Here we go again…

I have a sunburn.  From the sun.  In Portland.

It’s that time of year again.  February in Portland is when the sun torments us with days of t-shirt weather followed by a week of freezing rain, hot afternoons, hail, lightning bolts, locusts, piña coladas, bikini teams, and armies of zombie slugs.

It’s also the time that I make my master plan.  This year, we’re going for clean-up and minimalism.  I’m going to (really) try to plant even less than last year.  Ideally, I won’t plant any trees (unless I replace one), and I’m going to focus on quality over quantity in my veggie garden.

To that end, I removed my two 5′x25′ beds and replaced them with 6 3.5′x6′ beds with 3′ paths between them all.  Where last year, I had two 3′x15′ beds, I put in two 4′x4′ raised bed boxes.  Less will be more!

The problem last year was that, by the time everything filled out, I couldn’t get around it all to pick or weed.  A lot of stuff just went to waste anyway.  No, instead of jamming produce into every free square foot, I’m going to go for more attention on far fewer plants.  My guess is that I’ll get as much, if not more, output.

Also, note to self, if you set posts in this kind of cold, give the concrete a few days to harden.  I tried put up a trellis for my currants, dug and filled holes with post anchors and concrete, let the concrete harden for 24 hours, mounted the posts into the anchors, and the whole thing promptly collapsed.  Oops.

On another note, I think I’m going to start another blog.  RianSchmidt.com.  Don’t go there; I didn’t do it yet.  I’d like to keep this one focused on food, but I’d like a place to write my rambling unrelated thoughts.  There’s going to be no particular theme to that one.  I’m going to use it to write essays, show photographs, do experiments with semi-fiction that will come back to haunt me when I try to run for governor.

Keep an eye out.  I’ll let you know when it’s up.

Shalom.