Well it's now October and time for my for my end of summer backyard round-up post. But I have a confession to make first. I admit that I'm lazy when it comes to my yard and there's not really much to report on.  When I started this website/blog I had a dream of more regularly writing about my backyard projects and feel that I've really failed on that front. I blame it primarily on my backyard hammock combined with a busy summer and cold beer.

There's just never enough summer weekends when you throw in a wedding and stag party, a few cottage weekends with friends and the odd family visit. Every week I'd say "I'll do it this weekend" but then all of a sudden there were no more summer weekends left and the work still wasn't done. Obviously yard work could have been done in the evenings through the week but that's where my hammock interfered. It comes down to the fact that after a long day of regular wage paying work, relaxing on the hammock is a much more attractive option then doing any work in the yard.

Finally one of my half handful of Blueberries is turning blue. Yaah. It's not actually the first one to turn blue but that one mysteriously disappeared shortly after I noticed it.

Yes, disappeared. Gone without a trace.

The weather is finally warm enough to try drying some apples in the solar dehydrator so I managed to get some sliced up this morning before work.  Unfortunately I only have 2 drying racks at the moment so I was only able to slice up a few apples.  I’ve been using old picture frames with door screen stretched across them for drying racks but it’s difficult to find them in the correct size.

It's the beginning of May and the garlic has finally popped up in the past few weeks after a long winter. The garlic was planted in the fall by "the Garlic Girl" as I call her. She had posted on a local garden mailing list back in the October that she lived in an apartment and was looking for yard space to plant garlic.  As I wasn't planning on using my garden boxes over the winter, I offered them up. There are a few varieties and I'm looking forward to trying them out.  

With the weather getting warmer I've been thinking about setting up my solar food dehydrator for another year.  Unfortunately it's still not warm enough in this part of the world so to keep myself busy I build this little fan add-on that I'm excited to try out on the dehydrator.