Okay, so there are still a few things to deal with. Expired emergency food, two bags of shredded paper, But other than that, I have cleared off the porch, hung the bike mount for Matt’s bike, fashioned a makeshift lock situation that I will fix eventually, and now it’s much easier to sweep off the porch.
I bought new water storage cubes. Previously we’d bought three-gallon containers of drinking water at the grocery store which would inevitably swell and burst when temperatures got below freezing. Our storage shed has an exterior wall and is not insulated.
These containers are empty, which means I can empty and refill them myself. It also means that can fill them to a point where even when they do freeze, they will not burst. I also appreciated the sense of humor as displayed by item three of suggested uses.
To manage the expiring food, I have made a spreadsheet. I’ve got one column that has the expiration date and one column that is a month before the expiration date. My plan is to print this sheet, attach it to our wall calendar on the month with the next expiration date. When the calendar turns, I can pull the food and incorporate it into the menu, or put it out in one of the neighborhood food pantry.
By doing this I will hopefully avoid another incident where I only realize the food is expired because of ants attempting to colonize the food storage area.
Et voila! Shelves. I cut a leftover piece of wood from the dryer platform in half (with a handsaw balanced on top of my recycling bins because I was too lazy to get everything out that was needed for the circular saw), installed four of those handy braces I’ve been using forever, did some drilling, and now there are shelves where there once were none.
Here’s a close-up view.
In keeping with my laziness, I’m not going to paint them. The bare wood fits with the utilitarian nature of the laundry area.
The thing about living in Portland is that by the time my garden really gets going, it’s September and thoughts of autumn have taken over. September is when the tomatoes really produce, which was always inconvenient when I worked for a school.
My garden in September is often neglected, poor thing. Regardless!
Here you can see the tomatoes going gangbusters. I think next year I will trim them back so I get fewer and bigger tomatoes. You can see a healthy collard plant to the right of the tomatoes and some other greenery that I have forgotten since I am writing this post in the far future. I also picked up a cat litter box with a cover from the street. My plan is to clean it and put it on the catio to give another litter box option to the cats. [Update from the future. I did this, and Antares showed some interest, but when the rains came, they flooded the box and I ended up throwing out a large chunk of soggy cat litter, scrubbing the litter box once again, and putting it back out on the street for someone to grab.]
From a different angle, you can see the orange 5-gallon bucket that I haven’t put away for week. Plus that the tree collards (back center) need better support. One of them has been flopped on the ground for weeks, poor thing. The raspberries are still spitting out a few gems, and between them and the tree collards are some spinach, kale and lettuce I started late in the summer.
Over in Leo’s yard you can see the squash doing its late-summer thing where it tries to grow a lot and gets powdery mildew. I didn’t get much zucchini from my three plans this summer (maybe I need to attract more pollinators?) but the delacata squash managed to put off a small squash for each plant, which wasn’t bad considering how old those seeds were. I staggered planting the green beans because I love green beans, but then I didn’t go out and pick much of the later plantings.
On the other side of the green beans you can see the Oregon Sweet Meat squash that I direct seeded. Steve Soloman seems to think this is a better way to go, but by the time the soil warms up enough for direct seeding, it’s too late in the season. Plus, I never bought another soaker hose so the poor thing had to grow on its own, without additional water. I got one very small squash out of this deal.
