An Update on the Overachievers

Remember The Overachievers? My littlest brother and his lovely wife, the ones who made a gorgeous new veggie garden with over 300 landscaping bricks and 10 yards of topsoil this spring? (It still makes my back hurt just to think about that!) Well, lest you think they're resting on their laurels, I should assure you that their garden is still moving along quite nicely.

In fact, I received an email several weeks ago that included some pictures of their latest construction effort. Check it out:


Did you guess that this is a compost bin? If so, you guessed correctly! They did a nice job on construction, and I'm jealous of this pretty bin--beats the heck out of my ugly black plastic ones, but those were the only ones that I could get my former husband to approve so I'm kind of stuck with them.

I didn't yet tell them that they'll want to have at least two bins, as they've been working so hard already and they can wait to start on the second one until this one gets filled up a bit. As you can see, though, they did start filling this one right away:


Compost bins are not the only environmentally-friendly feature added to the Overachievers' yard in recent weeks. They also ordered two white oak barrels (seconds from a distillery) to use as rain barrels at their house:


Jeff reports that the whiskey barrels smelled really good, and that they were very heavy. He was glad that the website where they ordered them (linked above) included shipping in their pricing, and that a friend stopped by the day they were delivered. He was able to talk his friend into helping him move the barrels so he didn't have to do that on his own.

I was promised more pictures as the garden starts to grow, but I know that they finally got their grapes, blueberries, and all the rest planted. And since I know that Jeff sometimes reads my blog, I would like to offer up this link to the Ohio State Extension Office's page on growing blueberries in the home garden.


I think he wondered whether I was playing a cruel trick on him when I advised him to not let his blueberry bear fruit this year, so I'm letting this page back me up. As it says: " Blueberry plants normally do not need to be pruned for the first three years. Remove blossoms that appear in the year of planting and second year after planting to stimulate vigorous growth." It's not easy to do--I know that all too well--but it's definitely worth it!