Making a Mess

My neighbors love me.  Ha.  Hopefully I won't make a big enough mess for someone to actually complain.

So I've decided to make a mess of my yard.  The previous owners had it all nicely landscaped and pretty.  Well, since I bought it, I didn't water the lawn so I let the grass die and the weeds take over.

I never really cared for that planting strip at the front.  What purpose does it serve? So I decided to plant some tulips last fall.  Directly into the grass because I didn't feel like figuring out how to get rid of the grass.  

Well, then spring came along and the tulips started coming up.... and I realized I needed to do something.  So I laid mulch.  To kill the grass, I put newspaper down under the mulch to help suffocate the grass.  

So far this hasn't worked out so well.  First, I didn't buy enough mulch and so I ran out and the newspaper was peeking out from under it.  At the time I didn't think it was that hideous but the next day, as I was leaving or work, I realized how absolutely horrendous it was.  So that night I went and bought more mulch and laid that down.

Well, now it's been a few weeks.  The grass is peeking out at the edges.  And in places where the paper has shifted, leaving a gap for the grass to come through.  And next to the plants.

I also decided to cut some babies off a spikey plant closer to the house and plant those.  No clue what it is other than a spikey plant.  I transplanted 4 of them and it looks like 2 of them should survive.  I'll probably try another 2 or so again.  The original plants are pretty big and over grown and haven't appeared to have been harmed by my earlier attempt so I have more material to play with.

If you take the picture at the right place and angle, it doesn't look too bad.  Look! I have flowers.  What's that thing next to the flower?  It must be some glare or something.  It couldn't be newspaper peeking out.  Why would there be newspaper there?  hah

  

The garden center is not a good place for me.  It's a really nice garden center and they have tons of cool stuff.  It's really hard for me not to spend an hour just browsing what they have.  It's also really hard not to walk out of there with way more than I have any reason to buy. 

Case and point, the tree I bought.  It's a persimmon tree.  The reason this is relatively good is because it's only one tree, where I had 3 others I was also seriously considering.

 

So far it's just a stick in some mulch.  Hopefully something will happen soon.  I have no idea what I'm doing or when some signs of life will show up.

Seed Starting Update

I have my first sprouts!

See em?
They are in there
Broccoli and Brussels Sprouts have sprouted

Yes I do realize it's really early to be starting them but the weather's been so warm, I figure spring's gonna start early and they like a little bit of frost right?  That and I'm excited to have my first garden.  Garden that I own, that is.  Well, I guess technically the bank owns it.  hrm.  I'm good at sucking the joy out of things.

These were new seeds.  Most of my seeds are from 2010 and none of them have sprouted yet.  I'm hoping it's just because these ones sprout fast and the other ones will come up in the next week or so.  Otherwise I will be sad.

Seed Starting

 

 

The first batch of seeds has been started!  That is my water heater.  It's the warmest place in the house.  Until the plants actually sprout, they need heat, not light.  Once they have sprouted, they will move to a shelf where I will set up flourescent lights to get some seedlings going.  

I am anticipating 8 weeks to transplant.  Last frost date here is listed as April 11-18.  Hopefully it will be earlier rather than later.  Most of the seeds are from 2010 so we'll see how they do.

The seeds are a bunch of herbs, a bunch of tomatoes, a bunch of peppers and a bunch of other stuff, don't remember what other seeds I randomly chose.   Very descriptive, I know.

Compost

So it's mid September. Obviously I am not going to be planting a garden this year. But I can get things ready for next year.

Here is the first piece of my garden, the compost pile. I brought home some pallets from work. $2 for L brackets, and an hour to assemble and load it up. By load it up, I mean, move what looked like a trash heap in the middle of my yard so that it's contained by the pallets. My neighbors love me. At least my lawn isn't yellow any more, just green with weeds.

The compost pile is in the corner. The rest of the garden will be the dirt area around it.


I am deciding how I want to lay out the garden. The grid is 1 ft per box. The box on the top left is the compost pile. The other boxes are raised beds. That's as much effort as I am capable of putting into drawing this.



What do you think? Is 2 ft a wide enough aisle? I am thinking it will just be boards around the border. Not sure how I am getting 20' boards and bringing them home but we'll get to that. Or I'll get multiple shorter boards and figure out how to join them. Can I just screw together the corners or do I need something more to support it and keep it from falling apart once it's filled with dirt? I figure I'll till everything with my garden weasel before I build the beds. Hopefully that will give me a few years before I need to figure out how to till inside the raised beds.

