August 9, 2011

Well, the girls escaped this morning and I was rudely awakened on my day to sleep in so I could round them up.  Seems my kids didn't do as good a job locking the run doors as it sounded when they helped me put the girls away last night.  I just can't see how they'd get the latch opened if it were properly locked.  If not, a good push would open the doors and I know they're capable of that.

No harm done it seems, they all seemed to be hanging out on the patio or on the grass where they normally are kept in the arc.  They probably want food as they seem to devour everything I give them in seconds.  Well, all their regular food that is.  They've seemed to sour on the cabbage that I chopped up and have kept in the produce drawer in the fridge. 

I keep expecting to see some mis-shappened eggs, but as yet nothing.  I also wonder if I should be baking and grinding up egg shells to supplement calcium right before the whole laying thing starts?

In other random chicken news, I saw the neighbors of some friends of ours using a spray bottle on their chickens to get them to quiet down, so today I tried it out.  It worked like a charm, as they quieted right down and simply shook their feathers to get that nasty water off them.  One of them even clearly liked the taste of it when she moved and got hit in the face by it.  It was humorous and worked well, so I think I've got a new way to keep them quiet...ish.  I expect they'll be their breed-typical loud selves when they lay and I won't stop that unless I get complaints from the neighbors (sure hope not as they agreed to me having them).

Anyway, it's all chickens all the time around this blog of late since my fall garden isn't doing much and my spring garden's all bolted.  I'm still hopeful about the countless flowers on all my tomato plants though.  Maybe tomorrow I'll take some pics of the green tomatoes that are growing on a few plants.

Hope your garden is doing better than mine!

June 1, 2011

Please someone tell my garden that it's June first! I swear it thinks it's April 1 instead.  Aside from the calendar, Spring has yet to visit the Pacific Northwet.  I'm posting this because I saw a post on another blog I read about all the things that should be going on in the garden right now and unfortunately, most of them are right for the calendar, but wrong for the weather.  The funniest is that I should be starting seeds indoors for my broccoli and cauliflower Fall crops when I still have my spring crops up there.  I have yet to plant out my succession plantings because it's pointless.  The first planting is not growing at all and just being nibbled at by slugs.  I have carrots that overwintered and are going to seed, but I haven't pulled them because I'm feeding them bit by bit to my hens and I don't need the room until I plant out my brassicas.  Aside from that the entire bed of carrots I've planted have yet to germinate.  I'm about to give up hope on them and plant again as my brother's just started coming up (finally!).  Oh, and my cool weather peas... what did germinate have grown a total of 3 inches. I haven't even found the need to set up the trellis for them.  Insanity reigns in June.

About the only thing growing in the garden is my salad bed.  It seems my lettuces are growing, albeit slowly.  But we have been harvesting them for salads and garnishes etc.

As for my tomatoes, they haven't grown at all, despite regular doses of fish emulsion.  I'm trying, but the best I can get is I have one plant that flowered under lights that is finally setting fruit... three tomatoes. 

Lastly, I know I'm behind on planting out my cucumbers and squash, but really, what's the point? I don't have a greenhouse to grow them in, they don't transplant well (cukes that is), and even if they do germinate (big if), chances are they'll never grow.  I'm feeling a bit disappointed by this garden season.

I hope your garden is doing better.

Special Tomato Post

Help, what's killing my tomatoes (now)!?

My guess is it's too much water on the leaves, as in we've had far too wet a spring than normal.  Here's another shot.

It's not happening to all the plants, but a few of them.  Other than that, none are growing despite multiple shots of fish emulsion.  Very annoying.  Makes me really want a greenhouse as my brother's store bought specimens are perfect because they were started in greenhouse conditions.  Unfortunately the only place to put one is against the house in the front yard, well side yard.  I am strongly leaning toward removing the grass and putting a half dozen 4x8 beds and a greenhouse.  What's stopping me are two little boys that could use that roughly 30x40 space for all sorts of things growing up.

Anyway, my immediate dilemma is this problem with my tomatoes.  Any ideas?

Lastly, I was talking to my brother during out coop building ordeal and I finally learned the difference between OP and Heirloom.  Apparently all my heirloom tomatoes were orange last year because of cross pollination.  Thank goodness I didn't save seed, because it would have bred orange going forward.  As for heirloom, Gills All-Purpose can't be considered heirloom because it's not like 75 years old or something, it's only 25 years old.  Gotta love rules like that.  Very interesting.

Thanks for the comments!

Enjoy your garden!

May 1, 2011

This post is a little late as I temporarily lost my camera, so here's a post I started about last weekend.

Well, I'm sure you all had busy weekends, but I wasn't nearly as productive as I'd hoped to be.  For one, I had two back-to-back baseball games for the boys on Saturday that blew the morning and part of the beautiful afternoon.  Then I found out that my much needed coop construction was on hold for the day.  I have come to realize I am not a construction guy, at least without clear direction.  So I turned my attention to something I know, or at least think I know, my garden.

A quick garden tour told me I had tons of badly germinated spots in my pea row, so I started soaking some peas.  Then I watered since as odd as it seems, we haven't had much rain of late, so at least the top inch was dry.  I still need to replace the spigot on the hose bib in the back, so I have no water to the back yard, so I have to go around to the front of the house to get water and use a watering can.  I wish I didn't need to turn off the water to the house to change it out.  I am having all sorts of faucet problems this month. First it was the kitchen, then the main bath, now the outside faucet.  Someone's telling me to set up my rain barrels after a year of sitting there.

What I could do right away was finally plant out my tomatoes.  They were at a point where they either needed potting up or to be tossed in the trash.  I figured what did I have to lose.  So I grabbed some compost and mixed it into the SWC.  I know you're supposed to not use the same dirt you used for tomatoes the previous year, but gardeners have been planting tomatoes in the same plot of dirt for eons, so I used half last year's Mel's Mix and half new compost.  They'll either love it or they won't.

Then came the difficult task of getting the monsters into the SWCs. Some were easy because they were just bushy, or sticks, but a few were to the moon, which required my eldest son to hold the top while I de-potted it and planted it in the container. Don't these look nice?  Oh, and sorry for the bad shadows, my main garden area doesn't get late afternoon/evening sun, and I was working late Saturday.

Next, I couldn't forget to fertilize.  Per my garden buddy Judy in Alabama, the best tomato fertilizer is part Epsom Salt and part all-purpose tomato fertilizer.  In a SWC, this goes in a shallow furrow between the two plants.

Then it was simply a task of placing the cages into the bins.  I must say this was no simple task indeed! The plants were so tall and branches spindly that I didn't want to break anything.  Eventually, they were planted out.

