Yes, it’s crappy!

Not much going on.

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:08:06 -0700

Unfortunately, not much going on other than just keeping things alive. Tomorrow we’ll be getting another Trellis up and get some transplants in the ground. We’re getting sick of trying to keep these scraggly tomatoes and peppers alive in the cups so we’re just gonna throw caution to the wind and toss em in the ground. Toms Garden: Throwing shit in the ground since 2008 to see if it grows!

Here’s a shot of the current set of tomatoes/peppers that need to go in. This was actually few days ago and some of these have died off. Hopefully they’ll survive a little better once in the ground and getting nutrients.

-Tom H.

Corn!

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:05:03 -0700

Few days ago we planted corn all over Bed 1. 1 Foot centers, 4 across, 14 feet worth of corn. Today, almost the entire bed is covered with little seedlings. We’re pretty excited. It looks like of all the plants, only about 5 didn’t sprout, we’ll reseed in a couple days those patches so that we have full-coverage across the whole bed.

We’ll also be interplanting some Okra and Tomatoes in between the corn. Hoping that the corn will help shade the okra/tomatoes. Kind of an experiment but we’ll see how it goes. You can see the two Okra seeds I planted popping up here.

Jennifer also worked on bottling some tomato sauce. She picked up 60 lbs of tomatoes from Bountiful Baskets this last Saturday for about $0.50 a lb. Today was the first time they were starting to get softer.

She busted out the applesauce machine, ground them up:

And then forgot to watch the boiling tomatoes till they overflowed :-)

I’m trying my hand at keeping the planting beds setup in Excel, so here’s my Bed 1 Plantings from my spreadsheet file.

-Tom H.

Project Day

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:21:35 -0700

Well today I got a few projects done that I’ve been meaning to get to: First off was routing the runoff from the Air Conditioner to a bucket. For the longest time it was just running down our roof. Finally got that moved toward the garden area but the drops had to free-fall to the container below. I finally bought some pvc from the home center and got it looking a lot neater and now it drips directly into the water container we are using. I’m hoping this will be replaced by a better 55 gallon drum eventually but for now I’m happy that we’re catching 100% of the 2-3 gallons of water that our AC makes each day. The block of wood is there to push it out from the wall for now.

Then I started in on the Trellis: I picked up 2X3’s from Home Depot yesterday along with some hinges. The rungs on the ladder-style trellis are made from scrap 1X3’s I had lying around the backyard as well as ripping some old siding we had leftover from the addition.

After I finished ripping down the siding I attached the rungs with screws:

And ripped off the sides so it looked a little more tidy. I tried to salvage some rungs from an old pallet I found in the alley but the nails they used to put the wood together proved to be too much. I ended up destroying more of the pallet than I was able to use. Oh well, I guess I’ll save pallets for other things, like chicken coop or something. Here I am about to attack the pallet, looks like a scene from Duke Nukem. Just need a grenade launcher and God-mode command and I’ll be set!

I put up the trellis and hung the old sheet on it to help protect the seedlings from the intense afternoon desert sun. I think given the rungs and the partial shade they’ll be getting from now on I might be able to get away with taking the sheet away entirely. I’ll see.

Lastly, we have CORN! That’s right! itty-bitty corn plants just started to poke through the soil in the back half of this bed today. We literally filled the rest of the bed with corn spaced 1 foot apart, so approximately 70 seeds. I see about 12 of them just poking out of the soil right now, so hopefully we’ll get more in the next few days. Big question I’m wondering right now is should I bother shading them or will corn be able to handle the heat of the sun as long as they have plenty of water? Everything else growing right now seems to not suffer from the sun so I’m inclined to just leave them open and see how it goes. I think we got corn in early enough that if they take a turn for the worse we should be able to either get shade over them or re-plant.

-Tom H.
106.9 and 83.7 today.

Keeping on Keeping on.

