April 2010 Archives

I've been trying to post these pictures since Sunday afternoon.  So without further ado and no photo editing, here they are.

This is the long view of the raised beds before I cut the fabric and planted lima beans, chard, squash, and zucchini.

Here's a close-up of the stakes I drove to keep the boards from bowing.  And I also plan to tie bean poles and tomato trellises to them.

These are the cucumber buckets.  (They're former kitty litter buckets with drainage holes drilled into them.)

Today is the first day this year that I noticed the bamboo shoots.  I happened to spot this guy erupting out of the yard in an inconvenient, high traffic spot:

But at least that one didn't try to kill me.  While dumping a zombie-cchini found in the fridge onto the compost pile, I almost fell over another bamboo shoot lurking in the hedge of wild violets that I haven't had the heart to mow down yet.  And then to add insult to injury, I couldn't find it again to take a picture of it!  (Not that I looked too thoroughly - I didn't want to hang around the zombie-cchini any longer than necessary.) 

So, I'm going to try to photograph the bamboo shoot above until I get tired of it and remove it from the yard with an axe.  That's if I don't fall over it and squish it before it hardens into the bone-like stalk we all know and don't love when it erupts in the middle of the yard.

In the outdoor seed starting tray, the catnip and Krishna tulsi are finally sprouting.  I was beginning to think that catnip just doesn't like me!  But I guess it thinks I'm OK, after all. ;)  You can't really see it in this picture, but there are two little sprouts under the post-it note on the left.

The blue vervain did come back - I thought it was dead.  And I think there might be an echinacea next to it.  Or it might be a weed.  I guess time will tell. 

I finished chunking dirt into the raised beds today.  Much to my horror, I discovered that stuff sprouted under the landscaping fabric! Not. Good.  I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to do about that.

I haven't seen signs of any more deer damage, but I'm still sprinkling chili powder on stuff every few days.

The wire grass woke up this week. Ugh.  Now the battle to keep it from overrunning everything will commence in earnest. 

But the most worrisome thing I noticed today is that the tomatoes are sickly.  The peppers are fine - it's just the tomatoes.  The ends of the leaves lose their color and then shrivel up.  The plants overall look pretty anemic.  I gave 'em a shot of worm poop today in case they're undernourished and didn't leave them out in the sun as long as I did the peppers.  I'm not sure that the sun is hurting them - I keep them well-watered and the leaves aren't really droopy.  So I don't know what the deal is.  Needless to say, I hope they make a miraculous recovery!  I tried to take a close-up picture of them, but it's all blurry and you can't see what I'm talking about.

Here's a longer view of the tomatoes and squash, zucchini, and cucumbers:

And the peppers:


I also finally put up a trellis for my snow peas.  I staked twine down with landscaping fabric anchors and looped it through the rungs of my deck railing.

This weekend was extremely productive - my family and the plants worked very hard! ^_^

The daffodils finally bloomed Saturday.  This is the first one.

Several more daffodils bloomed over the course of the day.  I think you could almost sit there and watch the blooms open.  If you didn't have other things to do - like, say, build raised garden beds.

This is what the garden area looked like before we started.

My parents brought me a truckload of planting mix.

On one of the three trips to the hardware store, we bought a wheelbarrow and compost.