The tomato plants are looking a little scrawny. They continue to produce flowers, and now a handful of actual tomatoes have appeared.
The terrorist bunnies got to some of the corn shoots. I think I was a day or two late with the second application of Liquid Fence. The rest are doing well and the ones that did get nibbled may come back. The pepper plant that got stripped bare and the cilantro have both come back. I don't know if the corn shoots that got hit will, but maybe. If they don't, I'll use the space for something else in the next two weeks.
The package on the radishes says 22 days to harvest. I don't think so. They are doing fine, but I'm guessing two weeks behind.
The heavy rain last night just pounded the carrot tops flat. The same thing happened to the radish plants earlier and they popped right back. We'll see what tomorrow brings.
Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty happy with the progress so far. I got the second round of beans, carrots, onions, and radishes in today. Directly below is a pic from today, and for comparison, below that is a reminder of how it looked four weeks ago when it was first planted.(click photos to enlarge)
Mom is doing pretty well and is in a transitional care place where she can get some physical and occupational therapy. She is on anti-seizure medication until Wednesday and it has some side effects that she can do without, dizziness and nausea for example. I think she will do even better once that stuff clears her system. I think she is going to be fine, but it sure made for a long week.
One of my neighbors wears hearing protection for the 15 minutes it takes him to mow his lawn and thinks I should wear some too when I cut mine. I asked and no, there's nothing wrong with his ears, he's just being cautious. He has a typical gasoline powered mower just like mine. So the question is, is my neighbor smart or a bit of a weenie? I see lawn crews wearing hearing protection all of the time, and if I did that for a living I would too. But for 15 minutes, or in my case, two hours, once a week or so? It seems like overkill to me, but maybe I'm wrong.
RIP Father Tim. I didn't know him and hadn't even heard his story until yesterday. The first military chaplain to be seriously injured in Iraq, he had worked for five years to recover before he suffered an injury and passed away on Saturday. God Bless him for his service.
I've been over the Lowry Avenue bridge in Minneapolis about a billion times. It looked like a piece of crap bridge and was enough of one in reality that they shut it down last year. On the other hand, it had served the city well for over 100 years. It was demolished on Sunday and I would have been there except that Father's Day breakfast took the obvious priority:
Week 3 garden update. The heat is on, finally, and everything seems to be doing well, knock on wood. The tomatoes are getting tall enough for their first tie, though I'm not sure if I'll have to stake the bell peppers. Anyone know the answer to that? Anyway, week 3 pics(click to enlarge):
I think I'm most tickled about the sweet corn though:
Those larger shoots every 20" or so are the sweet corn. I know, I need to temper expectations about what I will actually end up with here. The odds of getting really good corn ears are probably stacked against me. The first thing is to get something to emerge though, and there you go. This pic reminds me that I need to get a new hoe and scrape away some of those weeds. I broke my last one in the process of getting the bed ready. No cracks, Bingley, I'm warning you :) . Weeding and getting the second batch of carrots, onions, and beans in the ground are the priorities this week.
Rain, rain...stick around for a couple more days. We got our first decent rain in about a month yesterday, a little over .5" where I'm at. Hopefully we'll get some more tonight and tomorrow.
Week One: The veggie garden has only been in for a week, so I need to be patient. It will be a long two months before I even have a shot at the kind of bonanza that Rob is already starting to reap. So far the rabbits have damaged one bell pepper plant and one tomato plant, but they didn't totally kill them, just took the lower leaves. The rest are ok, though not looking as robust as they should be I think. I scattered some time release fertilizer today to supplement the soil and fertilizer I had mixed in before planting:
On the plus side, your eyes do not deceive you. That third row from the left is indeed the radishes coming to life:
When they get to 2" high I'll thin them down to about 2" apart. No sign of anything else yet. The rest of the rows should emerge in the next week or so if they are going to come up at all. I suppose I could pick a spot and dig in to see what is going on, but I think I'll just wait for now.
I didn't remember to take a pic of the new garden until I went out to water it this evening.
Hoot Acres.
The stakes will stay, but the strings will go after the first few times I weed and when the thinning is done(if I'm that lucky). It looks so small there, even though it's 10' x 15'. You wouldn't think it was so much work to carve it out of the lawn, but it was.
Things are really dry here. The reports say that it was the third driest May on record. It has also been fairly cool except for two days when it hit the 90s. There is a freeze warning for northern Minnesota tonight and a frost advisory for a good chunk of the central part of the state, a band roughly 70 to 200 miles north of the Twin Cities. That's not really too remarkable as the last frost date for the border averages to be June 9th, though it is a bit unusual to see that band of frost dip so far south of the border. The forecast is for a low around 48 here tonight. I'm pretty certain we have seen our last frost until fall.
As you can maybe see above, my lawn is already going dormant from the lack of moisture. I'm not going to waste water or money by watering my lawn. At least one of my neighbors hates me for that(oddly he's a liberal, though in fairness, a couple of other liberals in the neighborhood agree with me). I'll water the gardens, trees, and shrubs, just not the grass. When the rains come, the grass will come back. I've lived here 19 years now and I've seen it before. Barring unforeseen circumstances, I'll see it again.
The 10' by 15' veggie garden bed is finally ready. I downsized it by 5' because it turned out to be much more work than I had hoped. The first blow came when the small rototiller I borrowed was not even close to the task of cutting through decades old sod. Ok, I thought, I'll turn the sod with a spade and then give it a go.
Nope. I had hoped the tiller would sort of just chew the remaining roots to shreds, but they were still too much for it to handle. Instead of shredding what was left of the chunks of sod, the grass roots just got tangled up in the tiller. I've never used a tiller on a garden that hadn't been previously tilled, so I'm not sure if I was off in my expectations or if the rototiller was just too small.
After a couple of hours of busting up clods of sod with a spade and by hand, things seemed pretty clean of roots or anything else that would screw up the tiller. It was just a matter of a few passes to make sure everything was good and mixed in, some smoothing and grading, and the bed would be ready.
Naturally, at that point I managed to find a 3" stone that perfectly jammed the tiller. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to partially disassemble the thing to get it out. I pondered that over a beer and a smoke for a few minutes, and then decided to just finish things by hand. That chewed up the rest of the time I had for planting today, but it was ok to do some fairly mindless work on this nice day and the veggies will be planted tomorrow.
There may be a little ad lib action tomorrow, but I think 4 or 5 tomato plants, 4 bell pepper plants, carrots, green onions, radishes, green beans, and maybe some pole beans. This is a bit of a learning year for me, so we'll see how things fit.
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