As much as I wanted to have tons of tomatoes this year. My poor germination earlier this year made me scrounge to fill three SWCs (6 tomatoes).  In my third SWC went the volunteer that did so well and the one I grew from succession (read emergency) replanting.  So I'll have two Stupices this year.  One's flowering already so the other one can really be a succession planting.  I sure hope I can figure out what that volunteer is, because it's growing so well and healthy, I'd like to grow it again, even if it means I need to save seed to do it.

Lastly, my final tomato did rather poorly, even more so than the others, when I hardened them off.  Note to self, no matter how nice and calm the day, don't leave your plants out all day in the beginning of the process. When I took a look at the nearly dead one, I found it was my only "surviving" Sunset Red Horizon. I bought that seed and really wanted to taste it.  Last year nothing grew well, so I was really hopeful for this year. So hopeful that I planted a stick.

Of course I didn't waste an entire SWC for that little sickly stick. Instead I planted it in the scrap SWC material I have next to my kids experiment gardens. I was planning on planting peas there (I found a package I don't remember trying before, but didn't want to mix them in the main beds). Now I don't know what I'll plant next to it.  Maybe one of the really late growers I still have upstairs.

What a great segway to the plants still hanging out under lights upstairs.  I had totally forgotten them.  What's worse, I had forgotten that I had turned the fan on to help my broccoli and cauliflower not be so leggy this time.  It had only been two days, but the fan must have dried out the plants.  When I went upstairs to put the last of my tomatoes that weren't quite ready to plant, back under lights, I found this scene...

MY BRASSICAS!!!! I killed my succession crops of broccoli and cauliflower to hopefully be preserved for winter consumption. Still I had to try putting them on life support, so I ran and grabbed the defibrillator, aka, watering can, and tried to save them.  I could keep you in suspense, but I won't.  The next day I went to check on them and found this radically different scenario.

They have odd coloring, but the leaves all perked up nicely, so there's hope for them yet.  I don't think I'll continue with the fan though. I'm just too spotty on watering my light system, out of sight, out of mind, as they say.  Oh, and the other container on the right? It's got a tomato sucker growing that I'm not sure I'll plant out, as well as some wheat grass my son's preschool class planted.  Is that something we'd eat raw, say in smoothies? Or something to feed to the cats or chickens?  Not pictured here is the tiny seedling I had hardened off that I potted up into a quart container and put back under lights.  Can't hurt to experiment can it?

Enjoy your garden!

April 24, 2011

Happy Easter all! I hope you spent this time with family and friends and all the kiddos enjoyed it as well. Mine sure did, despite missing the egg hunt at our local nursery twice (we went yesterday too, a day early).  We showed up at 9 am and it was "over" having started at 9.  Ah well, it gave time for the Easter Bunny to make it to our house which was the main reason for going. Everyone knows the Easter Bunny won't come if you are watching... just like a pot won't boil or seeds won't germinate.

Anyway, I've not been posting much of late, as I've said, because my wife's been out of it so I've been stuck doing everything for the family.  That hasn't meant I haven't been gardening, just not blogging.  Priorities, I'm sure you will agree.

As much as there is good news on the chicken front to share, as Alton Brown of "Good Eats" fame likes to say, "that's another show."  This post will be all about tomatoes, namely extricating them from my light system and starting the whole hardening off process.

As you may remember from my last garden post, I was at the end of my rope... er... chain again upstairs under the light system, and I didn't want to figure out a lower box to set the tomatoes on, so I'd left it alone for far too long.  When I finally tried to move the tomatoes, several of them had actually grown AROUND the light bulbs, making me damage some branches removing them.  In hind sight, I guess I could have taken the bulbs out, but I did it late at night and just wanted it finished.

As for the dead branches lower down, that's a lack of water. I just don't have big enough pots to pot up these babies another time. I've never had to before as they'd be much smaller when it was time to plant them out into the SWCs.  This was a test to plant much earlier.  I should have planned ahead and scrounged up bigger pots like my brother did.

So, one by one, with minimal light in the room as I couldn't get to turn on the lights manually with this extended setup, I moved them downstairs to the unheated garage. They would spend each night in that room sitting on top of my all-purpose chest freezer that is about the only flat surface of the house that is regularly cluttered but always cleared as we need to get things out of it (if only the whole house was like that).  It took an inordinate amount of time, but finally they were downstairs and ready to rock.

The funny thing about the picture above, is that I couldn't fit all the plants into the picture.  I could either get the bottom of the pots, or the top of the Black Cherry tomato plant.  Man has it skyrocketed.  It won't even say straight up with a stake in it, it's so top heavy.  Actually, many of them are having troubles with the staking.  They really need to get hardened off in a hurry.

The next day was the first sunny day in a very long time.  I needed to get them in the best light possible as they would be up against the east side of the garage, which gets full sun from dawn until about noon.  Unfortunately where it sits it's blocked by a garden bed.  So, to raise the plants up above the bed, I grabbed two 5-gallon buckets and threw a few 2x2s over them to create a make-shift table.

In case you're wondering, if I ever get the funds to build or buy a greenhouse, this is the only spot for it.  Not the ideal location given the sun conditions, but I could fit a 6x6 greenhouse there if necessary.

Anyway, the tomatoes went on two seedling trays to give them room to get enough sun.  Boy to they look ready to plant!  Too bad they weren't hardened off.

Fast forward three days and various weather conditions (they're protected from the rain by the eves), and they don't look very healthy, in fact, my Sunset Red Horizon is on death's door, and it's one of the smaller plants.  Maybe I shouldn't have left them out there about 10 hours each day, sometimes until it was very dark and the temps had dropped to the mid 40s, but life commitments made bring them into a light setup after a few hours impossible.  I sure hope they come back.  I'd hate for all this work to be for not.

Enjoy your garden!

April 21, 2011

Well tomorrow's Earth Day, and I'm not ready.  The weather's been so cold here that I haven't even taken my seedlings for a walk yet.  They're currently overgrown up in the light room, but it's all I can do to let them grow AROUND my lights. I need them out of there so bad!

My tomatoes are so big, they don't need staking as much as they need tomato cages already! I am dreading moving them once, let alone taking them in and out of the garage every day for a week!  Actually, I guess after I finish this post, I'll brave moving them to the garage for the evening as the lights will be just about turning off by then.  Then tomorrow's supposed to be fairly nice, so I'll put them under the eves in the garden area, fairly well protected from wind and rain. 

