Multi-media SOTG Report

Yay! I'm finally at home, at the computer with the relevant pictures, and possessing at least a little bit of spare time. Or, to put it another way, there are lots of other things happening in my house right now, but they can be getting on without my help for the time being. Mostly anyway. So, on to the garden!

Here are the babies in their nursery. Fresh, new florescent lights go a long way towards having healthy, stocky little seedlings (rather than the spindly, pathetic-looking, falling-over hopeless seedlings I've grown in the past). The top pic are my spring broccolis; the second are all of my brassicas--broccoli, cabbage, kale and, um, celery. (Okay, celery isn't a brassica. Fine.)

Here's the beginning--my 4'x4' square garden boxes. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I'm trying this out for the first time this year, so I went el-cheapo on materials. I didn't want to sink $100 on a project I didn't end up liking very much, ya know? So these are all untreated 1"x8" pine boards which I banged together with some drywall nails I had laying around. Now that they are in fact being used, and have begun to warp slightly with the damp, I see that using a couple of screws would've been beneficial for a more secure joining, but I don't think it'll be a big deal this year.

Step two! The boxes are in, and the remaining beds have been made. The circular garden you see is my children's "pizza garden". They decided they wanted to plant carrots, beans, tomatoes, lettuce, and some flowers. Now, the weird paper & dirt things. That's my pathway lining. I put down layers of newspaper, and covered it with mulch. What you see in the above picture are just handfulls of mulch to hold the paper down while I was laying everything out (it was verra verra windy that day).

And here we see the garden in it's mostly finished state. Of course, not nearly all my plants are in yet--we've got another two weeks till the frost free date here. But there's a good number. The white sheets are floating row cover, or frost blankets depending on whom you ask. I have them covering my brassicas to protect them from The Evil Cabbage Worm. Broc & cabbage don't require fertilization, and the cover lets in nearly all the sunlight and rain, so I can pretty much leave the plants covered until it's time to harvest (except for weeding & mulching, of course). Oh, that big mass of branches? My neighbor next door had a tree cut down, and she is struggling to gain the upper hand on the remnants. =)

Here we see the latest additions to our garden: the patch at the bottom of the photo is Brian's potato patch, which is a 4'x8' spot with 8 potato plants in. Behind that are, for as much as you can see in the photo, 5 mounds of mulch. Growing out of those mounds are various bushes & vines: the three in the middle are grapes, and they are flanked by the blueberry bush at the far end, and the "mystery bush" on the near side.

And here we have the nursery again, this time populated by summer veggies & herbs like tomatoes (middle, right), basil, chamomile, borage, echinacea, blessed thistle, horehound, chervil, cillantro, and ... er... who really knows what else? I know there's some lavender and chives in there somewhere. I expect I'll be able to figure out which plant is which once they're bigger, right? And smiling down beneficently over all is the AeroGarden, currently housing lettuce.