Crunch Crunch

Even warm from the garden they are so cool and refreshing. They are SO GOOD. My daughter practically beat the door down with her basket to go outside and pick "cumbers".

They are a little yellow, so I picked some that were on the small size so that I can try to get the ones on the vines now to ripen a bit darker with some extra nitrogen. We'll see. Even if they don't get darker, they are unbelievably sweet, and the skins are not tough at all.

Now if only the tomatoes would hurry up and ripen, we'd be able to have a tomato, cucumber and basil salad right from the garden!

Before and After (or later)...

Jersey tore apart my log walls for the last time so I decided to break down and make a planter box. I used untreated 1 x 12 pine boards. I also added another tomato plant and put a pole in for my last remaining bean sprout. I think I'm also going to have to get a trellis for the cukes in the bed who can't quite reach the railing (since I planted them in the front thinking the back row would be all beans).

Anyway, I thought I'd post a before and after picture of the whole thing.

Before:

After:

I can also see little baby cucumbers. They look like a little gherkin pickle with a flower!

Gives me a craving for fried green tomatoes!

I noticed I have two little tomatoes nestled in the center of my big tomato plant. There's a ton of other little clusters about to fruit soon, too. My grape tomatoes are coming along nicely as well, and the combination of using transplants and seedlings means that I'll be in tomatoes for a while. Yippee!

I think I'm going to have to do some repair work on my bed walls, though. Jersey, my female Jack Russell Terrier, has been pulling the loose logs down to get to the lizards that hide in there. I have no idea how I'm going to do it, but I don't see any alternative, short of putting a fence around the whole thing to keep the dogs out (which wouldn't be a bad idea, but it would be a heck of a lot more expensive!).

And, I think I weeded my bean sprouts out by accident. I was left with some funky looking fern thing that closed itself up at night. I have no idea where that came from, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't my pole beans! So now I have an empty row, which I think I'm going to fill with more tomato transplants.

My cucumbers and my carrots are coming along nicely, though. Tomorrow I'm going to tie my cukes back because they're getting tall and floppy. See..

Big difference from the little sprout in my last entry, huh? There's a few pitiful carrots in the front of, but I have a whole other row of nice bigs one that I started at the same time. These are the ones that got trampled by what I think was a cat, so I'm kind of upset about that. I'm trying figure out what I should put in there, maybe just more carrots? Dunno.

And I found some brown mystery stuff, which I think may be a fungus. Greeeeeeeat. So now I'm a google fiend trying to find chemical free ways to get rid of fungus. If it is fungus. It looks like fungus. It's kind of spongy looking.

We have sprouts!

My cukes are sprouting!

There's nothing that new to report in the garden, except my conundrum about where to hang the upside down tomatoes. They weren't getting enough sun, so I took them down to hang on the railing, but they're too low to the ground, so I decided to get a shepherds hook, but when I put my foot on it to push it in the ground it broke. So I have to take it back. I think I'm just going to get some wood (like a 2x4 or 4x4 with a fence post cap ) and screw it to the railing on the outside so I can hang the tomatoes nice and high. I will have to paint it though, so that will be a good afternoon project.

I think I also need to get a plastic owl and then pay someone to climb up the power pole to install it. My garden tranquility is being disrupted by a disgruntled squirrel. He doesn't like the dogs, and dogs don't like him. This morning I had actually go out into the yard in my PJ's to get Rhino to back away from the fence line. When I got out there I realized the squirrel was THROWING things at him. So I ran inside for my camera.

If that poor squirrel fell, there's a good chance he wouldn't even hit the ground.

The Little Garden That Could

I got my soil today. You should have seen me pushing my daughter in the shopping cart and pulling the flat bed cart with about 17 bags of soil on it (I wish I had my ergo with me!). At one point some guy started asking me, of all people (can you believe it?), about how much soil to use to plant his flowers. A giant stack of soil does an expert make. LOL I guess passing along the little knowledge I have about guesstimating the amount of soil needed for a bed (cubic feet = l x w x h) impressed another customer in the isle, because then she started asking me what kind of soil she should use. Hey, maybe I should get a job at Home Depot? It was funny, considering I kept insisting that this is my first bed and I'm just a big newbie.

Anyway, it was amazing how much that pile of logs started to look like a garden bed once I started filling it. Which wasn't an easy task in this heat, by way. And it was a good thing I got some stakes because when I started filling it some of the logs shifted (as I expected). I may have to get one or two more, but it's actually pretty solid.

I have two 7 (ish... I haven't done an official measurement) foot rows, and on the north end is a better boy tomato transplant, one of my pablano seedlings, and then rest of the back role is going to be Kentucky blue pole beans to take advantage of the deck trellising, and then along the front row is carrots and cucumbers.

I also planted two more of the grape tomato plants in the two pots on the left, since I have so many seedlings (and I still have enough left to give to my sister in law as well), and one more pablano in the pot on the right. I've never put pablanos in pots before, so it will be interesting to see how they do. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever done pablanos before.

Other then a few herb transplants, all the hard work is done. For now.... (I still dream about by 4x12 bed, though).

Mmmm Lasagna!

