by lcreekmo on April 19, 2009
Despite what seems like never-ending rain, I’ve been doing a lot of garden work in the past couple of weeks. A lot of it has involved transplanting half the tomatoes I started from seed into regular pots, out of their seedling trays. I need to do the other half today.
But I’ve been delaying about one of the most manual-labor-y tasks I have in the garden — and I finally decided yesterday morning that I simply couldn’t delay one moment longer: I had to build the trellises if I wanted to get the tomatoes in on time.
[Now, right off the bat, we can acknowledge that this is pregnancy nesting in some form, because I've planted tomatoes well into May and still gotten lots of fruit. But, I don't plan to be doing any planting in mid-May this year, and we'll certainly have tomatoes a lot sooner if I hurry the heck up and get those plants in the ground.]
So yesterday, I had Ashby help me unroll the fencing I’d bought to create the trellises from, I cut it, and I wired it to the poles. For the most part, it was like building a chain link fence, if you’ve ever done that. A lot of pliers and wrapping wire and crimping it. While no one would call that fun, I’m pretty good at it, and I find a lot of satisfaction in accomplishing manual tasks like that.
Let me NOT recommend this method of trellising to you if say, you’re 36 weeks pregnant and you have had rheumatoid arthritis, so your hands get tired and cranky easily anyway.
I’ve had trouble with my hands swelling the past couple of weeks, due to the pregnancy, but as long as I don’t use them in some way really out of the ordinary, they’re always better in the morning.
Building a fence or a trellis does not fall into “the ordinary” for my daily activities.
So I knew after getting the first two trellises set up that my hands were going to be in bad shape. But I figured, no need to go through this twice. Might as well push on through.
I got all four in place and secured, but it started to rain as I was finishing the last one, so I took that as a sign. It won’t be too much effort to finish it up later this week once the weather improves. [It's pouring rain at the moment.]
Let’s just say my hands were not amused. And of course, after I finish doing that kind of work, I’d normally pop a couple of Advil…which you can’t do while pregnant. I barely did anything with my hands the rest of the day, and spent quite a lot of time with them over my head, but they kept me awake a decent portion of the night. The whole pregnancy swelling thing is strange to me. It doesn’t hurt, exactly, but once you get past a certain point, you are hyper-aware of your hands or feet. You can’t stop feeling them.
They are much better today and should be back to normal tomorrow, based on my recovery from other over-the-top things I’ve done recently. And as soon as we get a couple of sunny days later in the week, I’ve got a lot of tomato and cucumber plants and lima bean seeds going in the ground.
by lcreekmo on March 14, 2009
Unrelated: I am beginning to think I could spend about 2/3 of the day handling email every day, and still not keep up. Increased volume on all fronts this week has been overwhelming. If I haven’t answered you, I’m trying.
Back on point: We’ve gotten a lot done in the garden in the last 10 days or so, but very little of it is finished, or more importantly for our purposes here, fun to look at.
We’re a little less than half done building a brick path around the garden. It’s somewhere around 1 3/4′ wide all around the inside of the fence. We’ve just been scavenging bricks from various folks in the neighborhood who are doing projects. I have to say, it’s one advantage of living in an older area — there’s rarely a shortage of people tearing up old sidewalks and/or cleaning out basements and discovering big stashes of bricks. I don’t know what people living in the suburbs do when they need a bunch of free bricks.
The path work has been slow and painful, but mostly because I started on the hardest side. Once we finish the north edge, the rest should be a lot faster. When I bought this house 4 years ago, half of the backyard was gravel. I don’t mean pea gravel or paths. I mean, gravel like a driveway. Even worse, it wasn’t in the driveway area, which was nicely paved. The gravel was just in the yard.
Now, don’t get me started on the crazy guy who used to own this house. Let’s suffice it to say, that was just one of the unusual features I’ve since updated. In the case of the gravel, I paid my regular yard guy and his crew to pull it up and haul it out by hand — wasn’t really possible to use a Bobcat or anything because of the layout of the yard. It took them 2 days. And they put down grass seed and in general, things are lots better. But there are a few areas of the yard that still have a lot of stray gravel. And the north garden path is one of them. So before we can place the bricks, we’ve had to pull out a lot of gravel.
The other interesting thing I’ve found is a full-sized cinder block buried right below the surface on the east path. Maybe 3 inches down. I’ve never dug that far there before, since it was under the path, and not where I plant, but the block had to go if I was going to lay my new-found bricks there.
This is one of those things that you know you should not be doing when you are 30 weeks pregnant, but that you do anyway.
You will be pleased to hear that once I dislodged the block and pulled it out of the hole, I left it there til Ashby got home, and I had him move it out of the way til I can decide how it may be useful.
