Cleaning up the garden

Last year when I left for Germany I just left the garden as it was. I didn't cover the beds with mulch or a a cover crop. Bad idea. This is what it looked like when I returned. For perspective, the wire fence around the perimeter is about 3 1/2 feet high. The weeds were taller than me. After much weeding its now cleaned up (mostly) and I did a fall planting of salad greens (spinach, lettuce, arugula and chard) in mid September, which are now coming in great.
I was a bit worried about the late planting, since most of the garden books said to plant by early August for a fall harvest, but it's turned out fine so far. This fall has been unusually warm here, so I may as well take advantage of it. Now I just have to plant the garlic...

my first post

So from August 2006 to August 2007 I was living in Oldenburg, Germany while working at the university there. This was great, Oldenburg is a wonderful town and I met lots of nice people, but there were somethings that I missed. My wonderful girlfriend Laura and our incredibly bad dogs of course. But I also missed gardening and brewing. I kept thinking of things I'd like to grow or beers that I'd like to brew. During this year Laura became somewhat obsessive about her knitting blog. I had never paid much attention to blogs before, but then I started looking around and found some with really neat stuff, and began thinking that maybe posting would help organize my projects. Anyway, I plan on mostly posting about my gardening and brewing projects (hence the clever title), probably with some superfluous shots of the dogs thrown in for fun.