Short grass problems.

One of the not entirely unexpected consequences of mowing the lawn short relative to our wild grass and perennial woods clearing. With the drought we've been seeing this summer, despite our nice moist climate relative to the valley, after mowing the lawn regularly we're seeing a lot of sad and browning grass. It's not the vibrant greens that I'm used to seeing our lawn, but it is starting to look more like a normal lawn. With a bit of rain it'll look fine.

On the GoFundMe front we are closing in on enough to put the %50 down payment on the furnace. Right now with the donation matching my father is offering we could reach that goal very quickly. We hope to reach it before August 1st so we can get the house on the market with a firm date of installation for the furnace. Thank you all for listening, sharing, and donating. Our community has been such a huge help to us.

Now on to the rest of the gardening situation.

One of the consequences if the light rain and our insufficient weeding is that the garden isn't doing particularly well. The plants haven't died, but they aren't growing large. A trio of tomato plants, and a few pepper plants are of a normal size, but most of them are still very small. That said, the peppers seem to be setting fruit and while we may not have the biggest plants, as long as the dry streak doesn't continue for too much longer we should still have peppers, and some tomatoes at least. We should probably be watering more than we have been, and that's something we can pick up on now that it's hot enough that the peppers are getting their ideal temperatures.

What has been doing very well is the garlic. We're coming up on the point we can harvest the garlic, and we have already been eating the garlic scapes. We aren't going to eat all of them because, again, this year I want to try to get garlic seeds instead of solely cloning the garlic we have. We'll see how well that goes. I'm going to early next week be cutting all of the scapes we have that are un-eaten by that point, and putting them in water to see if we can get them to flower. The thing I need to remember to do this year is, as they open gently with tweezers pull out all of the bulbules so they don't crowd out the flowers preventing seeds. That's what I forgot to do last year. As I do that I'm going to try to get photos because it's apparently a fairly involved process.