I’ve spent a lot of time this week beating myself up for not getting things planted faster, but thinking back, I haven’t wasted any good days. There’s just a lot of work to do in your garden in the spring that doesn’t necessarily involve planting anything, and we just haven’t had that many good days yet.
We’re still 3-4 weeks from our last frost date, so the minute things improve outside [cold and rainy again today], I’m slapping some peas in the ground, and more lettuce and spinach. Oh yes. The two things I have gotten planted: Two adorable little lettuce plants. Two days before the sleet this week. I’m scared to go look and I have a lot more lettuce seeds starting inside anyway. And some spinach seeds, which I think will be OK.
by lcreekmo on February 21, 2009
I didn’t set out to do weekly garden updates, but I see that I last did this a week ago. Next month marks my 13-year gardening anniversary. I did not grow up gardening. We lived in the woods, and it just wasn’t something my parents were into. It definitely wasn’t something my dad was into. I remember when I was really small, and we lived in a different house, my mom grew lettuce and roses. I’m sure there was more, but that’s all I remember. And I remember my dad cursing the grass a lot. He had a lot of trouble getting the kind of grass he wanted to thrive in our shady yard.
[I really think I've written about this before, but I can't find it at the moment.] When my ex and I bought our first house, his mom and stepfather came up from South Carolina one weekend in March, their pickup truck loaded down with plants for us. We dug a garden and some flowerbeds, and I picked my MIL’s brain all summer for advice. So I have Suzanne to thank for my love of gardening. And I did love it immediately.
For years, I have grown vegetables and flowers and whatever. I’m getting both pickier and more adventurous in my plant selections. The first couple of years I had a garden, I’d try anything, but I quickly learned that some plants actually are more difficult to grow than others, even in our mostly forgiving Middle Tennessee climate. So I got some basics down that I was really, really good at.
It’s been several years since I’ve branched out as much as I have this year. After my first year gardening, I haven’t started anything from seed that had to be started indoors, before the last frost. This year, I have grow lights and seed starter trays and a new shelf to hold it all. I ordered $100 worth of seeds online and I’m really going crazy.
Here’s my first victory: Parsley. I’ve typically bought parsley every year or two [it's a biennial] as a plant and just stuck it in the garden, where it’s very happy. I’ve tried to grow it from seed outside before, and it’s just not that easy. This winter, I spent a lot of time re-reading the details of seed germination in The Square Foot Gardener, and I think I’ve nailed my previous issues with parsley seeds. Just look:
That seedling is one of about 12 I have going. No, I don’t need 12 parsley plants. I may be willing to deal here in a month or so.
by lcreekmo on February 14, 2009
I’ve already been spending a lot of time on my garden this year. I’ve been transplanting a few hardy herbs out of my vegetable garden and into the flowerbeds to make more room for veggies this summer. I’ve got such a large scheme in mind for the flowerbed that I’m pretty sure I’ve lost my head. But nonetheless, I’m proceeding like this is all going to work.
You can see photos of where I am so far in my 2009 Garden set on Flickr. Mostly, it’s a lot of dirt. But you can see some of the herbs I’m moving around, and my garden plan for the year.
The main things that have happened so far:
- I’ve moved all the remaining herbs from the vegetable garden into a flowerbed.
- My awesome yard guy Phol Huy came out last week and doubled the size of my two backyard flowerbeds.
- He also tilled up the vegetable garden and incorporated compost in the garden and the beds.
- I’ve started some parsley from seed inside. Or at least, I’m trying to. Parsley is notoriously hard to germinate, and it takes forever, so it will be another week before I know if I’ve screwed up somehow.
- I started some larkspur seeds in the flowerbed today.
- I set some sweet pea [flowers, not vegetables] seeds to soak overnight. We’ll plant them tomorrow.
Here are other upcoming events I’ve already planned. I show some plants growing through the summer — like carrots — that will likely bolt. When that starts to happen, I’ll take them off the calendar until cooler weather. But it’s hard to predict in advance how any seed variety will handle the weather.
UPDATE: Darn it, I keep forgetting that I can’t use iframes on WP.com. I guess now I finally have to get Wordpress running on www.fixinsupper.com so I can install a plugin that will let me show you my calendar. Back with you in a day or so…. DONE!
by lcreekmo on February 9, 2009
Today we made real progress on the garden. By “we,” I really mean Phol, my awesome yard guy. Today Phol arrived and cleared out the garden and doubled the size of my two main flowerbeds. Tomorrow he’s tilling everything up and adding compost.
I did make some small progress. I started some parsley seeds. Parsley is notoriously difficult to start from seed, but you know that just made me more anxious to give it a try. Plus, I have a recipe addiction that absolutely requires flat-leaf parsley.
Later this week, I’ll post the whole gardening calendar I’ve laid out. If I stay on schedule, by the end of the month, I’ll have a number of spring plants under grow lights in the laundry, trellises in the garden, and I’ll be well on my way to salad.