I'm beginning to wonder if starting them the first of the year was such a good idea?  I guess if Mother Nature had cooperated and had any sort of Spring this year, I could have planted them out early and been done with it, but we've had hail, wind, freezing rain and nighttime temps as low as 27 degrees.  I call that an extension of Winter rather than Spring. /sigh

I guess I've been hiding out and hiding behind my sick wife as I do everything to take care of the kids and her. I haven't even taken any pictures. I promise I will as I move out the seedlings for the first time, and everything else that happens tomorrow.

Yes, I promise tomorrow will be a productive day.  I have called all parties and intend to start the coop construction process! I even hope finally get the girls out of that tiny brooder and into some larger digs.

Hope you are staying warm and are enjoying your garden!

April 13, 2011

No pics today, I just haven't taken any good ones as the camera is charging.

Man this weather's crazy! It's warm one minute, then near freezing the next. My plants don't know whether to grow or go dormant.  Unfair! 

As April 15 is our traditional Last Frost Date around here, I really should be getting my tomatoes out for a walk by now.  They need to harden off before they go into the SWCs and become unprotected other than tomato cages.  Alas, I'm not happy with the conditions to harden them off, even if they are staked.  The wind was so bad today they wouldn't have stood a chance.  Not sure that the rest of the week's much better.

I guess what I need to do is to bring them out and shelter them somehow from the wind. Unfortunately that's not even the worst of my problems with my tomatoes.  They're so big and entwined in my light system frame that it's going to be a pain in the rear getting them out.  I'll water the plants tonight but save tackling the extraction for another day.

Other than that, I'm just waiting for plants to grow, which isn't happening with this wacky weather we're having.  There has been signs of life in my beds where I direct sowed various varieties of seeds last week, but it could very well just be weeds popping up.  Time will tell.

Lastly, the chicks are entering their gawky teenager phase, so maybe it's good that I don't have pictures of them.  Their feathers are discheveled a bit and getting rougher, they're growing taller but not filling in as fast, and they're getting real antsy, wanting to borrow the car, I mean get out of their brooder.  I bet next week they'll be moving out to the garage into the potato box I got from Costco.  Oh, and that coop sure isn't building itself, hehe.

Yep, I've got my work cut out for me.  I hope your garden is keeping you busy!

April 9, 2011

I've been dying to get this post out, but the girls deserved yesterday's post all to themselves.  Yesterday I went up to do my every-three-day musical plant game, only to find the reservoirs dry and the plants bumping the lights again.

The good news is that the closest two that are still on the shelf are growing stalky rather than tall.  That's a good sign for appropriate growth.  The rest, despite all attempts to avoid it, are getting a bit leggy.  I may need to stake them more when I harden them off, or they'll flop over.  Speaking of which, do you think it's time to start doing that?  I'm nor relishing the prospect of moving them in and out of the house on those flimsy trays, let alone extricating them from the framework of my light system.  Eek!

The bad news is that this is what I'm dealing with with the first plantings...

So, it was time yet again for another furniture change.  Let's see, what do I have laying around the storage room.  What am I going to do when the kids move up here and I can't use this great southern exposure room over the garden for my light system. Maybe they won't mind sleeping on the couch for a few months each winter? hehe  This box will do...

No pics were taken during the moving process, because I definitely had my hands full with moving out a monitor box and moving in an orange crate while holding a tray full of heavy tomatoes stuck inside the frame of my light system.  How I did it I have NO idea, but here is the result...

I figure this will give me almost a week.  Maybe by then I'll just move them outside during the day and in the dark garage at night. It would throw off their light schedule, but isn't that one of the points of hardening off?  Oh, and what did I find when I was watering them?  One of my Legend tomatoes had set flowers!

I never know whether to pollinate them or pluck them at this stage.  This plant's pretty good sized (not one of the huge ones but the next biggest).  Sure would be nice to have a few early tomatoes, but I hate to have the plant devote all it's energy to tomato production rather than plant growth.  Of course they'll get a shot of fish emulsion when planted out, in addition to my all-purpose fertilizer and Epsom salts.  Thoughts?

Lastly, I was going to create a separate post on this, but it really doesn't deserve it.  I've been playing with milk-jug cloches with some interesting results.  Of course I simply cut the jugs in half and poked vent holes in the "tops".

Then I simply dug them into the soil a bit over the top of my seedlings. In this case it was my tender broccoli and cauliflower starts, one of which got eaten by slugs (see a post a few days ago).

What I found was that the seedlings wilted quickly, kind of like a greenhouse effect, so I was always removing them on "warm" days, as in around 50 degrees. Tonight I just left them off all-together.  I've sprayed for bugs so let's hope the slugs stay away.  Maybe tomorrow I'll hit them with a shot of fish emulsion to jump start them?

Enjoy your garden!

April 1, 2011

Well, the cats got into the light system room and wreaked havoc on the plants.  What they couldn't eat, they knocked over. What a mess and all that work down the drain! I had planned on a tomato post today, but what's the point?  At least last year my brother had a crappy germination and seedling growth and still did well buying starts from the farmer's market. 

Thank goodness my lettuce starts and broccoli/cauliflower seedlings were outside hardening off for the last day before planting them out, so I'll still have some brassicas to grow this spring.  I'd planned on a big succession planting to freeze for winter next year, but now that too may not be possible.

Don't let this happen to you! Toddler gates don't work!  Big cats can simply knock them over and most cats can jump them easily!  Your best bet is to close the door and lock it, in case they learn to turn knobs, or in my case where I need the door open to allow heat in, electric fencing is the way to go! Nothing cruel mind you, just the stuff they use to keep small dogs from leaving the yard should do it.

April fools! None of this actually happened, but it is a fear of mine, so I have two toddler gates stacked on top of each other.  In reality, this will be a tomato based blog post with some of the above issues thrown in, but this time truthfully told.

First off, I have ditched the TV tray for a lower storage box with goodness knows what in it. It was just in the storage room, sturdy and the right height.

As you can see, it's give me a few more inches on the tallest of my tomatoes. However, their rapid growth has caused some of the lower branches to be too heavy and start to droop and some even break off.  So to help a bit, I've taken to staking them up with bamboo poles from my folks place.  I knew I was going to miss their old house when they moved because they had a bamboo plant that we'd use for gardening as we thinned out the dead canes.  Thankfully their new home had a much bigger mature plant that provides all any of out three families need. 

