utenzi

I posted on Friday a picture of Cry's garden so I figured I'd best put up one of my own admittedly rather small garden area showing the progress since I posted about it's start 3 weeks ago . You might notice the two circled areas. The area circled in black, near the top, is of my first tomatoes. They're very small and green right now, but in a couple of weeks I expect they'll be plump and red. That plant is a grape tomato so the fruit isn't going to get all that big. The other tomato plant, the one in front, is Roma so while a little bigger, that one isn't going to have huge tomatoes either. And over there on the right is a bell pepper plant. The white circled area shows my newest plant. It's a bean plant that resulted from one of the seeds given to me by Cry in payment for helping her with her trellis. So far the second seed hasn't germinated. :-(

This past weekend I helped a friend build a lattice for some of the plants in her garden, especially the beans. This is what it looked like when it was done. She had bought the wood with a different building style in mind so this lattice is a compromise between her view of what she wanted, my view of what she needed, and the constraint of the wood that we had on hand. Neither of us felt like running out to get more wood, y'see. I've labeled a few points of interest on the lattice. (A) is where some screws can be seen jutting out of the structure. (she calls it the Contraption) Since I thought we were using 2x2 lumber I'd brought screws with me that would penetrate most of the way through 2 of those. Instead we had some 1x2s and those screws were a mite exposed on the other side. Oops. (B) is where a knot caused a 1x1 to buckle requiring a somewhat ugly fix. I just screwed a length of 1x1 over the knot area so that the whole thing wouldn't buckle. That would be a very b...

Maybe "farming" is a bit of an exaggeration. Really what I did was drop 3 veggie type plants into the ground after clearing said ground of the ground cover and invasive grass that were already growing there. Sorta farming but on a very small scale. As you can see to the left, I have two tomato plants and one bell pepper. I bought them nearly a week ago but was waiting a bit to plant them. You see,the area I wanted to put them already had ground cover growing there and a lot of invasive wild grass had made its home there too. This is what the area looked like this morning just before I started hacking away at it with a hoe. The prep work that I had done was spraying the area 3 times in the past week with herbicide of the Round-up variety. As you can see, it worked better on the ground cover than the grass. That grass was VERY well established. But after waiting a week, I wasn't going to wait any longer. Hopefully the roots are full of nasty herbicide so once I hack off the...