Nicky and Dave Schauder are passionate about helping families grow their food, and medicine and find God in the garden
Take time to draw your garden
Take time to draw your gardenInspired by Lara Call Gastinger's "Perpetual Journal Practice" and the works of Roger Tory Peterson, I started capturing my garden in this way. And I hope that despite the heat, and perhaps the mosquitoes this summer, we can all still find time to observe nature and perhaps draw it. Drawing forces you to truly look at something. And in a world of digital distraction, may very well be the last bastion of focus. That and prayer, I suppose. And there are similarities between the two practices. That kind of observation is the same instinct behind succession planting, honestly. You can't tell when a bed is ready to turn over unless you're paying close enough attention to notice it's slowing down. Summer Planting & Planning Ahead for the FallIf you missed our webinar on Succession Planting in Summer, or want to sit with it again, we turned it into a full written guide with our actual raised beds, what's planted in each one, and what to plant next as the season moves towards fall. The replay is there too, if you'd rather watch Dave walk through it live.
or watch the replay Grow abundantly! PS. I'm so curious to know what's growing in your garden this time of year, Reader? Send us photos or better yet, drawings of what you see! |
Dave & Nicky Schauder
Nicky and Dave Schauder are passionate about helping families grow their food, and medicine and find God in the garden
Hello, Reader, We have honey! The tomatoes are still green but growing really well right now. Yes, there are still things that are getting eaten by deer (like potatoes and every unprotected sunfower and zinnia on our property). But we've got beets coming in so fast we're having a beet salad every other day! This abundance is exactly the "problem" we set out to have when we started growing our own food eleven years ago. Back then, we had a tiny suburban backyard, six kids, a health crisis, and...
Hello, Reader The sky turned a strange, hazy orange as we drove to Charlottesville this week. Not from anything happening here. Wildfire smoke, drifting all the way down from Canada, the same haze that's been sitting over Toronto, Boston, and New York this month. The kids kept asking why the sun looked like that. I didn't have a simple answer for them. So I looked up the actual numbers for the US. As of this morning, there are: 487 active wildfires burning across the US, covering 1.4 million...
When it gets hot Last week, our house hit 97°F. Not far from here, other parts of Northern Virginia were past 100°F. We had planned a family hike and despite weather warnings decided to drive to the Shenandoah mountains very early in the morning anyway, with lots of water packed. We did a loop trail about 4 miles and were delighted to find that just when we were at our sweatiest, a freshwater pool appeared, beckoning us to go for a mid-hike swim! This gave us just the refreshment we needed to...