Mostly Frozen

The weather forcast last night was for 37 degrees, with a "frost advisory" in low-laying areas. I did not think too much of it, because in my own past gardening experience, a forcast like that had never been a major problem. However, this new house must be in a microclimate because this morning all the peppers, eggplants and most of the tomato plants I planted out last week were not just frosted, but frozen solid! I couldn't believe it. The garden hose even had ice in it! It looks like a complete loss. I am devastated, because those plants are unusual heirloom varieties I nurtured from seed since mid-March, and I don't have extra seedlings for most of them. I'm afraid to go back outside to look at the damage....
I'm kicking myself because I have enough plastic sheeting downstairs to have made nice cozy tents over all those beds...why didn't I? I've got no one to blame but myself.
The extra plants still sitting in flats on the porch are fine though.
I'm so glad I did not plant out the squash, melons and beans yet.

Filling the Raised Beds

The view from my bedroom window provides a nice overview of the garden. It took Pakman and Weatherboy along with Junior Gardener 2 whole days to move the 8 yards of topsoil/compost from the driveway to the garden. Whew I get tired just thinking about them. Those boxes are only 2x6 framing, now I'm thinking I should have spent the extra money for 2x8's. But overall I'm very pleased with how the project is turning out. The yard slopes fairly significantly to the rear and to the left, so those beds, especially the rear ones, are actually level, but are all at different altitudes, so from this angle (and almost every angle) they look all cattywompus. That white pole is for a volleyball net (remember this was nothing but lawn about 8 days ago), the massively cemented base for it fell smack dab on the centerline of this garden rectangle, purely by coincidence. I was going to leave the pole there and make it as a bean trellis,



then I thought it needed a flag with a picture of a tomato and a corn cob on it, but I ultimately decided to take it out and plant marigolds there. The long dirt row to the right without sideboards is going to be planted with Tom Wagner's potato sampler this year~much more on that later. The 10'x15' unmulched area at the rear will be for corn, mostly. It's very dense clay and in need of lots of amendments. And no I didn't loosen the native soil in each box before having the topsoil dumped in. I'm sure the plants, for the most part, will do just fine.

Pray for an Epidemic

Apparently, the school board here has ordered the entire district closed Monday and Tuesday due to swine flu. However, according to the pre-recorded phone call this morning, my eldest will be thrilled to know that A.P. exams will continue on schedule, and students will be admitted "provided they are not showing any flu symptoms", whatever that means. Looks like the weather will cooperate for a lovely unexpected vacation for everyone else. My 10th-grader did for a fleeting moment feel genuine sorrow for the kid who got the flu who prompted this drastic district-wide measure, but don't worry, she quickly got over it.

On the garden front, this week I arranged and leveled all 21 raised beds, dug in170 linear ft. of plastic edging, laid landscape fabric, and spoke words of encouragement and adulation as Pakman and Junior Gardener went back and forth moving 5 yards of cypress mulch from driveway to garden. And tomorrow morning 8 yards of topsoil/compost is being delivered! That means I can have plants in the ground by tomorrow night! I am feeling a little light-headed....

My eldest has taken our only functioning digital camera with him to Anaheim on Tuesday, which is why I have no spectacular mulch photos to post. He is due back tonight, so get ready.

It's becoming a garden!

Remember my two wistful posts back in January about my then bleak and snow-covered backyard which concealed my future garden? Well look at it now! We did rent a sod cutter, and once we got the hang of it, it was pretty easy, except for turning the thing, that took two people. Sorry, no videos or pics of the actual cutting operation, couldn't find the camera at that moment and didn't want to spend time searching for it because we were on the clock, had to have the sod cutter back at the Home Depot by 3 on Saturday or they'd charge extra.

Sadly, to Junior Gardener's disgust and horror, we must have sliced at least fifty million earthworms into a hundred million that day. Running the sod cutter was easy and actually kind of fun, but the really hard (and tedious) part that took the longest was cutting the strips into managable slices (with kitchen knives), rolling them up (avoiding as best we could the half-worms and worm guts, as well as the occasional grub, catapillar, or spider), hoisting the sod rolls into the wheel barrel, carting them to the back of the yard and throwing them onto the skillfully engineered and unexpectedly ginormous sod heap ~ look kids, it's our new sledding hill! The plan is to let the sod compost itself down into rich humus by next spring. Maybe I should cover it with a tarp of some sort.

I could not wait, I just had to go get some of the raised bed frames and arrange them on the fresh ground, just to get a feel of it.

3' wide wood mulch pathways will surround the boxes.

I'm so geeked I can hardly stand it!

Now, add some black plastic edging, landscape fabric, a truckload each of wood mulch and topsoil/peat mix, (and a handful of Motrin), and voila! Le Poteger est ne!

And the really cool thing about this whole thing is--we did it ourselves. And did quite a fine job too if I do say so myself.

...boy am I tired.

You just cant find good help these days

So our neighbor who owns a landscaping business was supposed to strip 1400 square feet of sod out of my backyard last Friday, which he delayed to Monday, which the weather did not permit until the end of the week (which is NOW) and this morning we called him (left a message) as to what time he was coming today, to which he called back half an hour later with a story of how he JUST found out today that his sod-cutter JUST broke and that we would need to pay him an extra $60 on top of the previously agreed-upon price so he could go to Home Depot and rent one. As if!

I got all the raised bed frames put together, some of them out back and some sitting in the garage, I got a shelf full of root-bound brassicas that should have been planted out two weeks ago, and now I have an unexpected date this Saturday with some heavy machinery -I'll rent the thing and do it myself rather than give the bonehead down the street any business after what he pulled. How hard can sod removal be, anyway?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXFU8tHGh3Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yfNamqbBUw&feature=related

It's a Harden-Off Life...

..for us!

Finally!!!

The tooth that came out today has been loose for about a week. The weird part is, it's the other tooth on the left that's been wiggling and driving her nuts for the past 4 months. Guess it still will.

Wood for Raised Beds!! Woo-hoo!!!

The thing that has been trapped inside my imagination since last January is going to become a reality! The design and layout has changed a dozen times over as many months, not to mention the countless sheets of paper sacrificed, done over with version after version....but today was the day that those countless arguments about money and feasibility appear to have come to fruition...Pakman took all the seats out of the mini-van and brought back a load of 2x6's from the lumberyard...the first entry on the material take-off list I had prepared just for this venerable occasion...pics to follow.

Homegrown Tomatoes

Y'know, my mom loved to garden. Even when she wasn't feeling all that great she still had to have something growing in the yard. Maybe that's where I caught the bug from. This morning I saw the date on the calendar and noticed that today is April 10, mom's birthday. Then I went to check the plants and noticed that today is also the day that my one prodigioius Stupice seedling decided to open it's little bloom. Coincidence? probably. But kinda cool too.

Now, time for a song...

(this video was originally downloaded from here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxwjMtI4aoM) but for some unknown reason I couldn't copy the embed code so it was easier to just download it and re-upload it.)