I don’t know if it was the homemade chili-garlic bug remedy, the light dose of neem oil, or the recent drenching of eggshell calcium-water, but my peppers and tomatoes have perked right up (despite the persistence of the darn squash bugs!). They look so much better than they did only two weeks ago. No new [...]
I have hit my limit with the handmade-ness of the toolshed. I wasn’t happy with how it was coming together; the gaps were too big for my liking (remember the cladding was split not cut, so the logs bowed out and in as well as left and right) and I just wasn’t fully loving its [...]
I got the first bit of cladding done today.
Only the far left log is nailed in place; the others are all loose like puzzle pieces, getting moved and turned this way and that, to see which way they fit best before being trimmed and nailed in place.
My borrowed sawzall really helps trim up the sides [...]
Old-fashioned marigolds, not doing a very good job of keeping squash bugs off my pepper plants.
A meadow of pink, yellow, and blue weed flowers among the white buckwheat.
I don’t know what these flowers are called, bu they’re such a beautiful shade of blue.
Plain-Jane but oh-so-important peanut flowers!
Pepper and tomatoes need plenty of calcium to keep them healthy through the growing season. I usually plant mine with a mixture of crushed eggshells, sugar (for beneficial soil bacteria), and epsom salts (for magnesium). But this year I forgot!
The plants’re all starting to look a bit sallow. It could be all the attacks by [...]
It was in the mid-90s today, but since my time is limited before the Fall rains start coming I went out to work on the shed anyway. Sofía obliged me by taking a nice long 3-hour nap, so I got what felt like a good amount of work done… except to see it in the [...]
The deer seem to have stopped bothering most of my tomatoes for the last couple months. Ever since, in fact, I put up cages around a few of them. Maybe the deer accidentally bit into the wire a few times and didn’t like the taste of aluminum?
Whatever the magic was, I hope it lasts because [...]
Remember back when I said I was going to be building a tool shed in the garden?
Well, the excavation has begun. This is how far I got in two hours: four wheelbarrowloads of dirt.
I am saving all the round stones I find – and there are a lot of them – to line our future [...]
Back when I posted “Garden Despair“, I was really freaking out about all those bugs. And can you blame me? I mean, they were legion and I was one, and I had never had to deal with an invasion on that scale. In past years I’ve just planted enough to share with everyone, and never [...]
Here’s the harvest from today’s morning trip out to gather eggs (two today!).
Two 5-pound watermelons, one 5-pound Marina di Chioggia winter squash, one two-pound butternut, and of course our own egg. (The second egg came later, so it’s not shown.)
I wouldn’t have harvested the butternut or Chioggia quite yet, but vine borers got their vines [...]