I’ve posted a couple of close up shots of the compost/potato bins, so that you can get a good look at the coat hanger wires that are used to hold all the pallets together. Boy do those grass clipping need a good turning in the bin, but its kind of surprising that I’m still able to add grass clippings to the pile. Since with last years cinder block compost bin, in only two mowing I had filled the bin to the top. Plus now that I’m looking it over, I might pull some of the clippings out of the bin, and lay them down as ground mulch out in the garden, since the weed situation on the right half of the garden is still out of control. I ended up pulled up two 5 gallon buckets of weeds from the garden one afternoon and it barely looks like I made a dent. Continue reading
Category: gardening
Garden – 06/10/2010
Man oh man, look at all those weeds on the right hand side of the garden. It looks like its finally time to do a little bit of weeding in the garden, even though I haven’t been looking forward to the task. But you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.
Overall, everything seems to be coming in nicely. The sweet corn and rhubarb are growing like gangbusters. The tomatoes finally seem to be growing well. Maybe in another week or so I’ll prune off all the suckers on the tomatoes, and string them up to the trellis. Continue reading
Salad Table – 05/31/2010
Here are some better shots of the salad table, growing away like crazy. One thing that I’ve started to notice is that I might have planted the greens on the table a little bit too heavy. Since the plants almost seem to be crowding each other out for light/water/nutrients.
So what I’ve started to do, is some light trimming of the greens on the outside boarders. And then within each type of green, I’ve started to trim out plugs of baby greens, and then brushed around the remaining plants to fill in the gaps. We’ll see if this ad-hoc crowd control method works, since I’d still really like the maximize the yields from each planted cell.
I also tossed in a couple of shots of the wooden pallet compost bin, with the potato/carrot growing bin right next to it. Who knows if anything is really going to pan out vegetable wise with that bin. But as the old saying goes, nothing ventured nothing gained.
Garden – 05/31/2010
As you can probably tell, this is basically just a random dump of pics from the back garden. It seems like most of the plants are doing well. I finally spent some time during Memorial Day weekend to re-do the fence around the garden. Since each morning as I was leaving for work before the fence was fixed, the rabbits were basically using my garden as their personal buffet line. With the worst of the damage being on the tomatoes and swiss chard.
For some strange reason out of the four different beans/peas that I planted in the front right corner. The only seeds that really didn’t germinate at all were the Snow Snap peas from johnny’s, so go figure. But the Xera and Carson both seem to be coming on nice and strong, which is fine with me. Since the only ones that I really care about are the Carson’s, since they are a yellow wax bean. So if I’m able to harvest anything from the other three beans/peas, I’ll consider it a bonus in my book.
Salad Table – 05/28/2010
Amazing what a difference 10 days makes. Since it was just 10 days ago that I planted the second cell in the salad table with radishes and two kinds of mesclun. And as you can probably tell, those plants are well past the point of initial germination.
A couple more days of growing and it’ll be time to harvest some fresh mixed greens from cell 1 and cell 2.
Garden – 05/24/2010
Once again I got myself into another little side project with the garden. This time it has to do with setting up a makeshift irrigation system as cheaply as possible for the garden.
For the last couple of years, I’ve been thinking about how to run a water line over to the garden area as easily as possible. Since dragging around a 100′ hose in the yard is just too cumbersome. And trenching the yard to put the irrigation line underground is just overkill.
Once again, Menards was having a sale on plumbing/irrigation parts, and while I was looking at the sales flyer the idea hit for running the irrigation piping on the top rail of the fence going around the yard, and just securing it to the fence rail with zip ties. So with a plan in place, it was time to pick up all the parts for this project.
It turns out that this whole project only ran me about $50, and that included the crimping tool which was $9.99. Yeah I could have done this even more cheaply and gone with plastic quick connect fittings which would have been ~$6 total instead of $22 total for all the brass fitting. But for me, the extra $16 was worth the splurge.
I guess we’ll see over time how this set-up hold up to the weather.
Salad Table – 05/24/2010
Six days later and you can see that all the radishes and mesclun have germinated in the second cell. Though they may be small, and only have their cotyledon, they seem to be off to a great start.
Garden is planted – 05/18/2010
Over this past weekend, I finally transplanted all the seedlings that I grew. Unfortunately I ran into a bit of an issue, since almost all the seedlings developed a bad case of sunburn on their leaves. Guess I shouldn’t have given the seedlings full sun right off the bat, since I put them out for the full day on Friday the 14th.
Last year my issue was “damping off” (see here & here), and now this year sunburns. Man if it isn’t one thing its another.
Salad Table – 05/18/2010
Amazing what another three days can do, since the Spicy Greens Mix and the Bordeaux really added some height. While the Outredgeous in the front seems a little bit slow to the party, but I think its only because the Outredgeous is more of a head style of romaine lettuce.
For cell #2 I thought that I would mix it up and I filled up half the cell with Burpee French Blush radishes, and divide the other half for Burpee Mesclun Spicy Mix and Burpee Mesclun Salad Mix. I got each packet at Menard’s for about $0.62, so I thought what the heck, why not try to grow radishes in the salad table.
Salad Table – 05/15/2010
You can really start to see all the different greens starting to fill in that first section of the salad table. Another couple of weeks and I should be ready for my first harvest of greens. I’ve also got all the transplants chilling out in the salad table, waiting to be planted in the ground.
