Accountability Sunday #2

It's been a somewhat unproductive week for me with preserving fruit and vegetables. However, I did get quite a bit more then expected in the garden done. I finally got around to harvesting all the onions and cleaning out that garden row. What a mess that was. I had only intended to pull the onions but once I'd done that I couldn't stop and cleaned up the weeds and things too.

My garden bed of shame is also now so much less shameful. There actually wasn't too many weeds in this one and it mainly needed  deadheading and cleaning up a little. I finally got the suckers tagged that I will dig up this winter as bare roots. The ones with white yarn are the white flowering suckers, multicolored yarn are the red. Come winter, I will cut the roses down to the ground. It keeps them nice and bushy growing. A thorny job though....

So my NEXT bed of shame was this one which I was supposed to do this new week. looks like this- Horrifying, isn't it?

There is a nice mix of out of control weeds--crab grass, yellow flowered spiky leaved things, and LOTS of garlic chives. DO NOT let your garlic chives go to seed. You've been warned.

BUT....I was ambitious this day, my one day off of work this weekend so now it looks like this:

Not only did I clean out all those weeds (though I'm sure the garlic chives will be back with a vengeance REAL soon) but I found a home for some of the perennials I had potted up. I have my blueberries in this bed but they are doing very poorly so they may not even make it through the winter. I plan to try to move them to the veggie garden when they go dormant this year so the plants I just homed there can have it all to themselves.

Of course it needs to be mulched, but I have nothing to mulch with right now and I am not going to buy mulch. I hope to scrounge up some grass clippings from neighbors for free. BTW, that dirt used to be a terrible clay. But a few years of adding mulch and compost has solved that problem well enough.

Today's harvest included several more zucchinis and some carrots that I had for dinner. I swear I'm going to turn orange from all these tomatoes and carrots I've been eating although I don't care much for the flavor of the multi colored carrots....I will not be planting them again. However since I did grow them I feel that I cannot let them go to waste. They are somewhat more palatable cooked. At least Jack the dog doesn't mind chewing on them.

So how did my week of no eating out span? I did pretty good, except I did break down on Thursday and bought a diet pop and a little snack bag of BBQ chips. And on Friday I broke down completely and had a meal from the cafeteria at work, even though I HAD brought something. But I had done so much better then ever before and I will keep trying to bring my lunch to work instead of buying it.

Now I have to think of another "greener" challenge to do this week and I think it will have to do with driving since so much of my ecological footprint has to do with how much I drive. Sure I have a pretty low emissions car but I do drive a LOT, over 300 miles a week just back and forth to work-not counting errands and drives to the parks. This week I am going to drive the speed limit and no faster then that on my commutes. Now, this will likely get a lot of people MAD as hornets on the borman--there's some crazy drivers out there! even when I'm going 10 or 15 over the posted limit you usually have some Jerk ridding on your tail shinning brights into your mirrors blinding you. Then when they go around, they are going at least 30 more miles over the speed limit and cutting off cars left and right. Will i survive??? It's a good thing I have a short work week this week.