Garden Update

The garden is doing well. I get about 3 gallons of assorted stuff but mostly tomatoes every 2 days. That's typically because I stop picking because it's a pain. At least at this point most of the lower branches have ripened and been picked so I don't have to stoop over as much.

My family visited recently. I sent them home with close to 50 lbs of produced from the garden. Which pretty much wiped out everything I had. I should have taken some pics but for some reason have not in a while. Oh well.

K has been on my case to post something about this so he can send it to D. *wave hi* Don't you feel special, you are D? If it makes you feel any better K is only K and at one point was K-Ram, like K-Fed except nerdier. You should call him that by the way. Also, I told him to tell you to plant pineapple tomatillos but I bet he didn't. It's probably too late now but next year you should. Those are by far the most popular item from my garden.

Anyway, so these are some of the organic ish home remedy type alternatives to pesticides. I have found them by googling/word of mouth.

Beetles - they were going nuts on the soy beans. I believe this applies for other beans too but who knows. The soy bean plants were doing well and then one day I came out and there were probably thousands of beetles on my half a dozen or so plants. I guess they are japanese beetles. Get a bucket and put a couple inches of water and a squirt of dish soap in it. Swirl it around to get the dish soap dissolved. Alternatively, put the soap in first and fill with a hose so it takes care of it for you. Put the bucket under the plant where you see a bunch of beetles. Knock the plant and the beetles fall into the bucket. The dish soap keeps they from getting out and they drown. Then smash the drowned beetles (I used a large branch I found on the ground) so their guts get all into the water. It was recommended to actually put them in a blender but I'm not getting a blender just for this. I left the bucket in the garden. When the beetles die they release some pheromones or something that repels other beetles. They recommended spraying this solution all over the garden but I just left the bucket there. Since I did that, there have only been a couple beetles out there each day.

Mosquitos -
1. it was recommended to plant garlic sporadically throughout the garden or around the perimeter or something.
2. another option is to make a garlic solution. I heard garlic, ginger, onion, cheyenne pepper with some wator in a blender. Then spray this all over the garden. I haven't done this but one of my garden neighbors did.
3. listerine. get a spray bottle and spray the whole place. i actually did this one. haven't gotten a bite since but i still douse myself pretty liberally with bug spray before going out.
4. grow mint. or catnip. or citronella. only trouble is they may take over your entire garden. and you need to have it spread around, like the garlic in #1 which helps with the whole taking over the world thing.

Slugs - they say this is for slugs. they also say it helps release calcium to make your garden grow nice and tall. like milk for kids or something. crush up some egg shells and sprinkle them all over. the sharp edges are supposed to keep the slugs out. don't know if this really makes a difference but I had some eggs so I crushed up the shells and put them out there when my plants were still pretty small. Didn't seem to hurt anything.

OK that's not that impressive of a list but that's all I got.

Also, if your gardening shoes are fairly open and your feet are exposed, when you are harvesting stuff with a knife, make sure not to drop it on your foot. It hurts. And leaves a mark. And is hard to deal with when you have packed your garden really really tight and you are standing in the middle of it. You end up hopping on 1 foot trying not to let that foot move because you don't want to step on your plants but you end up grabbing the cages so that you don't fall down and crush about 5 of them. It's awkward.

Garden

This is what happens when you don't check your plants very carefully. I checked my plants tonight in the dark after getting out from work late. I started nosing around the plants when I noticed a shadow under one of the zucchini plants. Well, this is what I found. Not sure how long it had been growing there but this monster was about ready to take over the world. Fortunately I found him and cut him off. I'm gonna need a whole bunch of zucchini recipes really soon. Feel free to share if you have any.



I took a bunch of other pics of the garden but none of them are motivating me to add them to this post right now.

Yet Another Garden Update

Are you sick of these yet?

This is my plot from a distance. Definitely easy to pick mine out. It's the one with the giant sunflowers.

The sunflowers are now probably 7-8 ft tall. Too tall for me to guess at their height accurately. The first couple full fledged flowers have just popped up.


This is corn. Woohoo it's actually growing. Some of them have more than one ear of corn on them too. For some reason mine are a lot shorter than everyone else's. Mine are 2-3 ft tall whereas some other people who planted theirs a month after I had planted mine are 4-5 ft tall. But I have corn ears and they don't. So ha. Just have to figure out when to harvest. I don't think it's yet. Hopefully I'll figure that out before they are ready.

