It is a totally spring-like day so gardening is on my mind. Last week I covered the initial construction of my mega-pole bean apparatus. Last week's pole bean diary. My son came over and we attached 14 slats to the horizontals. His work is always so precise it boggles my mind.
We then lined the whole trench with hardware cloth, as gopher protection. In my experience it can last as long as 10 years.
Next process is to fill the trench with dirt. I got some from an old compost site, plus some potting soil. Then I transcended my hatred for gophers and walked around the farm looking for gopher holes, and shoveled the gopher dirt into a wheelbarrow for the trench. It is beautiful soil. I need quite a bit more but have time because the plants are not ready to transplant.
After the inch of rain Friday the tomato bed looks lush and the 36 tomatoes are growing rapidly. Most have flowers.
Plenty to share by June.
Sometimes onions get the wrong idea and start to produce a seed head rather than putting energy into bulb production. I disabuse them of this by breaking that off.
I love watercress but it's so expensive that I decided to grow my own. Never having grown it before, I planted some in the Fall. It grew so slowly that I could hardly differentiate it from the inevitable weeds. Now that it's warming up it's moving along. I'm starting more in the greenhouse for a summer crop.
Wimpy but tasty.
Three years ago I planted a nectarine tree in the corner of the garden. Not wanting to have a huge tree there I specified a "dwarf" tree. Well, dwarfing techniques must be pretty good nowadays because LOL it's the same size as when I planted it. Who knows?
Peewee tree.
I planted brussels sprouts in the fall, intermixed with red onions. Birds devastated the leaves and I thought the crop was toast. Then they recovered somewhat and I had hope.
Here they are today. Sprouts are forming on some of the stalks but it seems the bird devastation might have been too much for the mature potential. There's always something.
Stepping back, you see that wherever we haven't planted yet fills with California Poppies. In the back is the mass of fava beans which is a cover crop. I harvested a bunch of them yesterday which will be for tonight's dinner.
Everything is in gopher-proof (we hope) beds.
One last story. We removed the inoperable floor furnace from the dining room and of course I wanted to patch the hole. I contacted quite number of floor places and they all said "We don't do that. We'll weave it in and re-finish your whole room, that'll be $1800."
My son said he could do what I wanted and so he did; a perfectly matched job upon which he's doing the final sanding as we speak. We found the original stain, too. I couldn't be more pleased.
I hope your day is going perfectly or even better than that.
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