Plans for the Garden and the Uncertain Future

It's finally starting to warm up here (not that it gets very cold here anyway) so I've got my mind on Spring and plants!

I'm really lucky my landlord doesn't mind that I garden in the back yard. I've built two garden boxes, and have numerous other plants in pots, but he's okay with it. Since that is the case, this year, I'm going to try to step up my game in my garden, and make it actually productive. I haven't had a truly successful season to date, but that really is my fault. I leave things until too late, or  I just sort of trail off halfway with my enthusiasm. The addition of an automated drip system last year really helped, so hopefully I'll be able to keep building on that and get a harvest.

I want to expand to pots and planters so I can get a bigger yield, and hopefully have something to put up in jars, but as long as I am getting fresh produce and cutting things out of my weekly budget, I'll be happy.

Man, I've got such a wishlist of hopes for this summer,  I really hope I don't fuck it up. I want to grow short season sweet corn, with peas and short season winter squash, book-ended by beets and carrots at two week intervals so that I can get staggered harvests. I have some pocket planters that will do great for miniature lettuces, and I think there's enough scrap wood for a trellis of some kind for green beans. It's really hard to min/max small space production and keep the logistics of companion planting straight.

Like, I want to do more. I want to do so much more,  but I just don't have the weather or sunlight for it. My tiny scrap of a yard  is on the north side of my rental, and boxed in on three sides by my house, the T-shaped building next door on the west/north, and a fuck-off huge vintage theatre on the east, and I live in the coastal PNW so the weather is cool and damp.

Imma do what I can, though, because  I feel like struggling to get this done will pay off, at least a little bit. The way things are looking for our country, I'm seriously making mental gear-changes to insulate our lives from the oncoming storm. I'm investing in manual hand tools that will help me with upkeep and small construction projects, like fixing a rotten area on the back porch so that it can support a water catchment system, or like putting shelves up in my laundry room so I can store canning. Hell, I'm even looking at getting a fully functional washboard and manual laundry mangle to hang up above my washer and dryer as "decoration", so that we will have it available to use just in case. I hope to fuck it doesn't get that far, but looking at how things are I can definitely see it getting grim.

It's very lucky that I work at a place that gets just absolute scads of shipping pallets, because some of those are made with really good lumber, which I'll absolutely need. They don't mind if we take some, which is just as well, shit's about to start getting expensive. Hard to beat the low, low price of free!

I just got my hands on a really nice one recently, and tore it apart so I could bring it home in my tiny car, and the slat are just so nice. They are going to make such good shelves for my canning jars, I am so excited! Anything else I get I can use to make more plant infrastructure, or use in beautification projects around the house.

I just want us to survive as comfortably as possible. I'll find videos and learn to build things, I'll learn recipes to stretch staples like butter and how to make small foods feed 6 people. Maybe this is just silly prepper thoughts, though. I don't know. I know my great grandmother lived through the Great Depression, and my grandmothers lived through rationing, so maybe there's just some little genetic marker being pinged by the stress stimuli and going "Oh! I remember this, this sucked! Here's what you do kid..."

I dunno. Anyway, I think that's it for the night.

(However, I am going to add pictures of the pallet I reclaimed, because it took 45 minutes with a crowbar and hammer, and again, the pieces are just SO NICE.)

Victory!!

I can't imagine the cost of an equivalent load of "real" lumber.