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 21:55:18 -0700

With the heat lately and no hope for rain that keeps passing us by in the valley, we’re just spending our days trying to keep seedlings alive. Corn was planted on the 24th directly into Bed 1. We’re hand watering it 3-4 times a day trying to keep the soil evenly moist. We’ll be working this weekend on getting some sort of shade cloth system up over that section to help reduce the amount of heat on the ground and hopefully reduce evaporation.

Today I hit Home Depot to buy up some materials for an A-frame style Trellis system. I saw someone make this on the net and thought it was a pretty decent/modular system I’ll be able to utilize scrap wood I have lying around the backyard. I picked up 4 2X3’s, some hinges and I’ll work on putting the system together tomorrow.

Below are the current set of seedlings we have. of the 25 tomatoes that we planted, only 15 managed to survive the first couple weeks, now we’re down to 8. We’re really nervous about getting them out into the soil right now cause of the heat, maybe once the shade cloth system it put up we’ll feel like we can try it. We’ll keep this blog updated on the progress.

High of 107.1, low of 82.2 today.

-Tom H.

Rain Hasn’t been nice.

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:54:22 -0700

For the last two days the valley has gotten rain but each storm has passed to the north of our house :( We recently finished double digging Bed #1. That was a LOT of work, and now the top is all covered with dirt clods, we amended the soil and dug to a depth of about 2 feet. We’re hoping that’ll help the plants a lot over the next few growing seasons.

As you can see in the above picture, we have a sheet covering our melon/zucchini/squash/pumpkins. We put 2-3 of each type in there, now I have to figure out what I’m going to do for an arbor. The rest of the bed was just planted with Corn. We spaced them all about 1 foot apart all the way down the bed. We’re trying to keep it evenly moist till the sprouts pop up but we’re having a problem with the heat. I’m thinking shade cloth but I’ll need to figure out a cheap and easy way to get the cloth up. I’m thinking pvc hoops, but that’ll be my project for this weekend.

In other news the sunflowers are all starting to fall over now that they’ve flowered and are producing seeds. We probably should have made some kind of structure to hold them up, but for now the kids are having fun with the sunflowers at eye level instead of 10 feet off the ground.

at 1:30 pm today it’s already 104 degrees. We’ve been putting the sheet over the seedlings everyday around 1 pm so they got all morning’s sunlight.

-Tom H.

Stuff in the ground

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:54:51 -0700

Well it’s time once again to get more seedlings into the ground. Today we planted Squash, Zucchini, and Pumpkins! The first three closest and mid-left are Squash, to middle-right are Zucchini, and Pumpkins rough out the back section of what we planted.

With all the rain it was hard to double dig, I tired out after 4 rows, but we did get the other section smoothed out (sans rake, need to buy a new one since I think our last one got stolen). We’ll be covering with a sheet (we’re worried about the heat while we’re gone) while we’re on vacation for 4 days and I’ll get some trellis built when we get back so they have something to grow on.

High of 98.1, low of 77 today.

-Tom H.

More Rain!

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 21:47:07 -0700

We got a lot more rain today, torrential downpour is more like it! The kids and I ran around the backyard collecting rainwater (no gutters yet) and carting it to the garden when it’ll be put to better use than right up against the house. We’re going to be inundated with weeds in the next two weeks. Here you can see our ghetto rainwater collection system hard at work. Our current rainwater distribution system (the kids) end up losing about half of the water while transporting it to the garden but at least they have fun!

I attended a class on removing Bermuda grass on Saturday put on but the Phoenix Permaculture Guild. Hopefully I’ll be able to put my newfound knowledge to good use getting rid of those weeds that will be rearing their ugly heads soon enough!

High of 103.5 and low of 75.6, it’s been a pretty moderate day, I did try to get out this morning and keep working on one of the beds but it was getting pretty damn hot and there was no breeze whatsoever so I gave up to wait till tonight. Only, with the rain, I can’t dig the bed, so that’ll have to wait till tomorrow night I guess! We’re hoping to have the next round of squash and pumpkins in the ground before we head off on our reunion on Wednesday.

