Tag Archive: garden


HOT as FUCK!

A guy I follow on Twitter said “I’ve given up on looking at the temperature and just look at a piece of paper that says “Hot as FUCK”. I really should just do this. I watch the weather every morning. Why? I don’t know. Maybe I just want to be depressed? My front and back yard are a mix of brilliant green, sad looking green, and dead. It’s only green because I have trees. I’m watering my trees. My grass can fend for itself.

My poor little garden boxes? Yeah. It’s just too hot and it takes too much water during an “exceptional” drought. The sunflowers looked crappy even in full bloom, I planted two rounds of peas and they never grew taller than 4 inches before dying a crispy death, cucumbers are just a lost cause. Mint is okay and tomatoes are okay. But I don’t think it’s worth trying to keep it all watered every day in conditions like this. So, with my heart heavy, I have decided to let all this shit die. I’m yanking out the sunflowers today and putting a tarp over it so the cats can stop using it as a goddamn litterbox. Why are they using it as a litterbox you ask? Because I erected a quickie fence (stapled mesh around the box) around the other one. This was apparently too much effort for a cat to jump over or even squeeze through the cat wide gap to shit in their favorite place. So now they use the sunflower box. And they don’t even bother to cover it up. Goddamn outdoor cats.

So, yeah. It’s hot. There are cracks in my yard deep and wide enough to lose a kid in. It’s been stupid hot for a coupe of months now. It was hot (hotter than average) since MARCH. We haven’t had a good long spell of rain since OCTOBER OF 2010.

And to think we still have another 2 months of this shit.

GARDEN!

We started 3 square foot gardens: one 4×4 for veggies, one 2×8 for sunflowers and another 2×8 for strawberries. Well. That’s what was supposed to happen. Oh, we have the 4×4 veggies and the 2×8 sunflowers. The berries and mint? er, no. I made the mistake of buying strawberry plants from Home Depot. The kind in a bag. There was one viable plant out of 20. Fuck. That. Then someone’s cat kept digging in the damn box and killed anything trying to sprout until I sprayed cat repellent. Ugh. So, there is now one strawberry plant, two mint plants (bought from Red Barn Nursery), an onion plant, dill, and…um…other stuff I can’t remember. Oh there’s markers. written with Sharpie…on wood. *sigh* I am not real bright sometimes. I attempted to plant something called Butterfly Weed in an attempt to attract butterflies. It never sprouted. 🙁

Anyway, moving on….in the sunflower box, we have 2 types: Bashful and Teddy Bear.

[singlepic id=23 w=320 h=240 float=left]  [singlepic id=39 w=320 h=240 float=left]

Now. The packet said that the teddies would get to be about 2 feet tall. No prob. The Bashfuls maybe 3 feet. Oh how they lie.

The veggie box…I have harvest green beans twice now. They taste great. The lettuce is tall and strong and ready for eating once I figure out how to harvest it. The herbs are looking pretty nice. The broccoli got eaten by insects before I even realized it sprouted. Fuck. The cucumbers….have you ever been afraid of a plant? I went out to find that these guys had crawled (?) over to strangle the marigolds and beat out my beans. The hell? It also found it’s way out of the cage that @aelerelean built. Out of it. Yes. It found the 2 inch gap between the lid and the wall. I have cut it down 5 times. This morning it was a good 5 inches outside the gap. *sigh*

Here’s the gallery of plants:

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AeroGarden Crop pt. 2

It failed. Failed miserably. The plants grew like teenagers of NBA players taking growth hormones but something went wrong. They started to die. One by one. Like they were being pinched or chewed on. I own no cat and Tico is not that malicious or hungry. When I dumped the crop I figured out wat happened. Well, what I think happened. They included a flexible plastic coated wire to support the plants. You jam it in the little pod thing and the plants are supposed to grow on it. Well the part you jam into the pod still as the wire exposed. And it rusts. Rust + Plant = Dead Plants. Grrrr. So, yeah, no snow peas for me.