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Thursday, August 13, 2009

Butchart Gardens, PNG

Bill has decided that he wants to make our garden into a Butchart-like Garden. Butchart Gardens are immaculate gardens located in Victoria, in British Columbia. I have never been there, but Bill has, and I have seen pictures to know what our goal is. We have a ways to go, but the garden is looking pretty good and producing a lot of fruits and vegetables. We started the Butchart process by working on the pineapple patches. The garden help usually works on the pineapples, but one Saturday when they weren't working, we took the opportunity to see what we could do with them. We started with just one patch, and then a second, and before you know it we had 7 done, and decided we could finish them all in one day. Around 4pm we were finishing off our 14th patch and I was exhausted with lots of scrapes on my forearms from digging out the weeds around the pineapples. This is the definitely the best the pineapples have looked since I have been here, and if it produces nice big pineapples I will try to keep it looking this nice.
Bill's other goal was to have every plot producing (around 30, not counting pineapples), and we have accomplished that. We have beans, peas, cherry tomatoes, tomatoes, berries, papaya, cucumbers, cabbage, carrots, lettuce, bok choy, pumpkins, and peanuts all growing. I am thankful that I like most of what we grow now (beans, papaya, and bok choy being the exceptions), so I can enjoy the fruit of our labor. We had a huge cabbage growing that we recently picked when Marsha needed some cabbage. We discussed seeing how big it might get, but there is no state fair here, so no prizes to be won, thus we are enjoying eating it instead.