Wow, I can't believe it's already the end of June! The lack of rain here in PA in the early part of the month has made both hiking and gardening a struggle. Lugging water with me on every hike because most sources in the 'highlands' of PA were dry was starting to get old. This made it so that when we actually got rain, I was squeezing in a backpacking trip as soon as possible afterward. Not really conducive to getting other things
done.
The lack of rain also meant that one of my main projects in the last month was trying to mitigate all of the hand watering of my vegetables. In prior years, I'd put many of my vegetables in containers and spread them out on all of my decks in order to keep the deer and groundhogs away. This has one major drawback... I have no automated way of keeping them watered. Every few
days, if it didn't rain, I'd need to carry water to every plant. Not really conducive to getting other things done.
Speaking about things 'not really conducive to getting other things done'... this last month also saw the SEC essentially drive an
entire industry out of the US. This led me to immediately begin the process of removing all of my crypto assets from TradFi Institutions and Centralized Exchanges before it disappears by way of a government order. A week later, news of some companies getting the blessing of the SEC caused an uptick in interest in the blockchain services that I offer. To say that the last month was a roller coaster ride regarding my interactions with the blockchain world would be an understatement.
Since I know most of you hate crypto/blockchain 😀, I won't really write about anything I've done in that space.
So that leaves me pretty much one project to discuss... my vegetable watering dilemma.
I had a better than usual germination rate for my vegetables this year, so I had a large number of plants in my indoor grow space that needed to be moved outside ASAP. As mentioned, I was already dreading the time required to water anything in containers. Also, just getting all of these plants into
containers is time consuming... and time was a resource I was already short on. I decided to create some additional vegetable gardens and avoid the containers entirely.
I've been experimenting with Hugelkultur since hurricane Sandy turned my forested property into an
open meadow with massive rotting tree stumps everywhere. Since I've slowly been 'rewilding' my lawn area anyway, it seemed only natural to create some Hugelkultur mounds in close proximity to my existing automatic watering system.
