The nice thing about the cage garden is that I have places overhead to tie things to. It’s easy for me to make a trellis out of some spare string or wire and an eye bolt or two. As a result, I’m training the Krim up the side of wires / string strung from the top of it’s cage up to the ‘roof’ of the garden, sort of like the giant tomato plant at EPCOT.

The strings and wire are tied to the top of the tomato cage.

The Krim’s now about five feet tall. It’s growing almost visibly. And it’s set it’s first fruit! I was having lots of problems with it, but then I realized that it liked a lot more water than everything else seemed to want. After changing the way I watered (multiple short waterings with the soaker hose), I managed to get it, the cucumbers, and the Kentucky Wonder pole beans to grow profusely, even if the peppers and Sweet 100’s are complaining a bit about being overwatered. Next year, I’ll know what to plant where.

First fruit on the Krim

A wise man once advised me not to teach others to fish, but to sell them a method for fishing and charge royalties. In a similar spirit of laziness, I have found a new low. I buried some old dog food and a few other things that had gone bad in the bottom of the compost pile tonight, and when I went out to let Eo and Henry in after their evening potty break, I found that Eowyn had jumped into the compost bin and had turned it completely in search of the good, smelly stuff she KNEW was in there.

Every two weeks now, I guess I just need to arrange for something to go bad!

The dirt level settled by over seven inches.

In one area of the bed, I still have onions growing from sets. They’re hopefully getting towards the end of their season, but they’re still growing (and the occasional flower, whereupon I harvest the onion) so I don’t want to pull them just yet. However, the new bed level would be more than six inches higher than their current height!

Solution: I put in a divider. It rests on the top of the walkway and the edge of the garden, and let me fill one area back up without having to fill the onions back up.

Divider and onions are on the right; a 2nd divider with kohlrabi is on the left.

Where the divider meets the edge of the garden

Where the divider rests on the walkway.

The end result is a much happier, fuller garden with much better dirt (lots of store-bought (unfortunately) compost, as mine isn’t ready yet, and manure).

Mostly filled back up...

You may have noted the lack of ’square foot’ dividers in the new areas … I took them out since they were getting in the way a lot. Frankly, the irrigation system (drip hoses) and my mind provide enough of a ‘grid’ for me… I think the important part of the square foot system is the message to interplant things with different heights but similar needs, and I’m hip and cool and smart enough to go gridless.

And I don’t use Mel’s Mix either because it’s got so much peat moss in it. So there! Hppbt!

My glowing review of my favorite gardening tool is quoted over at North Coast Gardening. I love my BigGrip knife. It’s been used and abused for three years now, and looks much the worse for wear. I don’t think I could say enough good things about how easy it makes pulling weeds in the hard clay soil here, how well it fits my hand, and how useful it is for everything from pulling giant curled dock roots to cutting St. Augustine runners.

Constant Companion

The referenced forum post is over here, wherein I persuaded at least one other person to buy one. I did find a sheath for mine too, but I’m not sure what it’s from. Possibly a MagLite flashlight?

Regardless of the tools I use, weeding is currently my busiest activity. I have all kinds of good/bad grasses and other plants growing themselves in the yard right now. I spent all day sunday weeding (and ended up with one heck of a sunburn) and I still could spend another weekend, easily, in the backyard just on the curled dock alone.

In other news, I harvested my first Kohlrabi tonight. It seems that Kohlrabi is a bit more heat-tolerant than the other brassica family members, and I will *hopefully* get a few more to bulb in the next week or three without them becoming too bitter. It was sweet with some added salt, but smaller than the ones you get at the grocery store. I need to look up a source of the “gigantic” cultivar seed for this fall…

As it’s rained and I’ve watered it and things grow up in the raised bed, the settling is getting to the point where it could be deemed “significant”. In fact, in some places, the rasied bed has settled by over six inches. The structure’s only 20 inches deep, so losing six of twenty inches to either leach, plant absorption, or whatever is giving me a “!!!” reaction.

The top board is a 2x4.

As I rotate crops in the next few weeks (getting rid of the cauliflower that hasn’t headed, for instance) I’ll be pulling the bark dust out for the most part, and working a bit of manure/hummus mix from the garden center and peat moss into the soil, and it’ll be mounded all the way back to the top of the pile!

The first victim was a Sweet 100 seedling that I had sitting around; future victims will include other tomato seedlings, zucchini and maybe even beans…

Crossbeams Installed

As you can see, I’ve already hung baskets of annuals. My great-grandmother taught my mother that planting annuals near your vegetable gardens is necessary to attract pollinating insects so that you get fruit to set.

Hello, Petunia!

The next step, which I started on tonight, is to hang some tomatoes and other plants in upside down planters and see what happens. It’ll take me a few days/weeks to drink enough 2 liter bottles of soda…!

I wonder if it’d work with Zucchini?

Lunchlady Laaaaaaaand...

I finally found a supply of bird netting behind a fertilizer display at Lowe’s. Bird netting was a part of my original garden design due to the immense overpopulation of starlings, grackles, and other miscellaneous rats-with-wings-that-eat-your-garden that we have to contend with. They ate about half of my free gladiola and narcissus bulbs. They pecked a hole in and killed last year’s Super 100 plant … twice. They ate my squash. They… well, you get the idea.

Public Enemy #1

Once I managed to find it, a 14×14 roll was only $5.99, so I shelled out for it and strung it up last night using the last of the mason wire that I’d used to space out the square foot garden posts.

Nothin' but Net

Now why can’t I stop singing Adam Sandler’s “Lunch Lady Land?”

Side note: Great-grandmother Hrica was far before her time. As she harvested produce from her garden, she restored and enriched it by burying organic matter like plant waste, sticks, leaves, vegetable scraps, and eggshells in the dirt as she turned it. Funny how many of our “organic practices” have been practiced all along.

To modern backyard farmers who have really put some effort and study into their gardening practices (or stupid hacks like me that make mistakes until they finally do some research and figure it out), it’s obvious: Flowers attract bugs that pollinate, bugs that eat plants, and bugs that eat bugs.

My mom’s habitual list of practices are good ones.

Research what local bugs you have that pollinate (your state’s agricultural extension or your local Master Gardeners likely have a list along with what plants attract which bugs) and try to provide flowers they like plus a good habitat. In my area, we have a number of pollinators that become active in the early season, and lay eggs or nest in particular diameter holes bored in wood. I’ve placed a few blocks of wood with the right diameter holes in the top of my garden.

Alternate pollinators are sometimes far more efficient than the honeybees that we know and love. One species of green wasp here in Texas can pollinate 500 blossoms per hour, while most common species of honeybee are limited to twenty or so. Honeybees produce the happy side effect of honey, but you don’t want to rely on them … especially until scientists understand colony collapse disorder and figure out the cause and any workarounds.

Research the blooming seasons of your plants, and try to have ones blooming in every season. A good example is some of the local wildflowers I’m planting — their seeds should germinate this week, but I won’t see actual flowers for another 100 days after germination. That’s a long time! On the other hand, all of the Lupinus seeds should start blooming here fairly soon.

Place the plants in various places around your yard and garden, and not just at the edges. Some bugs will travel short distances, but some bugs will travel longer distances and hit every plant in between the two they’re really searching for.