Garden Update- February 28

We built a trellis for our grape vines. You can see the two posts on the end and a center post made out of a branch that we chopped off of our Mesquite tree and trimmed using POWER TOOLS. We used wire, which should hold up much better than last year's fishing line tied to nails in the wall. 

Carrots, Swiss Chard, and grape vine in the back. I was all sorts of doubtful about the chard, but steamed chard with vinegar has turned out to be my new favorite side dish. 

Beets & Green Onion

Little Bitty Tomatoes! They looked so big in the cups, but then we put them outside and they look tiny. 

Red onion is starting to sprout

We'll see if we actually get some strawberries from our little patch on the side of the house. It might not get enough sunlight. We shall see!

Yellow Jasmine and the Dwarf Orange tree on the right

Flowers! Lots of them!

Garden Update

It's that time again! Our germination station is in full swing. We moved the tomato seedlings to cups today. I'll start putting them outside for a few hours a few days to harden them off. We didn't harden them enough last year and lost some plants to sun shock.

Graduating to level 2: Plastic cups

Cute baby tomatoes

Germination Station

There is life outside too. The seeds we planted fall/winter are doing pretty well, and our green onion doesn't seem like it will ever die. We bought some in the grocery store over the summer and planted them outside and they went crazy! They will grow in a cup of water in an indoor window as well, but the cup got nasty looking and it didn't grow as big as it did in the soil outside.

Beets. Bears. Battlestar Galactica.

Green onion forest! Seriously, some of the shoots are 2 ft tall. 

Carrots to the left, Swiss Chard tot he right, and the pruned grapevine in the back

First yellow jasmine flower of the year

SNAKE! IN THE GARDEN! Thought you ought to know...

10 points if you know that reference! Here's a hint: replace "snake" with "troll" and "garden" with "dungeon." Answer: Harry Potter book one. Quirrel says it. At this point I'm ashamed if you didn't get it. Go read all 7 books. Start right now.

Back to the point of this post. WE FOUND A SNAKE IN OUR GARDEN! Like I mentioned in a previous post, we ended up with quite the tomato plant jungle because our coat hanger cages weren't actually strong enough to hold up the plants and we didn't do any sort of pruning. It got to the point where they were flopping over and smushing our other plants, so we decided to intervene.

We gathered up some sticks. This is substantially more difficult here than it is back East. We had to walk along the nearby wilderness trail for a while to find sticks that were the size we wanted that weren't infested with termites. We got to work using the sticks to prop up the plants.

BUT THEN!

Aaron pulled aside a bunch of tomato branches, and from where I was standing, I could see a snake! So I did a little yelp and yanked Aaron back. The snake was curled up and apparently asleep- he wasn't flicking his tongue out or anything. It wasn't a huge snake, but it was hard to tell with him all curled up. I wish we had thought to take a picture, but we were filled with battle rage. Aaron grabbed some gloves and our big shovel and I held the branches out of the way. Aaron had a pretty clear shot and the snake was kinda cornered. And asleep. So we felt pretty good about our chances of not being bitten. If it had been awake, we probably would have called the fire department to come get him.

I'll spare you the details of the battle. It was rather one-sided and ended with the snake half buried. It did hiss at us a little after we thought it was already dead, but a few more whacks put an end to that. Aaron moved the dirt around to bury him the rest of the way.

We never got a good look at it's tail- it was covered while he was asleep, and we didn't feel the need to dig him up enough to look at it after the fact. Going off of the coloring, it could have been a rattle snake, but we can't say for sure. There are some other non-venomous snakes with similar patterning. Aaron prefers to think that it was a non-venomous one so that he can tell himself that we don't have to worry about the snakes' brothers and sisters lurking nearby. I get a kick out of thinking that we fought off one of these guys:

Lesson learned- don't stick your hands into places that you can't see!

Garden: Year 1

One of the aspects of home ownership that we were most excited about was that we could start a garden. We made an attempt at container gardening in our apartment, but everything died because 

A) we ignored the fact that we were starting in the heat of summer  

B) we used the cheapest soil that Walmart sold, and 

C) the neighbor's cat might have been peeing on the plants. 

Ok, that last theory is completely unsupported. The neighbor had a very nice one-eyed cat that probably never peed on our plants.

ANYWAYS, we did some research about planting times when we moved into the house and started seeds for tomato, bell pepper, lettuce, and basil in January. We had some of the cheapo potting soil leftover from our previous gardening attempt, so we put that in egg cartons and planted some seeds. 

We also got some green onion from the grocery store and stuck it in a cup of water in the window. Anyone who isn't doing this already should do it- you cut back the green leaves and they just grow back over and over. No dirt required- just a cup of water and light.

We quickly lost faith in the egg cartons. You could tell by looking at the soil that it was no bueno- it was super coarse, almost mulch-like. So we shelled out a whopping $7 for a seed starter kit. It came with a tray and bunch of these poker chip looking disks that expand when you soak them in water. They are on the left in the picture below. We moved the operation to the study, where we set up the "Germination Station." We eventually moved the lamp to clip onto the window blinds and used fishing line to tie it up to a good angle for more consistent lighting. Yes, we are huge nerds. Germination station was Aaron's favorite place in the house while it was there- he checked up on our little plantskees multiple times a day. 

We got a few sprouts out of the egg cartons, but none of them grew more than a centimeter or so. Also Aaron dropped one of them on the floor. It's a good thing we got the soil pellet things going when we did. They were super convenient and almost all of them sprouted and grew to a pretty good size. 

We failed at pictures for the next few months... this next one is from early August. The vines sprawling out of the bed are cantaloupe. We planted them from seed straight in the ground in May and they did GREAT with the Arizona heat. Unfortunately we lost half of the melons because they all ripened super fast while we were on vacation and were rotten when we got back. The ones that we did get to eat were super sweet and delicious. They had a much thinner rind than the ones you buy in the store. 

The vines crawling up the wall are grapes. We got a cutting from someone at church and felt pretty silly planting it because it looked like just a stick. No roots or anything. 

And that brings us today! We are getting our second wave of tomatoes. We made some tomato cages out of coat hangers, but they weren't strong enough and we now have a super dense tomato jungle. We didn't ever prune them back and planted them fairly close together. We'll get actual cages next year. 

The bell peppers didn't do nearly as well as the tomatoes- the heat was harder on them. But we have gotten a few small peppers, many many tomatoes, and unlimited green onion. We had some lower quality spinach and lettuce earlier in the summer. It didn't do all that great. We also have 3 oranges growing on our dwarf navel orange tree. What a cutie. 

The grape vines are doing pretty well, even though we didn't get any grapes this year. We survived an onslaught of Grape Leaf Skeletonizers. It's an apt name for these cute little caterpillars. They REALLY like grape leaves, but didn't touch any of our other plants. We would go out there and kill 50-100 of them per day for a good week. They would have completely annihilated the whole vine if we hadn't fought them off. They disappeared a few weeks ago and the vine has made a comeback. 

RUTHLESS MONSTERS. We really would find that many under a single leaf.  

We planted our winter seeds at the beginning of October. We have beets, carrots, and swiss chard sprouts. SeedsNow.com sent us a free sample of Kale seeds so we put those in too, but the jury is still out on whether or not any of them will make it. We didn't bother with the Germination Station this time because the weather is nice. We'll see how it goes!