These photos were taken one year and one day apart.
August 30, 2025 and August 31, 2026.
I don’t think I realized how much had changed until the before photo popped up in my memory wall.
A year ago, Buttervale was maintained.
The grass was cut, the bushes were trimmed, the pool was clean. It was a perfectly nice backyard.
Until, we started doing something different.
We started cultivating.
That strip of grass along the fence became an orchard. Apples, peaches, plums and nectarines went in. Then blueberries, blackberries, pineapple guava, cherry trees, artichokes, asparagus, gooseberries, strawberries, figs, citrus trees and bananas found homes around the property.
We added a few raised beds and started growing more of our own food. Potatoes went into bags. Herbs and flowers went into cinderblock holes. Fall vegetables went into the ground and became a Thanksgiving Garden.
We have added native plants and more places for birds, bees, butterflies and hummingbirds.
We started composting more of what we used to throw away.
And, somehow, I became a worm rancher.
There have been plenty of failures mixed in. Plants have died. Things got planted in the wrong place and moved. Rabbits ate things. Bugs ate things. I probably bought too many plants.
But looking at these pictures, I don’t really see the individual projects.
I see a yard beginning to pull its own weight. It’s not just sucking down water and fertilizer to support a monoculture lawn designed to resemble a manicured fairway.
It is alive and thriving.
And we’re nowhere close to finished. There are more trees to train, more beds to plant, a greenhouse to put back together and my little taste of New Hampshire is just beginning to take shape.
That’s probably the biggest change in the past year.
We’re no longer just taking care of what was already here.
The Thanksgiving Garden is officially in full swing. This weekend, butter and romaine lettuce, rainbow carrots, bush beans, broccoli, butternut squash and spaghetti squash all got planted. Some of it should absolutely make it to the Thanksgiving table. Some of it may become an educational experience for me and a buffet for the rabbits. Gardening always keeps you humble and thankful.
The citrus trees got some attention, too. Though, that wasn’t exactly on the agenda. While checking on the citrus Friday morning, I discovered some of the leaves on the Key Lime bush had a black dusty powder all over them.
It was a little concerning for what is an otherwise thriving little bush. It has been crushing it all Summer.
So, I took a few photos and appealed to Master Gardener Google.
A few more photos later and a few questions answered and it turns out the little tree has a pretty good scale infestation.
What is scale?
Great question.
Scale (noun): A sap-sucking insect pest that attaches to plant stems and leaves, often appearing as small brown or tan bumps. Scale can weaken plants and produce sticky honeydew that encourages black sooty mold.
It’s that last bit, the “black sooty mold” I was seeing and the dead giveaway for the problem.
I will say, it was much less stressful to deal with a tree issue that wasn’t my fault, and deal with it I did.
The tree is scrubbed and trimmed and all the other citrus inspected. Tomorrow will arrive some organic horticulture oil which will treat anything I didn’t get brushed away and rinsed off.
Getting Ready for a Larger Pot.
Not a death sentence and glad it seemed to be caught pretty early.
I planted some wild flowers for Fall. I also gave all the bird feeders a serious deep cleaning and judging by the traffic at the Buttervale Bird Buffet, the customers have apparently decided the establishment may remain open. Even as I type this I am watching them come and go.
The blackberries continue getting trained onto their new trellis little by little. I should say, it is tough to play favorites, but Blackberry Row is in the running. I have done something right there in way of location or fertilizer or maybe I just got lucky, but I can see years of blackberries to come and nice addition of privacy since they are right next to the neighbor’s pool. It thrills me to look at them every morning.
And because gardening wasn’t enough, the Winni Experience rocking chair restoration moved forward with a major glue-up. The worst of the damaged joints is now back together, clamped tight and curing. There is something very satisfying about taking an old piece of furniture that has clearly lived a life and figuring out how to give it a little more. This is way out of my comfort zone. I have never been that “wood worker” guy, but I feel like I am on a path to owning a router and a table saw and eventually 9 fingers. Glue and clamps and a few dowels for now.
Then there are the worms.
Yep. I’m a worm rancher now. But you knew that already.
The new vermicomposting farm is up and running, stocked with red wigglers who have been given the important Buttervale task of turning kitchen scraps and shredded cardboard into some of the best stuff you can possibly add to a garden. If all goes according to plan, yesterday’s coffee grounds eventually become tomorrow’s tomatoes. That’s a pretty good system.
Worm poop. What’s not to like?
By late afternoon Sunday, I finally decided I’d done enough.
I climbed into the pool, put on my floaty belt and did absolutely nothing for a while. Just floated quietly, avoided the pool cleaning robots and watched the birds zip back and forth overhead on their way to the freshly cleaned feeders. Wrote a chunk of this blog post in my head as I tried to get some Sunlight on my belly. Susan remarked, that based on my tan I really am a farmer now. She’s not wrong.
Here in Virginia Beach, today is the last day of summer vacation for the public-school kids. Tomorrow it’s back to alarm clocks, backpacks, buses, homework and the grind.
I hope their summer was everything they wanted it to be.
Although I’m pretty sure most of the kids (and quite a few Teachers) are thinking the same thing tonight:
It went by way too fast.
Tomorrow, my dear first grandbaby starts Kindergarten. She has been doing pre-school classes for a couple of years, but this is the Big League. Full day Kindergarten in a room with 26 other kids. Yikes. I can’t type it without tearing up. Where does the time go? So quickly we watch helplessly as they take another huge step on their own.
My prayers are for her and for everyone starting a new adventure tomorrow.
She Gets an “A” in Plant Watering
Around Buttervale, though, for the retired among us, the seasons just sort of roll into one another. Summer tomatoes give way to Thanksgiving broccoli. Flowers change. Birds come and go. Leaves will start falling. The worms keep pooping.