-Tom H.

Spiders!

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:14:19 -0700

This is the first time we’ve seen black widows in the valley. A friend of ours was surprised this was the first time, he says they are very common during the summertime here. We killed em both and plan on deep-cleaning the porch off this weekend to make sure they don’t have places to hang out where our kids normally get shade.

Now that all the grandparents are worried, let’s move on to flowers! We had our first Sunflower pop out yesterday, took some pictures of that, and you can see the busy bees already taking a liking to our flower!

We also took a shot of the Okra flower:

And the great protector of our garden: Perl! She likes hanging out in the mornings in the garden, and has killed off more plants by sitting on them than we have from neglect I think.

It’s raining today!

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:32:31 -0700

Of all the reasons to live in the Valley of the Sun, Monsoon season is probably the #1 event of the year that I look forward to. After enduring the past two months of sweltering hell, the sweet breath of rain filling my lungs keeps me willing to stay here one more year.

So I don’t have a good photo of it, but it’s been relatively cool all day, high of 102.2, with fairly high humidity for the valley, 66% right now with the rain. As I write this is the low for the day (9 pm) of 77.2!

Earlier today I kept working on double digging bed #1, this time from the other side. We plan on planting some pumpkins there that with any luck will be ready for halloween, and since those plants, shown below are the biggest we have, they better get in the ground soon! You can see them in the middle, slightly to the right.

The sunflowers are getting tall! Jennifer and I swapped taking pictures of each other next to them, I’ll show hers cause she’s so much shorter :-) Well, okay, I’ll show them both or else she’ll end up killing me.

We fried up our first batch of Okra today, wish it was more prolific like we had a few years ago, but we have more ready to go into the ground so hopefully we’ll still have more yummy Okra later this season.

Picture of our double digging: I managed to get about 5 rows in before I couldn’t lift the fork anymore, damn desert clay soil! At least I’m getting a good workout! We’re amending with some composted mulch for organic matter in the bottom of the first trench, as well as some gypsum to help combat the dreaded dirt clods! Then working that into the bottom trench with the fork,
Well, that’s enough for today, we’ll get working on more digging tomorrow, hopefully it’ll be plenty soft from the rains and I’ll be able to finish off the rest of the bed. Well, one can always hope!

-Tom H.

Melons!

Tue, 8 Jul 2008 22:05:35 -0700

And boy do we have a hell of a lot of them! I count 6 muskmelons, 5 watermelons, and 2 unidentified melons, most likely honeydew. 4 of those should be ready in the week.

One of which I had to pull today due to cracking.

I also pulled out all the old drip irrigation and redid it into rows configuration. You see when Jennifer planted stuff, she didn’t follow the planting beds from a couple years back when we had our last garden. She ended up planting some melons in the pathway and they kinda took over everything. We haven’t worried about it too much mainly cause they’re shading the ground and holding moisture there, so I’m not complaining too much, but it is hard to get to things. We have to step on the melons to get to the okra which is smack dab in the middle of the garden. We’ll get it fixed next planting season though.

Speaking of getting ready for next season, I started double digging and amending Bed #1 today, starting with the back, where the tomatoes will be. All 15 tomatoes assuming all our seedlings survive till then! I don’t have any pictures cause the camera battery died and I don’t have the charger for it since my wife is out of town, but I’ll get some soon. I can see I’ll be getting quite the workout for it too. All that back breaking labor trying to dig up soggy clay is going to kill me, but in a good way I hope.

I’m concerned a little bit about the sunflowers, they seem to have ant infestation problems.

You can see the damage they’ve done to the leaves here:
I know there are remedies for the ants, but I think for now I’m just gonna see how the plants do with them. for the most part they look really healthy other than a few of their leaves looking a little worn

High of 110.1, low of 81.7 today.

-Tom