them on Veg Hill. I did a poor job of designing their trellis, however; not enough strength. (more)

One of the things we’ve learned in our brief farm education at Longleaf Breeze is that you want your plants to get vertical if you can, so they can make better use of the light and stay well ventilated. For us, that means trellises. We’ve learned what crops need trellises, what kind of trellises work best, and when it’s best to set them up. (more)

We can’t keep saying we’re moving in when we’ve been here for more than eight months. We need to get all that stuff we brought here organized! In the process, we have loved living more simply, avoiding accumulating things we don’t care about. We’ve set multiple but identical shelving units on rollers in the storage room and shop. (more)

It’s that brutal time in central Alabama when the extreme heat slows everything down. Most of Veg Hill is nearly comatose, but not the okra! It just keeps popping up and producing. Every day it’s producing new pods ready to harvest, and we know from experience that okra produces better when it’s “well picked.” (more)

We keep hearing there’s less of a problem with bugs for the fall garden, and of course we expect fewer struggles with the punishing heat of the central Alabama summer. But we can’t wait too long! (more)