Fruit in the Garden

Our garden is now bearing fruit. Here are some cucumbers:

Tomatoes are on the way:

And winter squash:

Here are some deeper shots of the garden. The squash and lettuce and corn:

The tomatoes:

And the potato bin:

Our mail-order trees and shrubs are all thriving (except the one sumac that was split in half when run over by the dumptruck - it seems to be dead).

Here's the juneberry by the compost bin:

We have two juneberries that have transplanted well and put out leaves. However this one beside the compost bin has really taken off. Before it got its leaves, it burst into flower, every stem covered in flowers, and now it has many unripe berries developing. It's either the moisture that comes off the compost, or the nutrients, or both, but it's a good sign for our humanure composting.

Here's our stick of a persimmon now settled in and putting out leaves:

Here's the one healthy sumac, with a ridiculous amount of foliage:

One of our peach trees, with new growth:

The redbuds up behind the gazebo:

The blueberry up at the swales, not doing much, but some have shed their old sickly growth and put out new tiny buds and leaves:

I took a few overview shots of the property before we left.

Here's the barn under construction in the distance:

A look down the gravel driveway:

The compost bin:

We are leaving for the 4th of July, and going down to Atlanta to stay for the weekend with my parents. The girls want to see fireworks. It will be strange leaving here for any period of time, as we've been here since April 23rd, 10 weeks. It will be very weird being in a busy place like Atlanta. We're used to a great deal of peace.

On the way we stop at the Obed River. It's about a half hour away by car, because you have to go out and around on the highway. It's designated the Obed Wild and Scenic River all through this area. So it's very clean and beautiful, with no development. Here's a photo:

It's one of the many big rivers in this area, like the Emory, the Clinch, the Big South Fork, and the Tennessee.

If you look closely you can see the girls tubing in this one:

Instead of taking the freeway to Atlanta we take the highway at Sunbright, 27, all the way south. It goes to a little town called LaFayette in Georgia. From here we take a short detour up Pigeon Mountain.

Pigeon Mountain has a famous rock climbing area called Rocktown, with a ton of boulders. That's how it was discovered for us, going climbing with a friend.

But Pigeon Mountain offers a lot more than climbing. Once we'd sort of given up on the Southwest, on permanently living out in the Gila Wilderness, whether due to lonliness, isolation, boredom, or longings to go back to where we come from, the East - Pigeon Mountain became the last place we believed we could permanently live outside in secrecy. The mountain is a wildlife management area, with tons of springs and creeks and fields. We found a field a half mile in where we set up camp:

Built a fireplace:

And started a thatched hut:

Here's a view out over the field where I collected grass for the hut:

And Alan Creek, where we bathed and stayed cool:

This place had it all. Forest and fields, and creeks, an infinite quanitity of blueberries, blackberries, autumn olives, acorns, nuts, edible greens, elderberries, persimmons, apples even, black cherries - the list goes on and on. There are even giant linden leaves which I would soak in vinegar and use as tortillas to wrap our beans. Here's us picking blackberries off an old dirt road:

And a ton of wildlife. I even saw a coyote chasing a turkey once, down the road.

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The drawbacks are the mountain is small, a few miles square, and the summers with the heat and bugs, especially the deerflies, can be very rough.

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But our visit this time after 10 weeks up building and gardening in Tennessee was pretty anticlimactic. Our old life, especially in a tiny circumscribed place like Pigeon Mountain, no longer seems possible for us, or even appealing.

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I took a photo at dawn off the Lookout. We camped at this spot once for 2 weeks. It's sheer down to the valley below.

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