While I was up there, I continued to bemoan my limited stock of viable tomato plants to plant out in a few weeks (weather permitting). Thankfully my existing stock provided me with some options for expanding my garden.  A few plants had slow germinating seeds finally sprout, allowing me to semi-successfully transplant them to new 9-ounce cups.  Other plants had already grown healthy suckers (branches growing out of the middle elbow of the stem and another branch). Suckers themselves won't grow tomatoes as branches, but are great for planting for succession plants in their own right.  Funny how they won't grow tomatoes on a plant but AS a plant they grow them fine?  Nature's funny that way I guess.

So, I decided to experiment a bit. Why not, for some reason I have the space in my light system.  After looking around at all my plants, I found tons of possible additions.  Some more viable than others.  One of my more wacky attempts was to pull a drooping branch off a plant and plant it in a cup.  It was far too long/tall to stand on it's own, so I staked it.

Fast forward a day and I'll tell you, it didn't work. hehe.  However, my other attempts did better.  Of the two seeds that finally sprouted, one was salvaged with enough roots to take hold, and as of last night, the sucker was holding it's own, though VERY small.

Sorry for the bad photo. The tray with my tomatoes is in the back, sitting on a couple of VHS tapes to raise it up closer to the lights.  The lights have to be that high for the tall tomatoes. So I had to be creative. That's one of the benefits of doing this in a storage room.  There's always junk laying around to use that nobody is going to miss.  That's why it's up there. ROFL.

Speaking of finding creative ways to raise plants. I mentioned my massive succession planting of broccoli and cauliflower in my poorly executed April Fools joke above.  Well it's in the foreground of the picture above.  As you can see, I hadn't yet raised it up closer to the lights.  You can even see the seedlings laying over, trying to find light on the top of the fridge.  Well, thankfully I found an old box laying around.  Worked out well enough, don't you think?

For the last pic of the post, I have been pretty much leaving the salad greens and initial plantings of broccoli and cauliflower outside all day long, bring them in at night.  I saw no point in taking them back upstairs to the light system every night, so they hung out in the garage and taken back out in the morning. Time to plant these out I think, don't you? Come on, I love comments, please...

Lastly, I've mentioned my brother tons of times in my blog. He's the one who convinced me to start my garden, helped design and build it, and even was my inspiration for wanting chickens.  Well, yesterday he finally decided to take the plunge and start his own blog.  I really shouldn't give you this link, because he was a journalism major in college and writes extremely well.  You may not come back to my babblings. hehe.  Seriously, I encourage you to follow his blog and mine and see how two brothers make the most of their small suburban yards on a journey toward greater self sufficiency.

Enjoy your garden!

March 15, 2011

Beware the Ides of March... My wife was born tomorrow way back when, so I like to say she's perfect, born right between the luckiest and unluckiest days of the year.

Speaking of unlucky, this didn't happen today, but today's the perfect day to share it.  I was making a smoothie for the family and needed to get out the frozen fruit from the freezer.  I had checked the tomatoes on top of the fridge the night before but thought nothing of it, until this happened...

Crash! Dirt everywhere, water everywhere, and no seedlings from this THIRD attempt.  Pissed at myself, I cleaned it up, and figured I'd give up on them. So I went upstairs and counted my viable seedlings... 7, just seven. I needed 8 and wanted 10.  So back out to the garage and maybe the four time is a charm.  January 24th I planted my first tomato seeds of the season, and the last are being planted March 15th.  How crazy is that?  I definitely will over plant next year, this is ridiculous. 

If these don't go, I'll simply direct sow them and see what happens. Yeah right, in this climate? 

Today was one big thunder storm, not quite Spring, yet I hope you got to...

Enjoy your garden!

March 8, 2011

Let's call this the tomato post.  In case you haven't been reading, you know I have a whopping 3 tomatoes out of 10 that are going gang busters.  Another handful are languishing and three are refusing to germinate despite multiple attempts with 2 seeds each.

So, just how amazing is the growth of those big three?  Here is what they looked like the day before I decided to pot them up.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, the CD case is just there for perspective, and to raise seedling trays to allow for gravity to feed water to the plants better.  And I used to like Depeche Mode. Hehe.

Yes, I know the seedlings were past time to be potted up.  I don't know what I was thinking?  When I went to re-pot them, I realized I really don't have a good place to do that, other than my chest freezer in the garage.  Since I gave them a brief walk in the yard, I decided to do the surgery on top of my yard waste container.  Don't they look like they want to start flowering already?!

Well, my waiting so long to pot these up was immediately apparent when I tried to free them from their 9 ounce cups.  They just DIDN'T want to come out.  One plant actually started to fall apart from the potting soil, such that I was very worried that it wouldn't survive the transplant. Anyway, here's what they looked like before I threw them on a tray and brought them back upstairs for their tanning session.

My brother says he pots up his young seedlings up to the first leaves.  I bury them up to the first true branch.  Not sure which is right, but I want the dew leaves or whatever to become roots.

Aren't they magnificent looking? I sure hope the compost I planted them in isn't too fertilizer rich that they shoot up again. I can't handle more than 18 inches including the pot in my light system, and it's a long time before April 15 (our traditional last frost date).
Speaking of roots, my Legend seedling (shown on the right below) that's about ready to be potted up looks like it's been almost cut at soil level in it's cup. I would HATE to lose it since my other Legend planting is one of the never germinated 3.  I have got to pot that up tomorrow.

Another one I need to pot up is my 3 seedling cup (on the left above).  I've since noticed one of the seedlings has simply disappeared, so now it's just two healthy seedlings battling for dirt in that 9 ounce cup.  The question was still, which seedling is which.  THANKFULLY one seedling has potato leaves and the other traditional tomato leaves.  A quick search online found that Stupice tomato plants have potato leaves, so I know which one I need to survive.  The other is gravy.  Well a bit more meat and potatoes than gravy, since I don't even have enough tomatoes to fill my SWCs yet.  Here's hoping EG is right and splitting tomato seedlings is easy.  I get the process but I hate playing with fire.

Now before you post that I should really plant more seedlings next time, you''re absolutely right.  My brother has the right idea to plant 6 of each to keep the best one and give away the rest.  I have always had good luck with planting multiple seeds in each cup, but only one cup.  My results were horrible this year, so I'll make room for more next time.  Maybe I'll just start them in soil blocks and pot them up sooner. I could fit many more in soil blocks than I can with those unwieldy cups.

Well, that'll just about do it for tonight.  Thanks for all the birthday wishes. I got some money that I'll use to pay bills and maybe even fund the construction of my chicken coop!

Enjoy your garden.

February 24, 2011

Sorry I haven't posted in a while.  Every so often I think I should be posting, but then I realize I have nothing to say.  I'm not like some bloggers that grab an idea from the news or research and expound on it. This blog is solely about my gardening adventures.  Right now, not much adventuring is going on.

