I think this is Aaron's last bowl of the season. We ended pottery a few weeks ago, but I still need to pickup our last pieces from the museum. The colors on this bowl aren't spectacular but Aaron was pleased with the curved lip of the bowl. He wanted to avoid the straight-walled bowls that he has been making plenty of.
Aaron hit a creative streak and came up with this funky shaped piece. What is it? A vase? A water jug? Not sure, but he gets high marks for originality. The glaze colors came out smooth and have an Acorn color. I suggested that he make a brown lid that would make this look like an actual acorn.
We enjoy games and one of our favorites is called "Bohnanza" but we affectionately call it the "Bean Game". The official game site is here but that is a pretty weak description compared to the wikipedia site. I bring this up because today we built our new bean support (V2.0). Version 1.0 is visible in the pictures of garden plot A and was simply the old door to our garden. V2.0 will have 4x the surface area of V1.0 and should yield 4x the number of beans! Beans planted that will use the support: peas, yellow wax and kentucky (string bean). We also planted soybeans, but they are small bushes and do not need the support. Eventually we will put strings or rope across V2.0 (the white pvc pipes shown below in garden plot B) that will support the beans as they grow 6+ ft up.
We keep posting pictures of the garden as the plants grow, but many of our loyal fans have been asking "which vegetables are growing where?". We are slaves to our fans and now we have a guide for you to use when watching the vegetables grow.
The guide is fairly self-explanatory. For the labels close to the edge the actual plant may be slightly off the edge of the picture, so you will have to trust us. Soon I will post a similar guide for the second garden.
Paula has 2 bowls to present for your entertainment. The first is s smaller bowl that has really cool textures on the inside and outside. She used a stamp to press the bottom of the bowl and it made a neat "bump" texture. The utside of the bowl has cool ridges made by her fingernails. The glaze did some neat things around the ridges.
This dual colored bowl is very cool because the right side (tan/gray color) is actually the color of the red clay after the bisque firing and glaze firing. The left side was dipped in a blue glaze, but the right side was only dipped in a clear glaze. 
Aaron has made his first mug (handle courtesy of Paula productions). The outside is actually a darker blue than the inside and the edges (rim and handle egdes) turned a nice brown in the kiln.
Paula's best (but not biggest) bowl to-date. The glaze turned out really nicely, and the rim at the top is dark blue. The tough part about the bowls is making sure they're symmetrical at the rim and at the bottom too. 
Plot B: cayenne peppers, cubanele peppers, white corn, pumpkins, peas, turnips, spinach, radish, marigolds and hopefully soybeans (the only unplanted crop as of yet). P.S. That is a LEGAL immigrant working the fields.
We have managed to keep up the pottery while spending a lot of time getting the garden running. Here are 2 new pieces from our collection. Paula made a new mug that matches her old mug shown here. She is the master handlemaker and anything I make that needs a handle gets gently nudged in her direction.
My latest creation is a decent sized bowl. I tried dipping the rim in a separate color than the bottom and inside of the bowl. The glaze drippped down from the rim and made a weird streaking phenomena. Kudos for making the inside of the bowl smooth, a first for me!
The garden plots have been cleaned, tilled and fertilized with mulch and organic fertilizer. We would have started planting last weekend, but the weather did not cooperate. This weekend we will hit the dirt first thing saturday morning.
Plot B looks a little smaller, but that is because we didn't weed block the entire area. There was quite a bit of straw in the garden leftover from the previous owner, so we used that to cover the left quarter of the garden. This will be Paula's Pumpkin Patch.
For the past 2 years we have rented a 15'x15' garden plot in an organic community garden in Waltham, MA. This year, we opted for a 2nd garden plot giving us about 30'x30'. The original plan had our 2nd garden directly next to our original garden, this was ideal. However, when we arrived on the first day a new member of the garden had already cleared our 2nd garden spot and begun to plant stuff. The powers that be let him keep that plot (which should have been ours) and gave us a 2nd garden catty-corner to our original garden. Oh well - I guess the early bird gets the worm.
This is our original garden plot (above) with old weed block on it and a pile of mulch.
This is our 2nd plot. You can see our original garden in the top left corner of the image.
These are "before" images of our gardens before we started to clean them and prep for the season.
