Bay View State Park

We recently rented a cabin at the Bay View State Park and liked it so much that I thought I would post a review and some photos. There are 6 cabins totally and Cabin #5 and #6 have attached shower/restroom. Most of the state parks we’ve been to, the nearest house was a few miles away but here we’d houses next to the park. Surprisingly that didn’t affect the serenity of the park in anyway. Our cabin had an ocean/bay view – we were in cabin #4. I believe all cabins have ocean view and the park has a beach access. The cabin closest to the beach access is cabin #5 but others aren’t far either. The park was quite populated with cabin-ers, RV-ers and campers – in a good way; even though it was a rainy weekend.

The restrooms are close to the cabins and there’s a shower too. If you want to have a shower don’t forget your quarters! The cabins have designated parking. Each cabin has a picnic table, a porch swing (yes!) and a fire pit.

I would highly recommend a stay here if you’re looking for an idyllic vacation! Here are a few more photos:

A peek at our edible garden

After our tryst with vegetable gardening last year (you can read about it here, here and here) we decided to go full blown this year. I don’t know how but I came across a new method of gardening called the Square foot gardening. My DH always asks me where do I come to know about all these things…honestly even I don’t know! Serendipity I guess! We went and bought Mel’s new book, All New Square Foot gardening. If you’re lucky enough to be in WA you can get it at the Half price book stores. Buying the book was just the start of the journey. Then we’d to collect the ingredients for the special mix – five different kinds of manure/compost, vermiculite and peat moss. Once we’d the ingredients it was quite a project to setup the raised bed. Mixing of the soil requires quite some muscle power. Of course and then there was the most pleasant part of it all – getting the required veggie starts. Picking veggie starts is like asking a child to pick a candy. However many you take, you’re never satisfied! There’s always that one veggie that you wanted and couldn’t get!

I do remember taking photos of when we planted the bed but don’t remember where they’re. So unfortunately I can’t show how much the veggies have progressed but I can vouch for it that they’ve come a long way! Here we go with the photos…

The Square Foot garden bed – the first 4 squares are zucchini and summer squash

Monrovia blueberry bush – if you look closely you’ll see a lot of berries on it

Back of the bed – the larger plants are tomatoes, front left and right is onion and the lots of small plants are spinach (we’ve harvested it a couple of times now!); the lone plant is pepper.

Strawberry plant in a container of it’s own – look at all those little berries!

Mint – we harvested a lot of this and probably not too frequently which kind of stunted the growth of this plant. Lesson learned – harvest mint frequently!

Both the plants above are blueberries – can you see the little berries?

Only the raised bed is done using SFG. All the others are using regular soil.

So what do I think of SFG? It’s hard to say right now since we' haven’t had much fruit except spinach but I can say that all plants look quite healthy. It is a lot of hard work to put up a SFG bed so I hope the harvest is equally good. We did put a weed fabric and a chicken wire to prevent gophers and other rodents – so that was good. I’ll update as and when we get fruits on our plants.