Even my spring garden plans seem to be in stasis as snow is falling here in the Seattle area.  Sure it's not much, not much at all, but it's darn cold and anything but spring-like.  For some reason, spring seems like a whole season away, rather than a month or so.

Of course, you wouldn't know it looking at my light system, though it's pretty much on auto-pilot except for watering every few days and moving the lights around if necessary.  And boy has it been necessary.  Here is what my light system looked like a few weeks ago.

And here is what it looked like a few days ago...

Yes, it looks like I could start harvesting lettuce already, and the root systems are actually growing together from one soil block to the next.  If it weren't snowing, I'd be planting these out now.  They may very well go in the ground this weekend under a hoop cover.  Not sure.

Here are the tomatoes that I successfully germinated this year. 

As you can see, there is a real difference in the ages of the various seedlings.  Though I started germinating seeds in my kitchen weeks ago, I have had several failed attempts and replantings have been necessary.  Maybe two of my original 8 actually grew.  And yes, I still have a good handfull of cups on top of the fridge trying like mad to germinate.  Grrr.

That said, I should give a word of caution for anyone that was frustrated like me with poor germination and replanted new seed into the same cups that failed to germinate.  I strongly believe I gave up on a variety and planted another in this next cup, only to have three seedlings germinate eventually.  Now I have no idea which is which.

According to my gardening buddy EG, it is simple to separate out seedlings like this when potting up.  I however have never had luck doing it with tomatoes.  I am not sure if I'll try it or just pick a random seedling to survive. That'll teach me not to remove the top half inch of soil before replanting a different variety.

Lastly, I should mention that my brother may not be getting chickens this year.  As he was my chicken buddy and motivation to take the plunge, I am not certain I will either if he does not.  Of course I would be very disappointed, but I don't think I could do it without him. Silly, I know.  Here's hoping I can convince him to go through with it.

Enjoy your garden!

February 12, 2011

Not much in the way of garden topics tonight.  First off, I wanted to let you know to check out my new page, 4) Hoop Covers.  I've been toying with the page for a year or two, and just decided to finish it, especially since I came to the realization the hoops could be used to tractor my chickens in the beds in Fall.  Also, I just realized that this theme does not allow comments on pages.  I've got hundreds of posts nobody can see because the theme won't allow it.  Grrr

Next, I wanted to apologize if you got yet another message that the site's been suspended.  I've tried to contact the site owner, without success.  Since I don't own the site, or pay for it, I have no say.  My wife thinks I should switch to Google, but I see a few problems with that.  I don't have a clue if or how I could save all my posts and transfer them over.  If I couldn't transfer my blog in its entirety, I wouldn't want to move.  Second, I would likely lose all the traffic I get here, which used to be formidable... And a distant last would be learning a whole new set-up.  Ah well, something to think about.

About the only garden activities I've had of late are the occasional sprouting of tomatoes, which go up to the light system.  Boy are these taking a long time to germinate.  One of the latest to germinate was one of the new varieties.  I am worried because it germinated right at the edge of the cup, not in the middle where I planted it.  I'm afraid it won't root well right near the edge and I'll lose it.  I may pot that one up sooner to give it more dirt on that side. 

I also got from my folks a few of their pill bottles so I can try my hand at building a new soil block maker.  Mine works fine, but I kind of wanted the taller one. I get so many stubby soil blocks that I wanted them to start taller.  Just what I need, more projects!  EG I'm not!

On the chicken front, I've finished Chickens for Dummies and am still bumping around Backyard Chickens.com (see sidebar).  In my research, I'm now concerned that the 4x8 ark I'm planning will be too small for 4 chickens.  At 32 SF, that'll hold a maximum of 3 birds, not 4.  I don't want to make it bigger as it would become awkward to move around daily, especially if I wanted to lift it over the fence to have them hang out in the front yard for a change.

Lastly, my wife's Facebook friend has started a blog.  She's a chef and it's mostly a gardening/self sufficiency blog.  And where I got a boost in 2009 from the Seattle Times, she just got one from CNN... in other words, I'm not in her league.  Hehe.

Well, there are several random thoughts, but that's how my mind's going today.

Enjoy your garden!

February 7, 2011

Well, let me start by saying that KitsapFG wasn't entirely right when she said my comments would pick up after I fixed the comment problem...  Either that or I'm losing my touch to get folks to disagree with me... hehe.

Anyway, I've been doing nothing garden wise since my last post.  Well, that's not entirely true. I have been mother henning my tomato seeds in the kitchen, trying to force them to germinate.  I've been alternating them from one side of the stove to the other in the hopes of providing them the optimum germination environment.  On one side there's the direct air from the heat vent to warm the soil, but I can't use the lamp there because it causes too much heat.  The other side gets no benefit from the heat, but the lamp with an incandecent bulb generates too much heat also. 

In general I'm finding that the fluffy seedling mix I used for my latest plantings of more Legend, Stupice and Stiletz tomato seeds dries out very fast, at least on top where the seed is sitting.  What that means is I am regularly spraying the cups with water.  It's insane the amount of energy I'm putting into these seeds.  Boy I need a job, and not just for the benefits...

On the chicken front, this evening I had a good chat with my brother who's the cause of my chicken obsession.  We worked through several issues in about 30 minutes, some I didn't even know I had!  I hate to say that I called my dumb brother a genius on more than one occasion tonight (I always say he's the dumb one because I did far better in school than he, hehe inside joke).

We were tentatively planning on two separate chicken doors in our small coops.  One would lead down into the mini-run below the coop, the other would lead out to the yard where I could deposit them directly into my ark.  We decided to change the gate for the mini-run from the 6 foot side to the 3 foot side.  Hopefully I have the space to place the ark on the side of the coop and then let them just come out into the ark.  However, as I type I find one problem with that. If they don't want to come, I can't very well reach in 6 feet to get them... something to consider.  Gotta love designing your own coop.

Now for the reason I called him a genius.  He totally changed my mind about the type of ark I would build.  My plan was to build a hoop-house type ark our of PVC, though mine would be adjustable in length to fit on any of my garden beds during the fall to let the hens till and fertilize my soil for the next year.  I worked hard to design a way to make that work using different sized pipe for the bottom supports such that they could slide into one another to change the lenght of the run.

The genius part was when he made me realize that I didn't NEED an ark for my garden beds.  I already have one!  I was going to put a hoop house covered in bird netting into my beds.  I already HAVE hoop houses for all my beds.  All I need to do to make them chicken friendly is to replace the 4-mil plastic for bird netting and presto, instant chicken ark!  Brilliant. I can't believe in all my pondering I didn't think of that until tonight.  My excuse is that I was spending so much time learning to care for the hens and building my coop from scratch that I hadn't spent much time on the ark.

