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Wednesday, June 11, 2008

garden update and (cue Johnny Olson) A NEW CAR.

In case you don't follow the RSS feed for my Flickr photos (all the cool kids do) (*snort*), I should mention that every Tuesday (or thereabouts) I upload new pictures of the garden. I have a general garden set and a weekly garden photo set. The garden is getting really exciting. Something I planted actually has blossoms on it! Although we have had our first casualty. One of the "extra" tomato plants we put out (more seedlings than we had room for in the beds) was swiped by some gophers -- gophers with a death wish -- night before last. It's just gone, like it was never there. Granted, it was right next to the fence and it wasn't exactly thriving, but if the same thing starts happening to my squash plants I am going to sit out there all night myself with the .22. That actually sounds like a fabulous idea! We even have a spotlight. A diet Coke, a .22, the full moon, and thou ("thou" being a stupid little rodent who apparently doesn't know who he's messing with here).

Also, we're picking up a new car tonight; we signed papers for it on Sunday. I swear it's the frugal thing to do. The best mileage we can get on any of our classic Mopar daily drivers is 12mpg. TWELVE. That's highway MPG. At the current price ($4.50/gallon the last time I looked, but it may have gone up a dime), we can save almost the entire payment on our new (black, strippy model except for A/C because hello this IS California) Dodge Caliber in gas costs, especially since we get 500 gallons per year for three years at $2.99/gallon as part of that schmancy promotion thing that Dodge is doing. And from all accounts, gas prices are only going up. So it makes a lot of sense, right? Doesn't explain why I am having a total freakout about it. Well, not total. That was yesterday. Today it's only the occasional very small freakout.

Actually, it's seeming kind of... fun. I have never owned a new car before. And we got a really killer warranty, so that our usual main objection to new cars (things inevitably go wrong eventually, and they cost so much to fix, and T can't usually do it, and even if he could the parts are also outrageously expensive) is a moot point.

(Firefox thinks "freakout" isn't a word. Silly Firefox.)

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

bean sprouting

The Nikon (remember The Nikon? That was before THE NIKON) took this video for me this afternoon. It's rough and kind of choppy, but I still think it's neat to look at. (I'm going to try again tomorrow.)

Weekly garden update

itty bitty corn seedlings.

Peas.

Aliens. I mean beans.

Spinach, and C's ceramic frog.

There are more photos (including several more seedling shots! so exciting!) in the Garden 2008 Flickr set.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Hey, remember the garden?

The seedlings survived, the ground's been dug, the beds are made (by me) and lined with aviary wire (which is very poky when you cut it) and filled (by me and LT, and what a job THAT was), the hills are mulched, the seedlings are transplanted, and the seeds are planted in neat little rows.

In other words, the garden is in the ground, and nothing has died yet. Including me! Also, I have a bona fide farmer's tan and my arms are a bit more buff than they were before, thanks to two weeks of hard labor with a shovel. (My hands would never pass Rhett Butler's muster, though.)

Pictures!

Two weeks ago (not even quite that): T and LT pounding in fence poles. We didn't have a post driver handy, so T went up the ladder with a sledgehammer while LT held the pole straight, wearing my dad's old football helmet just in case.

Tomato seedlings, still in their flats a week ago.

This was a week ago too.

And this is today! Going clockwise from right in front of you, there's the corn patch, two rows of beans that you can't see very well (they need a trellis), two beds of Siletz tomatoes, a bed of spinach and broccoli with peas and gherkins on a trellis, a bed of bell peppers, one with pepperoncini and a watermelon mound (kids said we didn't have enough watermelon), one of carrots, one of cherry tomatoes, and one of cucumbers and *another* watermelon. Then there are 18 hills further back and to the right of the photo, planted with several varieties of melons and squash (guess who's going to learn to hand-pollinate this summer?), mulched with pine straw. (I always called them "pine needles" until I started gardening, but now that it's mulch it's "pine straw". Don't ask me why.)

The kids and I, in all our dirty glory, having just put the last seeds in the ground. Well, I cannot lie, I went in and washed my hands before handling THE NIKON.

Detail of my silly floppy monkey hat, which has been a yard-and-beach staple in my wardrobe for a couple of years now.

Spinach seedlings. Aren't they all cute and vulnerable-looking? Poor guys. They have no idea what they're in for.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

the garden: details

I have a transcribing job (from hell, so far; it's the kind where one person is almost inaudibly quiet and slow, and the other person is much louder and much faster, which means I'm always having to adjust volume and speed), a history test to study for, and a chapter's worth of nutrition homework, all of which pretty much NEED to be done tonight, which explains why I'm sitting here blogging. Ho-hum. But seriously, Denise asked a question about THE GARDEN, so how could I resist?

Denise (and anyone else who is interested, or, heck, not interested, for that matter): We are growing lots and lots of things. In fact, me being me, I made... a spreadsheet. (It's only because we're ordering the seeds by mail and I'm now officially too lazy to total up 25 rows of low-dollar amounts with paper and a calculator. I swear. Well, maybe that and the fact that I am a pseudo-geek who loves spreadsheets, especially if they involve mathematical functions.)

Hmm. I am just now finding that one can't just copy and paste stuff from Excel into text windows. Who knew? (Everyone, Rachel.)

We actually have really nice soil -- dark brown, just fluffy enough, not rocky, etc. (This is a positive change from our previous house, where we had red clay that was impermeable to everything up to and including water, except during really wet storms when it would become the world's reddest mud-slick.) In our nice soil, we are desperately attempting planning to grow beans, broccoli, carrots, corn, cucumbers (pickling and eating), tiny little cute kiwis with no fuzz that you eat like grapes, melons, onions (red and brown), peas, three kinds of peppers, spinach, three varieties of summer squash and two varieties of winter squash, pumpkins, tomatoes (cherry and standard), two kinds of watermelon, and some herbs -- dill because I want to try pickling, basil, oregano, and cilantro for salsa with the tomatoes, onions, and peppers.

Gosh, just LOOK at all the things I'm going to kill this spring. I am so in over my head.

We aren't growing lettuce, even though I would love to, because it reportedly does not like our long, hot, dry summers, and I am, as has been established, a gardening newbie, aside from the occasional corn-and-tomato patch, so dealing with temperamental plants that are going to freak out in the 110-degree heat that occasionally lasts for five or six weeks here is maybe not such a great start to a thriving career as a vegetable-growing granola earth mother*. I did find a spinach variety that was advertised as more heat-tolerant than most, so I'm giving that a try. (We'll see how tolerant it is of the terrifying Rachel Kills Green Things Curse! Bwa ha ha ha!) We are using all heirloom varieties, because we want to start saving seeds. It's a preparedness thing. It also means that we have to be very careful about putting multiple varieties of some species too close to each other, to avoid cross-pollination which makes the seeds Not So Good. In other words, planning the layout of the garden was like one big logic puzzle, and it was so, so much fun. Now if I can just maintain this level of enthusiasm for six or eight short months, the whole project might turn out to be something other than a complete waste of time, energy, and money. (Don't hold your breath.)

*This sentence just kept growing. I'd add a phrase here and a word there until, by the time I realized that it was getting out of hand, it was almost like a game to see exactly how bad a sentence I could make without technically creating a run-on. In other words, I totally did that on purpose. Yeah.

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