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.
For the last couple of weeks I was on the fence (literally) about whether to add some more space to the garden, another 8′ by 16′ to be exact. Well I finally pulled the trigger on the idea, but I ended up executing the idea a little bit differently than the last time that I added onto the garden.
Usually I would take my pick/maddox and grub all the grass off the surface, which is a very time consuming and labor intensive task. So as I was looking at the space an idea popped into my head out of the blue, burn out all the grass out with my propane flame thrower! I was only able to get about 1/2 the plot done, since a rain storm ended up rolling in on Saturday afternoon. And last I checked, propane and lighting don’t mix. But for the half that I did end up getting done before the storm, it only took me about 35 minutes to get it done and that was even with the grass still being slightly wet from the rolling rain storms.
With just a little bit more burning to go this week, I’ll finally be able to plant up all the seeds for the sweet corn and the beans/snow peas in the ground.
You can really see the radishes in the backyard and the Swiss chard in the front yard coming in nicely. Also I’m starting to get a little bit of growth action on the lettuce.
From the way that the main rhubarb plant is growing, it looks like once again I should be able to get two very robust harvests out of the plant. I’m not so much worried about getting stalks out of the other four plants, so those are basically the “in case of emergency” cuttings for friends and family that might want a rhubarb plant.
Once again the centennial is doing gang busters when it comes to vine growth, a couple more days and I’ll finally have to run the new diagonal trellis system to support the centennial off the ground.
I also cleared out an 8′ x 8′ patch of the garden and planted up two kinds of radishes (French Blush & Sparkler), three kinds of beets (Detroit Red, Moneta & Golden) and two kinds of lettuce (Bordeaux and Outredgous.)
Here are a couple of pictures of the garden that I took two nights ago. It’s kind of crazy that in just about a week, how much the rhubarb and hops plants have growth.
I’ve been thinking about getting a watering wand the last couple of years, but all the models that I see in the store suck. They are either made with cheap parts (e.g. plastic valves), or they add crazy bells and whistles to jack up the price (e.g. swiveling heads and/or heads with multiple spray settings.)
So I thought to myself “I can make a better watering wand.” So I put on my thinking cap to come up with some ideas to make a watering wand. And I kept stumbling on the actual sprayer head itself, since all the wands in the store have special sprayer heads. I did a little bit of searching online, and I found one guy online that made his own watering wand. It turned out good, its just that he already had a sprayer head from a broken watering wand, so that really didn’t help me out since I didn’t have an old watering wand to steal parts from. Continue reading →
I didn’t know it was possible, but I actually ended up killing most of the flower seedlings that I started a few weeks back. What ended up happening was something called “damping-off.” Which is basically over watering the seedlings and having a soil fungus develop which kills the root system. Continue reading →