Superflat Mode

With a great deal of roto-tilling, shovelling, and raking.  The yard is now pretty flat. We're finally ready to start building beds!  It's taken a lot longer than I would have liked but at about the same point that I started having free time to work on it, true summer hit and temperatures soared.  I know, excuses.

I also finally finished hauling concrete rubble to the dump. Yay.

On the greener end of things, the potted garden is doing very well.  The first tomatoes are beginning to ripen.  The first to turn red had a rot spot, but oh well.  Cucumbers have yet to produce anything but are really trying.  And the herb barrel is a wonderful riot of foliage.  It's dill really helped out a turkey I roasted a week ago.  Even the agave are doing really well!

So Far...

Alright!  My evening class is finally over so now I just have 40 hours of work to get in the way of my yard (and rising summer temperature, and general lethargic).

So! Lets see what we've accomplished so far and what we have to work with.

I measured my yard and created a general plan on Inkscape.  My wife helped me transfer some of that plan (the part pertaining to the garden beds) into the yard with stakes and string.  Basically it consists of 3 foot wide paths between 4x4 beds grouped into "T" and "L" shapes.  Here's a photo of the yard where I've attempted to highlight the strings that outline the beds.  Also, there are weeds.

I've also gathered a fair number of 18 inch square pavers (offered to my by my father-in-law) which will be perfect for the paths. I've still got another 20 or so to haul over.

Lastly, I've helped my wife plant a few things in some pots so we have some gardening to do while I build the beds. In the barrel on the left there are some herbs (Peppermint, Stevia, Fennel-leaf dill, and Spicy globe basil). Next to it is a tomato (Phoenix) and a pepper (mammoth jalapeno). On the right end is an earth-box type planter with some cucumbers (we'll see how it does). In front you can see my poor abused agaves that still seem alive, despite my neglect. There's still one pot left which will get filled with something at somepoint.

Come on summer! Lets gets stuff done!

Garden Update: April Showers

Yesterday, in the aftermath of the first precipitation we've have in months, I went out to take stock of my little plants.  Most of them are doing great.  I'm suspect that this will be a good year.

There's nothing quite like peas.  They are the heralds of spring!  They grow before most of the other vegetables and the way the seem to stretch up toward the sky lift my heart.  There are about seven plants in each pot and as usual, I'm afraid I over planted a bit.  The peas in both pots seem to be doing great though.  A few of them have grabbed hold of the tomato cage I stuck in their pot.

Carrot with round cotyledon.

Carrot with elongated cotyledon.

The radishes are doing great.  They're beginning to look like actual plants.  Time to thin out the dense spots a bit.  Even more exciting in this bed, the carrots have sprouted!  Back in my college garden I sowed carrots every year and only once got any to germinate so it's thrilling to have some success this year.  I planted a rainbow mix this year so I've been looking carefully for differences in the leaves of my carrot plants.  Some of them appear to have normal looking round cotyledon while others came up long and thin, like grass.  I only assume that they are both carrots because they both came up en masse at about the same time and they're both now sporting their first sets of true carrot leaves.  There's one other surprise in the radish-carrot bed.  Something came up with the radishes that is clearly neither a radish nor a carrot.  I let it grow because I was curious.  I don't know what my in-laws planted in this bed last year but it looks like a very large grass right now.  Any guesses?

The agave that I repotted is not looking so good.  It, and most of it's pups, have lost their happy green-blue color.  Now it mostly matches the wall.  In the research that I've done since the repoting, it looks like I shouldn't have watered them all after I was finished and I should have left them under the porch instead of against a sunny wall.  Live and learn, I guess.  I'm still hoping that it's succulent constitution will give it the strength to survive.

Lastly, two weeks ago I threw some seeds into the planter around the mailbox out front.  I didn't record the varieties and threw away the seed packets so I don't know exactly what I put in there.  I know there were some nasturtiums because, as I've said before, I'm curious how they do in our dry climate and I wish that everything I planted I could eat.  There were also some snapdragons because their color matched the nasturtiums and I know my mother-in-law likes them.  I also added in some sort of red lettuce for two reasons.  First, I thought the colored foliage would look nice with the flowers and secondly, I really like mixing flowers and vegetables.  The second reason goes against my mother-in-law's gardening ideas so I guess a minor act of rebellion is a third reason.  We'll see if she notices.  Yesterday, I noticed that something, one tiny little cotyledon, was poking out of the soil.  It is, of course, way to small and immature to identify so we'll just have to wait to see what's coming up out there.

What is it?

Repotting an Agave

Of all the things the previous occupant of my last apartment left behind, my favourite was a potted Agave.  I've never had much luck with potted plants and never seen much point in plants that aren't useful but the Agave was looked pretty and hardy and was free.  Unfortunately, judging by the pups squeezing their way out from under the parent plant, the Agave needed to be repotted.

This chore scared me in a number of ways.  I have very little experience with repotting plants, so the odds of killing it in the process seemed high.  Furthermore, the Agave is a large, spiny, dense plant so the odds of injuring myself seemed equally high.  So I put it off for a year.

Now that the days are warm again and the Agave has survived my neglect for a whole year, I felt that it deserved some care.  With the help of my wife (who got stabbed instead of me) I've finally done it.

We started by removing the Agave from it's pot.  This took the form of a dangerous tug-of-war, myself gripping the dead leaves around the base while my wife struggled with the pot.  Once freed, it was apparent just how badly root bound the poor plant was.

I carefully began untangling roots, cutting off far more pups than I expected as I came across them.  The pups were attached to the parent plant by way of long ropey looking growths which I mostly cut off and discarded.

In the end I had eighteen pups, removed and potted in plastic ups (with holes in the bottoms, of course).  The Agave returned to it's original pot, it's roots trimmed down by about half.

Will any of these survive being manhandled?  I hope so.  When I feel certain which ones are going to survive, I will make another post here offering them up to any local gardener who cares to claim one.  I certainly don't have a need for so many Agave.