So instead, both my brother and I are going to build light-weight triangular arks, similar to the ones with plans for sale on the net.  Ours will be simple 2x2 frame construction with light 1/4" plywood on 1/3 of the ark for rain cover and maybe a nesting box, though I do like my idea to use my cat carrier as a portalbe nesting box. 

As you can see, nothing is in stone yet, but we are rapidly approaching the time to build our coops (he wants them built before the arrival of the day-old chicks).  Decisions are going to have to be made soon, and I need to get over to see my father-in-law for his take on lightening the coop to make it more mobile.

Fun stuff! Enjoy your garden!

February 3, 2011

Well, I owe KitsapFG a word of thanks for making me figure out why I wasn't getting comments.  Seems you had to be registered, but you couldn't register yourself.  Double whammy.  How those boxes got checked I have no idea, but it's fixed now, so I welcome your coments!

Today was all about tomatoes.  In the end, out of the five cups I started with two seeds each, only three germinated anything.  I even dug around a bit to try to find a deep seed or something and found nothing but dirt.  Yuck, especially since one of the cups I'm out of seed for that variety.  No biggie, it allowed me to plant another cup of each of my new varieties.  I had already decided to plant tomatoes in one of my scrap SWCs, so I had two more plants to start. 

In digging around the cup, I found the dirt had settled a bit and was firmly packed, not very conducive toward roots forming.  So in when I replanted the failed germinating cups, I dumped out the compost mixture and added a bit more vermiculite to lighten it up.  I also added my mix of bloodmeal and 10-10-10ish tomato fertilizer.  Can't hurt I guess.  I didn't add much.

So, now that two of the cups have moved upstairs under lights, I filled their spots in the kitchen with two more cups.  One more is germinating, so once it stops being curled up and spreads it dew leaves, I'll move that up too.

Lastly, part of me wants to go upstairs and steal one of the ungerminated soil blocks and plant Green Wave mustard greens in it and start it germinating in the kitchen.  Unfortunately I have no idea when to plant that out.  Is it like lettuce, or something else?  First time growing for me.  All it says on Territorial's site is soil temps for germination, but since I'm starting it indoors it doesn't matter what that says.

On the chicken front, I'm just trying to work my way through Raising Chickens for Dummies... boy is that a comprehensive book compared to Idiots.  I'm so glad my brother had me read Idiots first.  Speaking of my brother, I may as well share our friendly debate that we've been having over flock management.  Specifically, what to feed the hens.  We agree on using starter feed for the first part, but when they reach maturity, I plan on using commercially produced feed that's balanced nutritionally for layers, supplementing with kitchen scraps and scratch.  My brother's gone to his local independent grocery store where he shops and spoke to the produce manager.  Seems they have about 10% loss for their produce.  That's stuff they can't even give away to food banks. Apparently the manager feeds it to his pigs, but said my brother could have some for his chickens, so my brother intends to go about 50/50 with feed and scraps.  Chapter 8 in Dummies makes quite the compelling argument against trying to manually get the right balance of protien, carbs and the like for your chickens.  Not only is it hard to do yourself, but the consequences for failing could be malnutrition, leading to poor egg production and even mortality.  That's just not a risk I'm willing to take.

Of course, that's just my brother for you.  He's trying to make it so his coop costs him as little as possible, using free materials whenever he can, and he hopes not to spend any money on caring for them either.  He even talked to a few mills or whatever, that generate wood chip waste.  About the best I plan on doing is talking to the arborist down the street.   He always has logs he's chopping up for firewood.  I'm pretty sure he still has a garbage can full of chain-saw dust.  A few years ago I made the mistake of putting a wheel barrow full of those wood chips into my compost pile.  They didn't break down for a year!.  I bet they'd make good bedding for my hens.  Something to consider.  I'm sure he'd be willing to part with as much as I wanted for a dozen eggs every once in a while.

Speaking of giving eggs to neighbors, I finally caught my former farmer neighbor today and spoke about getting chickens.  He was very cool with it, as I knew he would be.  He even told me that once upon a time, he could get a catch a chicken and put it in a pot for supper in 7 minutes flat.  I can't imagine doing everything it takes to cull and prepare a chicken for cooking in 7 hours let alone minutes.  Gotta love old farmers.  Now I just have to convince my other neighbor to not report me for noise violations every time they peep.

Well, that's enough for me.  Take care and enjoy your garden!

February 1, 2011

Not sure how to start this blog post tonight, but I guess I'll start with something that made me mad.  A Facebook "friend" posted a story today about three giant organic food retailers (Whole Foods is the only one I recognized) all caved to Monsanto and met with them to start selling GMO produce in their stores.  I know we can't get away from the THOUSANDS of products made from Corn #2, their biggest crop, but I do my darnedest to stay away from anything I can that they've touched or profited off of.  It's just sickening that they have that much sway in the retail world.

Anyway, on the homefront, I finally got tomato sprouts!  It sure took long enough.  Maybe I should consider using our regular heating pad on low under my germinating seed flats.  I fear they'll be too hot and dangerous, but can't afford the proper heat mats.  So, I've got some sprouts (two to be precise). I personally think I shamed them into sprouting since they think I planted up their replacements last night.  I really planted the Legend, Stiletz and Stupice I got from Territorial yesterday. 



Speaking of my order, I'm not sure when to plant my Green Wave Mustard greens.  From the Territorial site I see I should plant one or two per SF, which is fine since I want to try them out.  The 2 foot tall plants though scare me. I think I'll harvest them early to keep them young and salad-worthy.

Lastly, I've been tinkering with my seed germination spots.  You may recall I put my tomatoes on top of the TV, under lights and under my heat vent. 



Unfortunately that was generating temps in the 90 degree range.  Too hot for seed germination. So I turned off the light. No problem.  Ah, 75 degrees, perfect!  WELLLL, then two seeds germinated today and need the light.  Even with a CFL bulb in the fixture, it's too hot (80ish). I don't want the plants getting the wrong idea that it's 80 here when it's 40.  But I need light, so I had no alternative but to move the setup to the other side of the stove.  Unfortunately that means the light is about a foot above the bin.



It's either too hot or leggy plants.  Joy.  Well actually, the solution is tomorrow when the seedling actually creates it's first leaves, those two plants go upstairs under the grow lights.  I could use the room anyway.  Maybe I'll replace them with a few more of my new varieties.  I have SWC scraps that I can put more tomatoes in.  Not sure.