And tomorrow morning, we start counting down again.
Buttervale has reached the point this Summer where a lot of the things we planted earlier in the year have stopped looking like little plants politely waiting for permission to grow. What were once bare-root sticks, are alive and thriving. (With one notable exception, but more on that later.)
Tress are growing.
Quickly.
Apparently that means it is time for the infrastructure to catch up.
When we planted the little fruit trees along the fence, a serious trellis system is definitely something we would need eventually.
“Eventually” apparently means now.
I never imagined these trees would shoot to the heights they have hit this year. Many are up to 7 or 8 feet tall and several have put on enough growth that temporary stakes and trellising will not cut it.
This week included picking up a substantial pile of rough-cut, true-sized lumber. Wood that will become the permanent orchard trellis.
I drove to Elizabeth City, NC to pick it up and spent about a third of what Lowe’s would have charged me for my efforts.
I got to experience sunset in the lumber yard. Priceless.
The plan is for tall posts with six runs of spanning wires going up to 9 feet, giving us something sturdy enough to start training the trees properly instead of just watching them flap in the wind.
Looking at that stack of timbers sitting beside the house, I find myself wondering how gardening became construction. Both things I am learning on the fly.
I learned an immense amount with the blackberry trellis, though, and I am looking forward to upsizing and making the Fence orchard better, stronger, taller.
Buttervale also went rock shopping. Sort of.
The store was someone’s yard, the rocks were free, and the shopping involved considerable sweating, swearing and ibuprofen.
A guy on Craigslist had a large pile of old stone that needed to disappear. Having several places around Buttervale where stone would be useful, this seemed like an excellent arrangement.
It was.
It was also considerably heavier than the phrase “let’s go pick up some rocks” makes it sound.
Jumped in the Home Depot flatbed, grabbed shovels, gloves and buckets, and started moving stone.
And moving stone.
And moving more stone.
There were big rough pieces, flatter slabs, rounded stones and several buckets of smaller river rock. Some of it took two people to wrestle onto the truck. By the time we finished unloading at Buttervale, we had accumulated what now looks like our own small quarry.
But wait, there’s more. We only could put about half the pile on the truck so more lifting rocks in my future. I mentioned it on Facebook, but if anyone has a teen they are trying to convince to go to college, send with me for the day. They can see what a long shift of lifting rocks for a few dollars feels like.
I have plans for much of it. Some will end up in garden beds. Some will be used around water and drainage projects. Some of the larger stones are just too interesting not to find a home somewhere in the landscape.
Foreshadowing
At least a few of them are destined for projects I am not quite ready to talk about yet.
Meanwhile, something else followed me home
A birch tree.
Because obviously what Buttervale needed in the middle of August was another tree.
This one arrived looking understandably unhappy about the trip. A couple of small branches were damaged, the leaves were drooping, and it was roughly 1047 degrees outside. Not ideal birch weather.
So instead of immediately planting it, I’ve been letting it recover in its nursery pot, keeping the root ball watered and cool while moving it around to consider exactly where its permanent home should be.
Birches have a completely different feel from most of the trees already at Buttervale, lighter, softer and a little wild looking. If all goes according to plan, this one should eventually become a pretty dramatic addition to the yard.
For now, its only job is to survive August.
My job to stop moving it around long enough for it to end up in the soil so it has a chance to thrive.
Speaking of trees not thriving…
An update on the Elberta
The little Elberta peach tree continues to hang on. A little. Kinda. But maybe not really?
Sad Tree
You may recall, this is the tree that snapped a couple weeks ago after the nursery tag had constricted the trunk and created a severe narrowing. When the wind caught it, the trunk broke badly enough that I wasn’t sure we had any chance of saving it.
I trimmed the damage, carefully pulled the trunk back together, wrapped it and built a small orthopedic support device around the tree.
It has not been pretty. Everyday she looks worse.
A lot of the leaves have now dried up and died, and if you judged the tree only from across the yard you would probably pronounce it finished.
I’m not quite ready to do that.
I’m stubborn.
There is still green wood, and there are still signs that the tree hasn’t completely given up. So the brace stays. The watering continues. And the little peach gets every opportunity to decide whether it wants to make a comeback.
A replacement can be ordered later if necessary.
I have looked and they are surprisingly affordable even for a size or two up from what I originally planted, so I can basically “buy” the year I have lost. Its replacement wouldn’t ship until it is dormant in December, so there is plenty of time to be stubborn and see if this is The Little Elberta That Could. I think it can.
So, for now, it gets to fight.
And the actual food garden keeps fighting too
While we were hauling several thousand pounds of future projects around town, the garden continued doing its thing.
The figs are finally looking vigorous after their slow start this year. The sweet potatoes are producing new slips. And the seed potatoes we ordered for the Thanksgiving garden are now chitting inside the house, with little purple and green shoots beginning to appear.
I am most proud of the blackberry hedge that is starting to establish itself and will feed us for years to come. We have watermelons and pumpkins. Carrots and Romaine lettuce are in the ground. Swiss Chard and Kale freshly planted.
Faith is becoming sight.
Oh, and four rocking chairs showed up
Because, Winni vibes.
Four old wooden rocking chairs also joined the collection this week.
They are weathered, mismatched and badly in need of cleaning, scraping, new screws, glue and paint.
In other words, ideal.
I know exactly what I want to do with them. Hopefully Susan will get started on them soon.
But that is another story.
For now there are timbers stacked beside the house, a small mountain of boulders waiting for assignments, potatoes sprouting indoors, a peach tree refusing to officially die, a birch tree waiting for its permanent home, and four rocking chairs waiting for a new lease on life.
Does it get any better than this?
And I’m pretty sure we’re going to need the truck again.
The Buttervale Life 