Ever heard of lasagna gardening? Neither had I until last week. No, I won't be growing pasta. It's just a method of creating compost layers as a "no till" way of creating raised garden beds. With my back, I'm all about no tilling! It's also really cheap, allowing you to utilize just about any compost and mulch materials available to you - leaves, clippings, straw, etc.

Oh yeah, and I put in a bed. Sort of. While musing over what to plant the rest of some of my tomatoes in, I realized that I probably had some pots from last year stored in my shed. And I was right. While I was out back digging them out I also realized I had half a shed of fire wood. (Don't ask why a house built on the surface of the sun has a fire place, but alas, it does, and the shed came stocked with wood when we bought the house. LOL) I figured I could use the wood for something, if for nothing else, a few small planters. You can make a raised bed out of just about anything. As long as it stops your soil from washing away, it'll work.

So since there wasn't enough wood to make my 4x12 dream bed, I settled for a small 2x6 bed against the deck so I can take advantage of the trellis. I figure it'll be good for beans, and maybe one big tomato plant, since all I have on the deck are cherries and grapes. It's basically up, but I'm going to stake it off tomorrow just to make it a bit more secure. And it's almost kind of cute, in a rustic sort of way.

The lasagna part about all of this is that I don't even have to break ground. I just started putting down my layers. A few days ago I put an add on freecycle looking for some newspaper, and much to my delight I was DELIVERED a huge stack of papers by a wonderful woman I keep going back and forth with (she's gotten several things from us, and I've gotten several things from her, one of which is the wrought iron basket at the top of this page). Last night when I let the dogs out for their last pee I noticed they took off to the front yard, barking like crazy. So I looked outside, and there they were, unloading their car, piling stacks of newspaper on my front porch. She went trolling her neighborhood the night before recycling day and got several huge sacks of papers for me! Weee! And she delivered them! I was so grateful.

And then I went out to the feed store today to pick up scrap straw. They're really good out there, they'll give you a huge empty feed bag and let you pick up as many scraps as you can. So I got plenty of straw. So now the layers...

First was the newspaper. Wet newspaper. Lots of it. This smothers the grass and kills it, and in the process creates compost.

And then I put down a good layer of straw. Wet straw. A fair amount of it. Some of the sites and books I found said to use lucerne hay as the next layer after the paper, or even pet moss, then straw, but the only lucerne I found was a first cut alfalfa, and it looked really seedy to me. The guy at the store said that all the scraps that fell off the truck had long since sprouted in the grass, and I don't want to deal with that many weeds, so I went with the straw. Tomorrow I'll hopefully be able to get some compost and top soil to complete the rest of my layers, and then I'll get to planting.

The whole time I was digging the logs out of the shed I kept finding these little white eggs. They were fairly big, and hard. They looked like tiny bird eggs. I figured it had to be a snake. I was surprised that I got all the logs out and didn't find a snake. Then all of a sudden Rhino started barking from inside the shed. Sure enough, it was a snake! It was small and black, which didn't meet any of the dangerous snake criteria for our area, so I loaded it onto the hoe and safely dropped it on the other side of the fence where the dogs couldn't kill it. I don't love snakes, but they do eat bugs, and I loath bugs, so he's (or I guess she judging from all the eggs?) is allowed to stay.

Better late than never

With most things in life that is a good motto to live by. In zone 10 gardening, though? Not so much. Most people are probably wondering why I'm starting my garden now (with most of my seedlings just now sprouting), but if I'm diligent about watering I should get one harvest by July, while taking August off (being the hottest month).

Harvest.. hah, such a big word. You'd think by the way I'm talking that I have big huge glorious beds or something. Truth is, I'm a container gardener. Or at least for now, anyway. I would LOVE to put in a raised bed before September, but it's over whelming! Planing, preparing the soil, companion gardening, row planning, north to south, east to west, sun, or shade. OY! And since I'd be working above ground I'd have to truck in soil. Blast that South Florida shell rock! So for now my plans for a raised bed are on hold. Instead, I'm experimenting with upside down gardening. Yep, upside down plants.

I recently saw an add on TV for a kit where you put a tomato plant in a hanging bag, letting you hang it up so the vines grow down. Supposedly the water and nutrients drain into the plant, giving you faster growing times and a higher fruit yield. Much to my delight, you're not just limited to tomatoes.

So, I started two tomato plants (grapes) yesterday, and am going to put my pablano peppers upside down too (I just noticed they sprouted today). For the tomatoes I used decorative wire baskets with coconut husk liner, thinking I can start the hole in the bottom small and cut it open as needed when the roots are better established and the plant won't fall out of the hole. Upon doing some more reading I see that most people use 5 gallon buckets with large 2 and a half inch holes in the bottom, covering the hole with fabric or coffee filters so as not to loose soil when the plant drains after watering. That's what I'm going to for the pablanos, and maybe another tomato or two. See which works best.

Aren't they purdy?

Day 11

Most of the sites I've seen transplanted much larger plants into their buckets, but with the coconut husk I was stumped as to how I was going to get it in there without making a huge hole, thus loosing my soil, so I deduced that I'd have to start small. Indeed I did. It was delicate and tedious to get it in there without damaging it, but the hole is nice and small, and since it's coconut husk it can be cut away to be made larger once the roots are better developed. We'll see!