Anyway, on the chicken front, I've got conflicting information from the Bothell Feed Center.  The woman who helped us when we went there Sunday made it clear that we should get chicks within a week of each other, and to bring the initial chicks back with us when buying new ones.  Everything she said made sense.  So after my wife and I changed our breed preference based on the arrival times, I emailed the Bothell Feed Center to ask which of my options was best.

1) Buy 2 chicks on day, bring them back the next, get one more, then bring them ALL back a week later to pick up the last chick, all with less than week old chicks. There's no way for me to keep 95 degree temps during the 13-mile round-trip car ride.

2) Possibly wait until the day the third breed comes in and buy three birds at once, assuming the other two breeds are still available.  I would hate to substitute breeds yet again, so I was hesitant with this plan.

3) The final option would be to drop the third breed arriving the day after the first two, in favor of a similar looking breed arriving the same day as the fourth, cutting out a trip to the store.

I must say, I got a response early the next morning from the store manager.  He contradicted the other employee. He said he has added chicks up to 4 weeks apart (how he handled the temperature swing in the brooder I have no idea).  He also said it would be best to leave the nice warm chicks at home when I go back for the others.  Total contradiction!  Anyway, I'm going with his advice. I'm going to get the ones I want and leave the chicks at home when I go.  I do think I'll skip the Rhode Island Red in favor of the Barred Rock for the simple reason that SOME RIRs can be mean.  I am not worried about that as I plan to handle the birds often, and my wife is excited to as well (kids always want to play with them).  They'll be friendly for sure!

Make sense? No, well no problem. It's just my new obsession creeping into my blog.  Thanks for being patient with me.

Enjoy your garden!

January 30, 2011

Not much has gone on garden wise over the past few days, so no posts from me.  Looks like no traffic either, which is ok.  All the buzz a few years ago around my potato bins really kept the site hopping. Now it's down to a select few, which is fine since it's less teaching and more diary-like.  If you do come here looking to learn, by all means check out the pages, or my first year. You'll learn TONS!

Anyway, since my last post, just about everything in my initial tray has sprouted, so that tray is under lights in my unheated beadroom upstairs, sitting at 60 degrees.  What didn't germinate is on it's own.  Next time I water up there, any soil block not germinated will be recycled and used for another seed.  That'll show them.  I was quite surprised how BADLY my salad bowl seed germinated.  I put 2 seeds per block and maybe something's sprouted.  That's 8 seeds that didn't work as well as any other lettuce variety.  Sure it's 2008 vintage, but so is some of my others. /shrug



Also since my last post, the vacant spot on the TV was filled by my un-germinated tomatoes.  I've tried a number of things to make them germinate faster.  First off, they're in direct shot of my heat vent, so that helps.  I've got a thermometer to tell temps, and with no help it's in the upper 70s just trying to heat the kitchen.  Of course I first tried out my lamp with a 120 watt bulb to see what kind of heat it'd generate for chickens.  I've heard one way to drop the temp in their brooder is not to raise the light but to lower the wattage bulb.  Anyway, it clearly heated things up a bit.  The temp was 90+ degrees before I knew it, a tad hot for seed germination.  So that light you see is put away until some germinate and I need it with the CFL, a-la make-shift-light-system. 

Everything else that's happened has been chicken related, so bear with my new obsession.  First off, I finally made it through all 142 pages of the brooder thread on Backyard Chickens.com.  It reinforced my plan to use an 18-gallon (think SWC) Rubbermaid tote for a brooder for the first month or so.  Then I plan to ask Costco for a watermelon display box for the next month before they move out to the coop.  It's a large octagonal box with 3+ foot high sides, strong enough to hold in hundreds of pounds of watermellon.  Otherwise I'll be forced to use chicken wire and my kiddie pool.  No comparison which is better.

I also spoke to my father-in-law, the carpenter, who used to have chickens before my wife was born (she doesn't remember them).  He is excited to help lighten the coop design to the point that it's portable.  I want to move it either to keep the land from becoming toxic, or to put it under my eve's during the fierce fall/winter storms that could blow it over. 

Lastly, my brother, niece and I took a trip out to the Bothell Feed Center to check out the place, as well as ask some questions about getting chicks there.  Seems they're putting on a raising chicks class on March 6th, so we signed up for that.  I also found out that my plan to get chicks 2 weeks apart is bad for a number of reasons.  One I knew, that the heat schedule of starting at 95 degrees and walking it down 5 degrees each week would be thrown off by introducing chicks that need it at 95 when you're at 90 or 85.  The other I didn't know, that by the second week the pecking order would be in place and the new day-old chicks may very well be murdered by their sisters.  Finally I found out that if you get chicks and then come back for more, bring the original chicks back so they can get accustomed to each other and get the warmth of each other on the ride home.  Go figure.

So, my wife and I (mostly her, YAY!) researched the breeds that would be availalbe one week on either side of when others we wanted came in.  In the end, we decided on the following four breeds; Gold Laced Wyandotte, Welsummer, Barred Rock and Buff Orpington.  Each is a good dual purpose bird so my brother can have the meat when they stop laying, and they're all prolific layers, which meets my primary purpose.  My secondary goal was to have 4 birds that look pretty and distinct.  I am not sure I'd be able to tell them apart from their personality.

Well, that's it for my garden adventure this past week. I hope you enjoyed your garden!

January 21, 2011

Today my youngest was off school (3 day preschool week), and cabin fever had set in.  So despite the rain, he wanted to go outside and run.  I joined him after a bit to make sure he didn't get into trouble, and took care of some "fall" cleanup that didn't get done.  Mostly I cut back dead branches off perennial plants.  I'm still not sure if I want to keep the pineapple sage plant I planted last year.  It grew MUCH bigger than I anticipated and is out of place in my strawberry/blueberry bed.  I may move it or just remove it altogether.  Either way, I started by cutting it back to the ground.  There was no sign of the anisette plant that did so poorly from seed last year. I have more seeds so I can try again, but boy was I disappointed.

Anyway, the real reason I went out there was to look over the likely spot for my chicken coop and primary run.



The coop would go about where that toddler play set is located.  I should get rid of that thing as my 4 year old is too big for it.  I digress... The coop would go against the fence there, and the run would come back towards the camera.  On the left there is a huge rhodie and magnolia tree, with other native ground cover plants surrounding them.  The upside is that there is a dirt covered area surrounding the trees that would partially be within any run.  That would give the birds a dirt area to take dirt baths and a grass area to forage.  I don't care about that grass anyway because I can't get anything good to grow there... too much shade.



