Lisa's Log: Fall 2020

Hullo, all!

Happy Fall, Y'all!

It is so nice to have the season of Fall! As much as I love summers in Alaska, I still think Fall is my favorite season. Not only for the bright colors and the magnificent scent of dead leaves

(deep inhale.....................exhale.....aaahhhhhhh!)

But also because there is a lot of fun stuff going on in the fall every year (can you say "happy birthday" and "happy Halloween"?)

This year in particular has been a busy Fall. Because of our move, we had to start over with our garden. I mean, we had to start over from SCRATCH. We had to build our garden beds and order some dirt. But it was all good because this way, we could put the beds where we want them AND we could get some GOOD DIRT.

This time we splurged on the good stuff.

This is the best organic compost garden dirt you can buy in our area. It was expensive, so I hope it was worth it. This was only the first load; the next morning they came back with the rest of it, so we had a pretty big pile. We were just kind of annoyed though that the guy didn't go back further on the plastic. For some reason he said "this is back far enough", but it wasn't. I don't know what he was thinking. The next morning before he came back with the 2nd load, we had to lay down more tarp, which was annoying because the back half of this plastic was still bare. Anyhoo, that is my only complaint about that.

So now that we got the dirt, we need to get some wood. In case you haven't noticed, the home improvements stores are lacking in lumber these days, so we had to spend the extra money to have some wood cut for us from a local mom & pop lumber joint in Palmer. We ordered enough rough cut wood to build eight beds and then had to wait 3 weeks for it.

When it finally came in, we got to work.

We started with two and then it was getting late so we built the other six the next day.

The weather was perfect for this job.

And then we had to wait for decent weather to start filling them with dirt.

One evening we managed to get one filled, plus one of my compost compartments before it started raining. The rest had to wait until the next day.

You probably can't tell in this picture, but two of the beds have a compost compartment in them so I have somewhere to throw my kitchen scraps. One of them is filled up because I've been saving my kitchen scraps all summer and I needed to finally empty that bin, so I was glad to finally bury it in the garden bed (mixed with dirt and mulched leaves and dirt).

It was a lot of work (it took two days) to get all the beds filled up with dirt, and then we put a layer of mulched leaves and grass on top. I hope that was the right thing to do - we are just going to leave it alone now until next spring.

No, that is not our camper - we are just storing it for some friends for the winter.

You can see that we still have some room left to build two more beds, which we are planning to do next summer, and also another bed for raspberry bushes, and maybe also a strawberry bed.

I am really looking forward to gardening next year!

In the meantime, other things are going on here. Can you tell it's starting to look like Halloween here?

You all should've gotten my "restaurant" invitation by now, so you know that I'm doing a Black Cat theme. I haven't done any decorating yet, but I did manage to work on my salt and pepper shakers.

I can't believe I only have two weeks left to get ready!

Other Fall happenings include a new granddaughter on the way!

(the 4-legged kind)

Meet "Pumpkin"!

She is a poodle, and will be ready to be picked up in November.

Isn't she adorable? Stephanie is the proud mother of this baby and I am the proud gramma. I have been watching her every day on the breeder's web camera. She is walking around now and starting to play with her siblings. They are so CUTE.

I can't wait to see her and hold her!

That's about it, except for one more thing. I saw this in my yard yesterday.