Abundance

This week I'm joining, for the firs time, the Make Your Home Sing link up party over at Mom's the Word. So very excited!

The season for blackberry goodness is upon us again. We have a ridiculous amount of blackberry bushes on one side of our property that have yielded a ridiculous amount of some of the most delicious blackberries I've ever had. In the past two summers that we've lived in our little house (with it's small surrounding jungle) these berries have never tasted so good. Big, juicy, sweet (with that lovely hint of tart) berries that quickly fill our bowls and bellies.

Every other afternoon, the kids and I have been going out and picking berries, setting some aside to make something special. E. is begging for blackberry pie, but I'd love to make this from Cinnamon Girl.

With the blackberries comes the extreme green of summer at our house. Everything is so vibrant and growing so well, but...I don't know what half of it is. And most of the other half are weeds, or there's just a lot of it (it being hosta, bee balm, day lilies, iris, some sort of weird monster plant that grows to enormous heights, and six-foot-tall thistle that I have a love/hate relationship with).

There's one particular part that is abundantly overgrown (pictured just above) for which I have high hopes. For the last two years I've been desperate for a vegetable garden. But our yard is woefully shady in most places, except for this one particular crazy patch of ground that's afloat amidst our lawn. So, while logic might dictate (or at least it does to me, a person with limited gardening experience) that we simply tear up what's there and plant a garden (I realise it's slightly more complicated than all that, but that's the gist of it).

But it can't be that simple, of course. Two reasons: that particular patch is over part of our septic system and those crazy monster plants grow non-stop, no matter what, and, as our neighbour informed us, the only way to really guarantee their demise is to rip them all up (thankfully the pull out easily), put down a layer of newspaper followed by a black tarp and leave that there for upwards of a year.

So, in order to unite my desire to have a veggie garden and to get rid of those crazy plants (all while not using potentially icky, septic-contaminated soil), we've decided to try raised beds over the layers of black tarp and newspaper. Win, win, right?

We're in the midst of phase one right now, which mainly involves me ripping up the crazy amount of weeds, and trying to figure out if I'm capable of ripping out a six foot thistle tree bush. After that we'll put down the newspaper and tarp and settle in for the cooler temperatures. Over the fall and winter I plan on beefing up my gardening knowledge and spending those chilly months being an armchair gardener, hoping to put my new knowledge into use come spring.

We'll see how that goes. Hopefully, come this time next year, we'll have quite the abundance of home grown veggies to fill little and big bellies alike as we do home grown weeds and wild blackberries.

Or I'll have a lone zucchini (possibly from our neighbours garden). Either way, I'll call it good.