The garden today

And we have foliage! So far I'm very happy with the garden, except that it ended up being too small.  The previous post showed where I planted everything, and it turned out that the nasturtium were not a trailing variety and I missed some thinning of the marigolds, so the carrots weren't getting any sun.  So I moved some of each today in hopes that the carrots will fare better.  We have blossoms on the tomatoes, and I've seen a bumblebee this year so hopefully they'll be fertilized. Last year we got blossoms and no tomatoes, so we'll see what happens.  I may end up having to go out there with a paintbrush, but I'm hoping not.

Our wonderful neighbor Maggie brought me cherry tomatoes, and I have six cherry trees that need to go in the ground around the back yard, but for the moment I moved the one that has the most cherries on it into the garden house so maybe we'll be able to eat them.  Kristianna and Charlie helped me taste test the first strawberries last week, so now I just have to fight the slugs.  Nasty critters.  So after adding the small 'matos and the raspberry (bottom left inside), the garden house is very full.  Some blueberries have dropped the flowers and started becoming berries, so that should be tasty soon!

The mint has totally taken off and filled the pot; I'm not a fan of mint tea, so I need to figure out what else I can do with it.  If only I had a lime tree, I'd be set for doctoring up my mojitos. The thyme and basil have started coming up but aren't tall enough yet to taste them. Soon, I hope. And the only other change to the drawing in the last post was that the corner edemame pot became miniature sunflowers instead, and they're coming up nicely. The edemame is also coming up well, though it's being eaten by a voracious insect of some kind.  I need to find my pepper spray.  The green bean and green onion seeds from last year appear to be completely dead, but at least I have onions from last year becoming enormous, and beans are cheap if I decide I need them.  I'm also contemplating a leaf or romaine lettuce, but I'll only plant that if I get my watering system working, since they need to be well watered. 

Last week I got the watering system all set up and got all the spray nozzles on the tubing at the right places, and then realized I forgot to flush the line.  Clogged line = clogged nozzles, and I only have exactly as many as I need, so I went back to pull them off again... and the warm rubber tubing had snuggled in nicely.  When it's not so wet out (we've had a lot of rain) I'll have to go back out with a pliers and get it all finished.

Well, I was going to leave you with two more pix, but Blogger's having a fit. I guess you'll have to wait!

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Garden Extravaganza

One fabulous thing about living in the south is that we can start gardening so much earlier than everywhere else.  There's an online garden thing called ezgarden that had a free 15 days (after that we pay) but it looks interesting. You tell it your planting zone (I'm in 8A), what kind of plants you want and how many servings per week on it, do layout on your garden space, and then it calculates a schedule and tells you what to do when on a calendar.  For my needs, it had me starting seedlings the first week of January, so that tells you something.

Last year's (and years before that) problem was that we'd grow things and the local critters would gnaw on them before we got a chance to harvest. Last year we only got a total of three tomatoes that we could eat... and that was with three whole plants! So this year - faced with boredom, great weather, a pile of scrap lumber, and angst - I built a structure and covered it in bird netting to keep out the critters.  It is 4 feet deep by 7 1/2 feet wide by 4 feet tall, just great for me. I can reach the top, and Lanse can fit okay enough crouching to still be able to run out and grab something for me later on.  Today I put the final nail in the door, attached the hinges with my me-sized power screwdriver, and voila!  It is finished!

Here's a layout of what I've got in seedlings and somewhere in the mail. I need to make one more trip to the dirt store for some organic soil, and when that's in place I can finish setting up the watering system I bought last fall and never finished.  It's a vacation timer system, but I intend to use it when I'm home to help combat the extreme summer heat. As soon as the plumbing is set, I can get the seedlings in the ground, as most of them are about to outgrow their toilet paper tubes.

I'm so excited!  This year hopefully we'll get to eat a lot more of our own homegrown produce.*

* Yes, I realize that lilacs aren't food, but the fauna thinks it is because it's still small, so I'm keeping it in here as long as it'll fit.

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End of July news

There's really not much; I'm in Applied Math right now, and finding how much I really enjoy it even when it's hard. I was one of those obnoxious students who found school easy, even in High School, in everything except math. Of course, as one of those people, if it's hard it means you hate it... and I've always thought I hated math. But when I was teaching elementary math it started to be fun, and I found ways to do it differently. So now that I'm back in a college math course, I'm usually able to work for a while, take a break, get frustrated... and then really relish the victory when I figure it out. It's a good thing. I never liked challenges, school being easy made me lazy and proud of it. Now I'm kind of liking the challenge.

We're refinancing the house, finally, with the government help to banks for folks upsidedown on the mortgage (lost equity in the economy thing). That should close Tuesday.

We had new friends from church come over for lunch last week and we had a fabulous time. It's so good to find kindred spirit friends. They stayed a few hours, we had good food and lots of conversation and the kids were really good.

Spent a great time visiting my cousins last night. Good times. My one cousin lives here, but we don't see them very often because they're so busy. Her sister and her kids came to visit this week, so we had dinner over there. They'll be coming sometime this week for lunch too.

Otherwise, my bean plants finally have blooms, one pepper rotted but we picked the other one (haven't eaten it yet) and there's three new blooms, the onions are still kind of tall seedlings, I don't know if those will work out. We've eaten three tomatoes and there's four more green ones growing. I'm praying desperately that we avoid the rampant tomato blight that's killing the crops; one source said that it started with seedlings sold from Home Depot, Lowes, KMart and Target, and we got ours at Home Depot before the recall. Some leaves look strange, but the tomatoes look okay so far.

I woke up with a light headache today that I thought was tension in my neck, so I took an ibuprofen. Half hour later I got migraine symptoms, but can't take my migraine meds because I took the ibuprofen and they interact. I have to wait until the ibuprofen's worn off. So I'm missing church with only vague feeling in my hand and a small bit of pain starting to creep in my head. I love my mother's family enormously, but I really wish they'd refrained from passing along this little bit of genetics.

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Beans!

Holy jumping green bean, Batman! Check it out:

9:30 a.m. yesterday, June 15

Lanse says that when he got up this morning just after 7:00 it was taller, but had no leaves on it. Here's what I found when I went to the kitchen at 9:30 this morning, 24 hours later, June 16:

You can't quite tell from the angle of this shot, but the plant is curled towards the window. I turned it around after taking this photo, and now, at just after 11:00, all the leaves have opened out and it's curled toward the window again... in the other direction. If I had any faith in my self-discipline, I would set up a same-angle shot every 20 minutes for the rest of the day to watch this sucker's growing action! It appears I may have planted the cousin to Jack's Magic Bean!

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