Well this past Saturday, I ended up getting up early to finish reading a business book (yes, I know this sounds very nerdy.) And after I was done with the book, I looked in the fridge, and noticed that it was pretty empty. So with an empty fridge, I started to write up a grocery list to do a little bit of shopping for the week.

With the so call “heat dome” engulfing the Midwest, I decided it would be prudent to pack an ice filled cooler in my truck. Why? Well my rational is that if I’m going to be out running errands the whole day. I just don’t see the point of going home multiple times to drop off any perishable items, when I could just toss them in the cooler.

So stop numero uno, is the Walmart on the north side of town, since last week they had 40 lb bags of compost for $0.50 a bag, and I wanted to pick up a couple of bags. Of course I come back a week later, and they are all out of compost on clearance. But instead they had something even better on clearance, which was Milorganite fertilizer for $3.00 a bag (marked down from $12.98 a bag) and they had a pallet and a half of the stuff.

When I saw that, the first thing I did was call my mom to find out if she wanted me to get her any. Since she has mentioned to me a couple of times, how much she likes this brand of fertilizer. At first she said that she was going to check her local Walmart to see if it was on clearance by her house. So in the mean time while mom was checking her Walmart. I did my grocery shopping inside of Walmart and then picked up 8 bags of Milorganite on the way out the door.

After I had already left Walmart, and was down the street at a local butcher shop, I received a call from mom letting me know that they didn’t have the Milorganite on clearance by her house. So she told me to get her 10 bags of the stuff, so I told her no problem and I hung up the phone. Five minutes later as I’m checking out at the butcher shop I get another call from my mom, and she changed her mind, now she wants 25 bags of the stuff. Yes 25 bags of fertilizer!

So I headed back to Walmart to fill mom’s request. And in the 20 minutes since I bought my 8 bags, only half a pallets worth was left! And with that, I basically bought out the rest of their inventory, except for about 5 ripped bags that I didn’t purchase. And as you can see in both sets of photos, I have quite a bit of fertilizer on my hands now. And when unloaded from my truck and stacked on a pallet, it makes for quite a large and stinky pile in the garage at my other house.

I’ve picked up some pretty good deals over the years. But to pick up about ~$450 worth of fertilizer for ~$100 has to be one of my best scores to date. Now where my mom is going to be storing her portion of the fertilizer, I’ll leave that up to her to figure out.

Toward the end of June, I planted some sweet corn seeds in the back section of the left hand side of the garden. Once again, this is a task that I should have completed months ago, but hey C’est la vie. Right now the stalks are about to my knee, so it will be a while before I have any ears for harvesting.

You’ll also notice that I tossed in a bunch of close up shots of the centennial hops. And by the looks of those cones, I’ll need to plan a brew session in the next couple of weeks to take advantage of these fresh cones. I’m think about maybe brewing a Kölsch style beer, with these hops. But since I’m in the pre-planning stage of the brew session, all ideas are welcome.

This is one of those things that only takes 15-20 minutes to plant, but I just kept on putting it off. You’ll notice that in some of the other salad table cells, are the remaining seedlings. The plan is when I visit my sister for 4th of July weekend, that I’ll give her all the remaining seedlings. Even though transplanting them in July, is way late in the season. But who knows, maybe something will turn out from this experiment.

And speaking of late season transplants, you’ll notice that I’ve transplants all the remaining seedlings from their 9-cell packs into 10 oz plastic cups. This way the plants will be a little bit less root bound, come transplant time on the 4th of July.

In the pictures, you might notice a bunch of orange flags around the garden. I’ve lost the weeding war at this point in the season so I’ve resorted to tying orange caution tape onto bamboo skewers, and placing this homemade “flag” next to each plant. That way when I finally get around to actually weeding the garden, I’ll it least know where my seedlings are in the garden.

Also, check out the centennial hops, talk about a beast! If it keeps growing like this, I should have a bumper crop of cones.

Finally I’ve added a couple of pics of my neighbor’s “garden”. Since what he ended up doing, was just roto-tiling most of his backyard. There is a little bit of rhyme and reason to the layout, but mostly it has to do with not wanting to mow his backyard, so he got rid of the grass and put in the garden instead.

You can see, I’ve been a bad gardener this year, in that I still haven’t transplanted all my seedlings at this point in time. Call it paranoia on my part, since I’m still a little worried about a freak hailstorm. But the seedlings will be transplanted eventually, though a bit later in the season than expected.

You’ll also notice that the rhubarb and hops are doing very well at this point in the season. I’ve thought about trying to make rhubarb wine this year, so if anyone has a good recipe or tips, please drop a line in the comments.

In just under a month after trimming out the seed heads from the main rhubarb plant, it generated two more seed heads. This plant must ready want to go to seed this year, because its generating seed heads like crazy.

The hops are still doing their whole “growing thing” up the A-Frame. I’m kind of curious this year, to see what kind of cone production I get out of the hops. Since last years diagonally hops, didn’t really produce enough cones for a 5-gallon batch of homebrew. So hopefully my fortune will change this year.

But check out the hops! The Centennial is already at the ~10ft mark on the A-Frame, and its only been about two weeks since the last set of pics. Even the Golding is doing better this year compared to last year. Maybe it has something to do with all the heavy shade being provided by the surrounding rhubarb.

You’ll also notice that the rhubarb has already gone to seed, which is earlier than I was expecting. But none the less, all I did was take my pruners and just cut off the seed heads, since I don’t need the seeds, and the seed head also takes away from stalk production. But as the pics can attest, I’m not really in a shortage of rhubarb stalks this early in the season.

For some reason this year, the weeds are growing like crazy in the main garden. So I’ll have to finally bust out the stirrup hoe or string trimmer one of the nights and do some heavy duty weeding to get the garden ready for the May 20th transplant date.

At this point I’m shooting for a transplant date of May 20th, 2011, for all the seedlings that are growing in the house. And a few days after Mother’s Days, I’ll start the transplants for the corn & cucumbers, since they only need a day to germinate, and about 4 days before they are big enough to be transplanted outside.

But this week the temperature has dropped back down to the lower 30’s. So for now I’ll just have to bide my time with all the seed starting that I need to do inside, instead of any outside work.

I’ve attached, kind of a panoramic shot of the back yard, so you can get the full effect of what’s going on this year so far.

One final thing, which is kind of off topic, but semi related to this conversation. Many years ago I had I picnic table on the brick patio in the backyard. Well I ended up having to get rid of that picnic table, but I never found anything to replace it. And as you can tell in the pics, I have plenty of chairs for the patio, just no table. So this year I thought that I would finally undertake the task of re-laying the patio bricks, and making a “rustic” table for the patio. Since it’s kind of a shame, that I’m not utilizing this space to it’s full potential in the summer time. So expect to see some updates in the future for this little side project.