The Spring Catch-up Edition

OK, where was I?  Oh yeah, spring has arrived.  My to-do list runneth over.  Unfortunately, blogging sometimes slips a bit… road to hell, good intentions, and so forth.

The weather has been about as nice as it gets around here.  No significant rain for a couple of weeks.  Sunny and 70s.  That means it’s time to get out there and start feeling pressured to “get everything ready for summer.”

This year, that’s manifesting itself as little building projects.  I’ve started using a lot more containers to plant in.  In fact, about anything that’ll hold soil and isn’t moving gets holes drilled in the bottom and a plant stuck in it.

They range from this cleverly designed “bucket that had a hole in it” to…

This snazzy sawn-in-half-because-I-never-got-my-rain-barrel-system-finished old plastic drum…

These olde tymey sewage pipes that my neighbor was throwing out one day (NOT ON MY WATCH, MAN!!!)…

The bricks that were supposed to be more paths… but… I did some, and it was real hard… and so, bam, it’s a planter!…

All the way to my super-duper, custom-made planter thingies.  This one’s got the optional trellis attachment on the back.  I’m growing those crazy yard-long beans in it.  Unless my kid steps on them and kills them.

Since last we spoke, I made a couple more planters, and while I was at it, built:

This odd gate-like thing– from a bunch of sticks in my yard.  The point is to provide a trellis for a schizophragma climbing hydrangea (because the other one continues to be devoured by weevils.)  As a bonus, it makes my yard garbage look like something other than a pile.

The SchlopBox™ was designed after having built my kids the traditional sandbox– only to have them persist in filling it with water and stuff and getting themselves coated in the resulting glop.  I decided that instead of yelling at them every day, I’d cannibalize their stupid sandbox (and my old hydroponic tray) and make them a thing designed like a glorified bucket– with enough wood left over for a nice bench and step stool.  Fill ‘er up!  See if I care!

OK, I’m having a little trouble with captions right now…

Anyway, you get the idea.  It’s a tepee.  It’s made from some bamboo I scrounged, string, and the wire frame from an old wreath.  Then, I dug a trench around it, filled it with some reasonably good soil and planted every vining plant seed I had.  There’s beans, peas, tiny pumpkins, a couple of kinds of flowers… I forget what else.  Let the best vine win.

If the kids don’t enjoy that, I’m dropping them off at one of those hospitals that has to take them.

OK, so, after the sandbox project, I had some wood left, and I remembered that I’d packratted a neighbor’s piece of plexiglass.  So I thinks to myself, “you should make a root view planter!”  Dang if I didn’t do just that.  Last thing it needs is a door for the front (the roots won’t like light coming in.)  Oh, yeah, and some legs would be good probably.

This is my favorite right now.  You’ll possibly recall the big chunk of tree that crushed my raspberry patch this winter.  That was the Lord telling me that my patch was stupid.

It was pretty much a thicket, 4′ x 12′ and about 4′ high.  You could get at the berries on the outside, but that was about it.  The wood was 2′ x 2′ (i.e., too thin) and the wire didn’t even have turnbuckles.  I just cranked on it with a pliers now and then.

The Raspberry Room is more like 8′ x 12′ and 6.5′ high.  The wires are thick galvanized wire instead of the original “raspberry wire” that was thin, rusty, and broke a lot.  The posts are all PT 4×4s, there’s turnbuckles to keep the wire tight, and there’s a nice door on one corner to get inside.

Right now, the canes are trained to the wires as best I could so as not to ruin this year’s harvest, but this fall I’ll transplant the existing canes so that I can train them all along the inside “wall” of the room.  The center will be empty (or have a half-length, single row).  Theoretically, you’d be able to sit on a bench in there and be hidden inside four walls of sweet, delicious raspberries.  In any case, the canes will be off the ground, have better air circulation, and be much more accessible.

On the food topic, we’ve been harvesting some from the garden.  One of the most pleasant surprises was the condition of my (root-maggot-free) turnips and baby daikon:

We ate those tonight, actually.  Wifey did the turnips up with an Indian salted yogurt preparation that turned out deluxe.  The secret to my first blemish-free crop of these guys?  Row covers.  I may not like the looks of them, but you can’t argue with the results.

We’ve been eating lots of lettuce and a few other greens, but the leaf miners are totally harshing my mellow with my chard (and less so, the spinach).  I’ve tried neem and the blue sticky traps, but they seem to have little or no effect (the blue traps actually say that the flies will be attracted like iron filings “to a magnet.”)  Uh, hardly.  The only thing getting stuck to them is bugs that accidentally bump into them.

I’m hoping that they reduce as the season changes.  I have no reason to believe that, but again, the only certain answer is row covers, and… oh boy… my garden’s gonna look like a hospital ward full of poorly made beds.

We’re set to get a lot of fruit (except apples, oddly):

Peaches from both trees– the Autumn Rose shows a little leaf curl, but not too bad.  The OCF peach is clearly succumbing to bacterial canker, but is on its way to giving us a good last hurrah season of peaches.  I guess I’ll keep it on life support as long as it agrees to keep putting out the goods.

There’s lots of blueberries in the making.  I’ve lost count of how many bushes are out there… something like 25?

Even the fig is set to produce a few nice ones.  I’d like it even if it didn’t.  It’s really a beautiful tree.  The persimmon is like that, too.  Your average pear tree maybe isn’t that interesting.

Unfortunately, the mason bees seem to have run their course at this point.  I haven’t seen one in a couple of days.

I’m not thrilled with the yield this year.  I’d have expected them to almost fill the blocks, but they’re maybe half full, at best.  Not sure what to chalk that up to– other than the crappy weather that persisted through most of their season.

I did come to the conclusion, by looking at their nesting patterns, that they clearly prefer the holes at the top.  Next year, the blocks go horizontal and with a bigger overhang.

Luckily, the honey (and other) bees are still at it, so we’ll have a load of strawberries:

There are loads of all kinds of bees.  The most interesting, I think, are these itty-bitty ones.  They’re so small, and my vision so bad, that I can’t really describe them beyond the fact that they’re small (maybe 1/4″?, darkish, and clearly bees.)  Other than that, we’ve got our own honey bees and a pretty good crop of a variety of bumble bees.

OK, I’m officially too tired to write much else.  I’ll leave you with some gratuitous flower images including this year’s “check out a new flower” flower, the Zulu Prince Daisy:

Last year’s was the fernleaf fiddleneck, which luckily reseeded itself:

Wifey and the kids are starting to venture out… lured by the pretty, pretty colors…

The irises are dominating the scene in the flower beds right now:

The cuttings that I took from our neighbors have finally bloomed:

There’s three or four kinds including these, peach, and some blue and white ones.  Be fruitful and multiply.

These poppies are right up there for French Whore of the Flower World Status with those irises.

These little freesia keep coming up year after year… I have to remember to plant more.  They’re kinda nice.

Even my weedy residents are looking pretty good right now:

Every once in a while, I notice some mostly untended spot has shaped up nicely:

These are some cheapy salvias that I picked up at local grocery store.  Stuck them in here because I needed something to fill in around my new rock.  Seems to have worked out.  The blue and black salvia is particularly snazzy, I think:

Um… how about the leaf on this fuki plant?

You got your amazing sage:

Yer lavenders:

These little cosmidium are growing in a pot on the deck.  So nice.

And… this… which… I’m so tired, I can’t remember the name of…

That’s a good sign that I should stop.

It’s… uh…

Oh man…

Yeah, definitely time for bed.