Gardening

  It’s not really so good for your shirt, though.

In case you’re wondering how many tomatoes fit inside a shirt, the answer is 22.

It seems to help if you have a bunch of plum tomatoes [the yellow ones on the bottom] ripe when you are ready to fill up the shirt.

Sorry I can’t say more. I have to go put up more tomatoes now.

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So I should be out bushwhacking my garden, which is threatening to bust out of the back yard and make a run for Eastland Avenue. Or even just cleaning up a bit.

But I find that since returning from vacation, I landed in the Bermuda Triangle of summer: the doldrums. I have a list of chores a mile long, but I can’t bring myself to start tackling them. I mean, if I get the garden trimmed up today, it’ll just be back by Tuesday. So why bother? And surely as soon as I weed that last flowerbed, the rest of them will roar back. I can already tell you from experience earlier this week that even the kitchen is unable to stay clean on its own. And it’s not growing anything.

So I’ve been seriously considering throwing in the towel. If it weren’t for the fact that the killer okra would then eat me and the children alive, I’d do it.

UPDATE: 10 p.m. Apparently confession is good for the work ethic. I cleaned up outside, and cut back the basil. A good start on the garden, anyway. And then I made pesto!

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  There are more coming soon 

Woo hoo! The garden has just proven its worth. I was convinced when we left town July 2 that we’d return to several rotten tomatoes. A couple of these large ones perhaps could have been picked Friday instead of Saturday night, but all are more than edible.

Understatement of the year from the 8yo: These are so much better than what we get at the store.

We had another of the ginormous ones for dinner — it was almost more than the Hungry Toddler [a well known tomato fiend], the 8yo and I could eat together.

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  Garden, June 23

Here’s a photo of my garden from June 23. I can’t believe how much it’s changed in just a month [and especially from two months ago]. I am liking having the photo record of it.

I finally got the trellis built [see the green post and string, far left side of photo?]. I ended up having to buy a post driver but I’ll use it again next year.

I have also made myself two notes for next year:
* Get compost delivered in February.
* Bury the soaker hose in February, before I plant anything.

Maybe it’s just because it’s new, and this will all work itself out shortly, but the dang thing just curls up and thus impedes the water flow. As well as looks awful. I finally got water running through most of the length of the hose with some strategically placed gravel to weigh down some of the curves, but it’s still tons messier looking and acting than I would like.

On other garden fronts, the beans [far left this photo] are going gangbusters, and the okra is really taking off [center front]. And I have many, many tomatoes ripening up. Woo hoo!

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  It doesn’t LOOK hard. 
  Originally uploaded by lcreekmo.

As previously noted in this space, I was foiled by my sprinkler and hose this weekend. I normally keep a wand on the end of my hose with various spray options, and I use it a lot around the back yard. But I needed to sprinkle the garden due to our incredible drought here the past few weeks. Once I finished, I couldn’t get the hose back off the sprinkler.

Here’s what I did:
* I tried really hard.
* My sister tried really hard.
* I got the pliers out and we tried to unscrew it with them.
* I sprayed WD-40 on the coupling.
* I tried again.
* I tried to bust up [go away, grammar mavens. I'm from the South and we like to bust stuff around here.] the sprinkler with a hammer.

For the record, I highly recommend Nelson sprinklers. They are impossible to destroy, even if you’re really trying. And even if you previously just left them sitting in the yard all winter.

I briefly considered rolling over the sprinkler with my car but quickly decided I was more likely to puncture a tire than I was to separate the hose.

This morning, the guys came to mow my yard. [No, I'm not really the kind of person who hires out her yard. I actually like to mow. But when I realized about 5 years ago that I was spending half a day every weekend to keep the yard up, and I'm a single mom who only gets to see her daughter every other week, it was an easy decision.] When I got home tonight, I noticed the sprinkler was separated from the hose, which they must have needed for something. I had actually considered asking them to take a look at it, but didn’t, since that’s really not what I’m paying them for.

That’s when I noticed something peculiar: Part of the hose was still on the sprinkler….except not really. In all my efforts Sunday, I’d actually been trying to take the sprinkler apart, not remove the hose! There’s a coupling on the sprinkler that I mistakenly thought was part of the hose, since they were made of the same color metal.

Doh. Now I’m REALLY glad I didn’t ask the yard guys to do that. How embarrassing!

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> The garden is really doing well. But I’ve been struggling to get a trellis built cheaply and easily.

A. I don’t have any power tools, so that makes some kinds of materials more difficult to work with cheaply. I really don’t want to have to pay someone to do this….have spent enough $$$ on the garden this year already to get that nice fence.

B. I borrowed a post driver from a friend to try to place the metal stakes I bought in the ground. The post driver is too narrow in diameter to fit over my stakes. [Thanks to my neighborhood listserv, I have a couple other post driver possibilities. Keep your fingers crossed.]

C. The ground is SO DRY that even though I watered the garden for several hours on Saturday morning, I couldn’t push the metal stakes farther than 2-3 inches in the ground tonight. It’s definitely going to take a good post driver, and possibly more watering.

On the bright side, the garden looks great. It really appreciated the deep watering on Saturday, as did the weeds.

> Unfortunately, I also seem to have permanently affixed my sprinkler to my awesome 100′ hose. I’ve tried pliers and WD-40. So far, no luck.

> I found these really nice, inexpensive, attractive light fixtures at Home Depot over the weekend for the kids’ rooms. [Until you have really ugly fixtures, you have no idea how important this is....we are on a slow march to replace all the original ones in the house.] I bought fluorescent bulbs to use with them, trying to be oh-so-energy conscious. I installed one in the 8yo’s room all by myself! It was easy! But, the switch hums. I think this is because the people who used to own this house installed dimmer switches on every single overhead switch in the house. I have no idea why you’d want a dimmer in your laundry room either, but I’ve got one. At any rate, though I hear they make dimmers for fluorescents, I really don’t see why my daughter would need one, so I just need to replace the dimmer switch in her room with a plain-ole-variety switch. In the meantime, she’s at her dad’s this week, so no one is using her light and I do not have to be paranoid about whether the humming is just annoying, or a portent of a major electrical disaster. It will be fixed in a day or two!

> Lastly, my Linksys router is dying. I get 10-20 minutes of Internet at a time and then it goes. So I bought a NetGear router tonight on the advice of my tech guy at work. The reviews on Amazon were good. Hopefully it will last at least a couple years.

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No photo because there’s not a ton to see besides some wet dirt. But I got a lot done in the garden and a new flowerbed the past two days.

I have planted:
• About 10 feet worth of pole beans
• Two hills of canteloupes
• 12 okra seeds

I also worked up a new flowerbed, and two years after moving, I’ve now planted the forsythia and the mint that I’ve dragged to four different houses in East Nashville now. I thought I was pushing it at the last house when I planted a year after the move, but two?? So far, so good.

If I get my game on, I will get the other new flowerbed worked up tomorrow morning and plant cosmos and zinnia seeds, two of my favorite summer flowers. Wish me luck and stamina.

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  See my new garden fence??   

Wow, the garden is doing really well. I need to get some — I forget what exactly, but I think it’s seaweed-based — tomato food for them. I already have a couple tomatoes coming!

My great handyman built this fence for me recently, and he built it a bit larger than the garden itself. Ever since, I’ve been slowly digging up additional areas. I’m going to use the new space to plant okra and a couple other things I bought seeds for — but that I cannot remember off the top of my head.

Then, I’m going to take those remaining grassy areas and turn them into pea gravel pathways.

  There it is!   

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