Finally home for a weekend to tackle the garden. The potatoes are all that remain from the winter crops, but they’re blighted and spotty so I pulled the worst-looking one up because my curiosity got the best of me. Lo and behold, they worked! I forgot that potatoes are the most fun crop to harvest ever, because it’s like a treasure hunt under the soil. You dig around with your fingers or a fork or a trowel and scoop up earth and soil-crusted potatoes, and you never know how many are down there.

So after that episode of potato joy, we went to work irrigating. Our raised bed is about 5x10’, so we didn’t need much in the way of supplies. This local store is the holy grail of information on irrigation systems, and they were great with us because we had no idea what to do. The idea is that the drip irrigation delivers water right into the root zone (unlike overhead watering), so the soil is kept pretty consistently moist, instead of going through swings of wet wet wet from a big watering, then dry dry dry while I sometimes forget to water. We'll see.

And I highly suggest some refreshments throughout the project: 1) Mason jar with half beer, half ginger ale, 2) and jar with slices of oranges, limes or whatever you have on hand, stuffed with a bunch of fresh cut herbs.