On the right side of that area is my spent pear tree and my compost bins.  As you can see, fall/winter storms wrecked my cover.  I should really tidy up, but I'm not sure if I won't use the lumber or corrugated plastic for the coop construction.  Sorry for the mess.  Oh, and I should really rake the leaves into next year's compost pile.  Did I mention I don't care about that grass area? hehe. 

Anyway, having the compost pile right next to the chicken coop has many advantages. One, when I clean the coop I can simply put the soiled bedding into the compost pile.  Droppings need to age about 6 months to not burn plants. Yes, they're that high in nitrogen.  Two, the compost pile could be a great foraging spot for the hens, the piles are teaming with bugs and worms.  Yummers!

Tonight I spent a good deal of time on chicken research.  I read more of my book, found Backyard Chickens dot com and researched free coop materials on craigslist.  Much more work needs to be done, but it's a start.  I also went through all of KitsapFG's chicken posts to see how her experience has been this year with new chickens.  From that I found some great tips, like I shouldn't have got rid of our toddler super gate.  It would have made an excellent portable tractor and teenage pen.  Yet another thing to look into on Craigslist.  I'd say ain't Craigslist wonderful, but so far I've struck out on everything I've looked for.  There's still time though.

In other news, I didn't order my seeds. I'm waiting until Monday when my brother will have his order ready.  I figured I wouldn't gain much shipping time over the weekend and I can't start my tomatoes this weekend anyway, so what's the difference. 

Actually I could start some of my tomatoes early, but I'm not sure I have space for all of them to be babied for months inside.  Just not sure.

Well, that's about it for me.  Enjoy your garden!

January 20, 2011

It's been freezing rain here almost all day, so nothing much gardening is going on.  My soil blocks are soaking up as much water as I can give them.  That's probably because I used old compost to make them.  Ah well, water's cheap.  Of course nothing's germinated yet, but as soon as they do, I'll break out my trusty clip lamp with a CFL bulb in it.  Sure it's no where near the light spectrum of my 4' lights upstairs, which have a cool and warm bulb to give me the full spectrum, but it works nicely until all the seeds germinate.  Yep, I'm cheap and don't want to spring for a heat mat for my unheated storage room upstairs.  If you're new here, that's where my light system is set up.  Heaven knows where I'll put it when my kids move into the rooms over the garage.  Everywhere out of the way is too cold in the winter.  Ah well, we're a year or two off of that happening.

I'm chomping at the bit to put in my Territorial Seed order.  I've emailed my brother to give him an ultimatum of tomorrow to get his and his boss' order together.  Hehe, I can just see him pressuring his big boss for her order... not.  Oh well, maybe I'll put in a small order by myself.  All I'm ordering is Snow Crown cauliflower (I'm out), Green Wave mustard greens (a trial), then 4 tomatoes; Legend, Siletz, Stupice and Oregon Cherry,  All but the cauliflower is Open Pollinated.  I just really like that variety and since my wife likes it I'm not messing with it, unless I find out Monsanto owns it.

I was going to say that I always let my brasicas (broccoli and cauliflower) go to seed from laziness, or wanting side shoots from the broccoli, so I should get an OP cauliflower.  However, with the prospects of chickens this spring, I'll likely be yanking everything spent and feeding it to the girls.

Speaking of chickens, I'm into Raising Chickens for Dummies (Kimberly Willis and Rob Ludlow) and have actually learned some things from the much more technical book.  One is that hens make noise, possibly enough to make my neighbors complain, especially in the morning when one or all exclaim their egg has been laid.  Not sure my iffy neighbor would do well with that, even if the coop is as far from his place as possible.  He may just poison the chickens like he "may" have done with my 40 year old cedar trees that were blocking his sun.  We've had a strained neighborly friendship ever since that time.

The other thing I've learned is that Polish crested birds lay smallish eggs.  Not sure what I'd do with small eggs, hehe.  We'll see if my wife can be swayed.  Of course we may have to cut that breed if we can't get McMurray Hatchery to bend their 25 bird minimum order rules.  My brother called and got them to agree when he was checking into mail-order hatcheries, but who knows when we go to order.  We may just go to the Bothell Feed store for our birds, looks like they're the closest for supplies too, 15 minutes away.  I looked at their bird availability schedule and they have all but the rare bird I wanted, no surprise there.  However, the birds I want are hatching almost a month apart.  I am not sure I'd want to get them that far apart. 

Well, that's about it for me tonight.  Time to check out my pic storage site and see if I can still remember how to get in, if it's still there, hehe.

Enjoy your garden and thanks for stopping by.

January 19, 2011

Wow, after midnight and I totally forgot I hadn't posted here. Bad me. Well, here's a post to keep you knowing I'm still jazzed about my garden, my prospects for chickens and of course, my poor neglected blog.

Last night after the kids were asleep, instead of working on the garage or house, I read through some of my favorite blogs (see my side bar).  Low and behold, Laura commented on all the seed starting she'd done. Drat, behind yet again.  I can't START the year behind her and expect her amazing results, can I?  So I break out my kitty-litter-container-seed-starting-kit, aptly named as I have so many of those useful kitty litter containers that I use one to hold year-old dry compost and vermiculite, a bucket to mix in, and my wonderful home made soil block maker (thanks John Best!). 



Seems I needed to get the lead out and plant salad greens and onions.  Well, I only grow green onions, but those would have to do.  I eye-balled some soil and added water to the bucket, then proceeeded to make 24 soil blocks.  In 16 of them, I planted four each of Red Sails, Salad Bowl, Italianshier and Butter Crunch, enough for one square foot each.  I find that's enough for late spring, but I may stagger plant another square foot to make sure we have enough salads in the early spring.  Oh, and of course the last 8 blocks got Guardsman onions, they're about the only green onions I'll eat.  A flat of blocks is now perched on top of my iced tea maker in the kitchen to germinate and my wife is already complaining about the "moldy" smell, hehe.



After that was done, I made sure my Territorial Seed order was ready.  I'm not buying much due to my forced frugality, but what I am buying are the tomatoes Laura convinced me to get.  I've got seed for about half of what I'm planting this year.  So I called my brother to convince him to place our order, we combine shipping.  Well, apparently he was looking at the catalog at work and his big boss asked to see it.  Long story short, he's giving her until Friday to put in her order.  Looks like I'm going to be at least a week late on my tomatoes also.  Just can't catch a break.  Ah well, I'm still much earlier than last year, and it's not like I have a green house like Laura does to transition to the outside before the last frost is over.

Hope you enjoy your garden!