Topsy Turvy

For those of you who aren't aware, this is a Topsy Turvy. Its a fantastic invention that grows plants upside down! This specific bad boy was very generously donated to our gardening cause by a fellow gardener (Thanks Jen C).

We have put a Sequoia Strawberry plant in the Topsy Turvy as our local garden center horticulturalist said its a great way to grow strawberries. Also, he said it makes it harder for the squirrels to get them.

Its a simple concept, place the plant in a Styrofoam ring at the bottom that holds the plant in place and then you add the potting soil into the bag on top. From there on out you just water from the top occasionally and fill in more soil from the top as it compacts.

It has its place on the back porch near the garden, so lets see how it does.

Adjuncts to the Garden

Along with doing the "traditional" garden, we are doing a small pseudo container garden in our yard. We are doing this mostly as we want to let the girls (mostly Nora) help through the process of growing these vegetables so they start to get an understanding of how to grow your own food. I guess we are learning together as I am not 100% what I am doing either :)

We have just three plants here: A large "bush" heirloom tomato plant, a Sequoia Strawberry Plant, and a Red Raspberry Plant in these pots.

Our hope is that if nothing else, these three plants turn out to be the best of all of our gardening with all of the attention they should get from the whole family (even Hank as you can see). We are not expecting too much from the raspberry plant this year, but with the fence nearby we should be able to get some good vines going this year that will lead to a bountiful volume of raspberries next year.

Topsy Turvey information tomorrow......

That Dirt Is Now A Garden

In a spur of the moment decision, the family trekked to Gethsemane Gardens in Andersonville. There were plenty of choices in Tomatoes, Peppers, Raspberries, Broccoli, and Strawberries. I am not going to get into what I have planted so far, as I will leave that for this week. However, I will say that it was a LONG day, and we are going to have a ridiculous amount of Tomatoes and Peppers when this is all done.

Above is a picture of the fully planted garden. All you can really make out at this point is some rows of a plants and a few flowers. The few flowers are Marigolds. It turns out that Marigolds are good at attracting Ladybugs. Ladybugs like to eat aphids. Aphids like to eat vegetable/fruit plants, so the Marigolds are the guardians of the garden so to speak. In an added bonus, Marigolds apparently have a certain scent that rabbits dislike, so we have that going for us as well. Now all we need to do is figure out a way to keep the squirrels from eating everything, and we will have some vegetables to eat in 2-3 months.

Later this week I will post the layout for the garden as well as the varieties of each vegetable/fruit that we have chosen.

Weather or Not

I tried several times this weekend to get out to the lot to edge and furrow the garden in preparation for the planting early next month. We ended up having quite wet weather over the weekend. Whats worse, it was starting and stopping all weekend, so it was next to impossible to "squeeze" anything in.

We have also identified the garden center where we will be able to get the vegetable plants we want to grow, so now it just a matter of having everything lined up properly.

I will be working on it through the week. More to come.

Finished Product

Here it is looking SO much different then it did before I started : )

More to come....

New Face, New Topic

For those of you who have an RSS feed to this site, or happen to actually check in still hoping that I just was asleep at the wheel and am suddenly going to post pictures of a nearly completed home, I'm back, and with a new head of steam on a new topic.

Gardening. Thats right, the family and I are going to attempt to grow a whole mess 'o vegetables (and a little fruit) this summer in the good old city.

Since we are unable to build on the other lot, we have decided to use a good portion of the backyard as a vegetable garden. It seemed like the logical thing to do with the volume of fresh fruits and vegetables we eat, so we decided to go for it.

So, I took the above plot of grass, rented a rototiller from Home Deport, and went to work. The key to this was that we had to take soil that most likely hadnt been cultivated in 50 years, and turn it into viable soil. This meant rototilling the top layer and raking the grass off. Since the ground was fairly hard, I had to do this a second time to get the balance of the big pieces of grass. Once that was done I then went to work tilling as deeply as I could in parrallel lines doing one pass in each direction (east/west - north/south).

Once I was done with those 6 passes at the ground I went through and cut out what roots weren't ripped out. This area had quite a few roots, and it was tedious tilling and cutting all of these out. I also picked out any pieces of wood, rock, or random loose debris (this included a marble, a small plastic toy horse, a large metal hook and bolt, and a spark plug).

I went back to the Home Depot (twice) to get bags of Peat and Organic garden soil. First, I put roughly a 1" layer of peat on the whole area. Then I made a pass in each direction, making sure to take my time so the soil and peat were good and mixed. Once I had this done, I spread another inch of organic gardening soil on top of that. I then made very slow deliberate passes at the ground to mix as much as possible. At this point, the soil was so soft and deep that the rototiller was working at its fullest possible depth, and probably not hitting hard ground at the bottom.

Once I made the last pass, i then raked the dirt back into one level plane while cleaning up the rest of the loose grass, rocks, and wood that was coming to the top through the process of mixing everything up.

Next up is going to be edging the garden and deciding the best way to make furrows for growing the vegetables as well as how the heck to keep all of the local animals out of the garden as well.

It was just a matter of time

Before the issues the financial sector, and the economy are dealing with right now came home to roost. Despite my previous post of encouraging progress from the bank, I got a call today telling me that the deal was not going to work as originally thought. The result, was that the bank was looking for a larger percentage of the loan amount down at the initiation of the loan. As a result of things I had set in motion a while ago, this was what I have been budgeting for to this point, and it was the limit we were prepared to pay out of pocket. While we can afford to pay the extra amount of money, its past our comfort level, and we are going to wait til the spring to see how the market looks at that point.

Up to this point, we had just as much going for us with the down market as we had against. By this I mean that all we were going to give up - small mortgage to big, renting our other house - we were going to be able to mitigate with buying better from the contractors, and getting better deals on items for the house then we would have in a normal market.

Alas, it is not to be for this year. We are most likely not even going to tear the house down. It seems that with everything the way it is, we are better off leaving it up, then renting a temporary fence for who knows how long.

The upside in all of this is we can pull back the reigns and be able to take a good hard look at everything we are doing, so we can get the best deal possible on whatever we are going to use in the house.

I will update sometime in the near future.