Here's the start of the tomatoes. These were supposed to be Matt's Wild Cherry tomatoes. They never sprouted after 3 tries. I threw some slightly rotten cherry tomatoes that I got from the grocery store into the soil and sprouts came up. Thats' what's growing here instead. This one seems a lot more viney than the other ones.
Next: Lollipop Tomatoes. These should turn bright yellow when they are ripe.
Green grape tomatoes. Not entirely sure how you know when these puppies are ripe. I think my rule will be whenever I start picking the other ones I will pick these as well. That or I'll pick one every day and taste.
I know, I really should have learned to turn the flash off by now.
Cherry tomatoes. Someone explain to me why these puppies are over 2" in diameter. And why I keep referring to my plants as puppies.
Mini Orange Tomatoes
Dr Carolyn. These should turn yellow too. Apparently I was in the mood for yellow tomatoes when I ordered seeds.
Look they're yellow! oh wait, that's my crappy photography skills.
Wonderberries. These are growing like a massive bush. With about a billion little fruits. I just looked up what a wonderberry is. I had bought the seeds because they had a cool name. They turn a deep bluish purple. Mildly sweet and sour flavor, something like a blueberry, or so they say. I'll let you know.
Pineapple Tomatilloes. I was hoping these would be more prolific. There are a bunch of them, but no where near as many as say the wonderberries. And I know these are good. Still TBD on the wonderberries. Might just have a million little fruits that I don't actually like. That would be sad.

Butternut Squash. Between, Dr Carolyn and Wonderberries. There are also 2 pepper plants in the back somewhere but I suspect the butternut squash is gonna take those over. Harvesting is gonna be interesting.

And peppers. I have 2 of these growing so far. 2 peppers. On at least 4 plants. Sigh. Hopefully the others will grow something too.
Basil. Which I meant to harvest some for a caprese salad with the heirloom tomatoes I got from the farmers market. Maybe I'll remember tomorrow. Hopefully I'll remember before the tomatoes go bad.
Zucchini. Once again. Me and flash just don't get along. I harvested a couple that were about 6" on saturday. Sauteed with some onions and mushrooms on a pizza with gruyere. Yum.
Cucumbers. No fruit growing yet but there are some flowers. Not sure what I will do with them if they are very prolific. Any suggestions?
Watermelon. Right now just leaves and vines and weeds. Hopefully the first 2 will win and make me some watermelon. And if you are wondering about the newspaper in the corner, well, everyone else was doing it. And it seemed to help with the weeds in their gardens. I might have been a bit late putting it down though and I didn't really have all that much paper so I only did a small section.
Cantelope. Yes, I know, the weeds around them are much bigger. But at least they have true leaves growing now. If you squint hard enough you might even be able to see them.

I forgot to take pics of the dill but that is doing very well. The lettuce bed and the rest of the herbs... not so much.

Another Garden Update

Yes, you will get these way more often than is sane. It's aliiiiiive. You can feel free to skip to the next post if you are bored. I'll have both the Daring Bakers AND Barefoot bloggers posts later this month.

OK let's start with the pineapple tomatilloes. I only had them once and they really do taste like pineapple. Only thing is these puppies are tiny. Full size ones are maybe a quarter inch in diameter so these guys are really tiny. I didn't even notice them for a while.
These are wonderberries. I don't know much about them but they have a cool name. These are probably half the size of the pineapple tomatilloes. Just for scale.
Blueberry bush
Watermelon. Other people have flowers on theirs. I'm not cool enough for that.
Cucumber
Zucchini
Butternut Squash. Look the first one has started to form!
OK now let's go to some of the herbs. First up, dill. This is the most prolific of the herbs. Besides the unidentified herb mix.
Sage.
Thyme
Basil
Back to veggies. Peppers. Not sure what kind.
More peppers just sprouting. I am hoping these ones will come in a bit later so not everything comes in at once.
Beets and carrots.
Corn and soybeans
Tomatoes. I think these are cherry tomatoes.
Here are more tomatoes. I am not sure which ones are which. I think they are lollipop and green grape tomatoes. These ones popped up out of nowhere. I was taking pics and I figured I'd take a more careful look at all my plants and went whoa there's a whole bunch in here.




Woohoo!!!