What I Did On my Weekend/Vacation

[aldersprig]

I haven’t done one of these in a while, but it’s the season to get back into them, I suppose: What I Did on my Summer Vacation Weekend.

Although in this case, it’s a bit of vacation, too, since I started with taking Wednesday and Thursday off, worked Friday, and then took the weekend.

So this extended weekend was all about gardening — or, more accurately, gardening prep. We went two two nurseries, pulled out all our nice ceramic pots to outline the edge of the “patio”, and then went to a plant sale at the local high school.

(Our “patio” is a slab of concrete filling in the space made by an L in house construction. It’s amazing how much MORE patio-like it looks with the addition of a line of pretty pots (Ollie’s Discount Outlet; one’s a little rhomboid, one has a flaw in the glazing, but they cost for five of them what one would cost non-seconds) does to make it look like an intentional outdoor space. Add in the nice plastic-decking-wood deck chairs and table we got last year and it’s a proper patio.)

We have something like six tomato plants, a pepper plant, seed potatoes, a variety of herbs, including our constants, flat-leaf parsley and columnar basil, eggplants (one small and white, the other tiny and orange), and crookneck, butternut, and zucchini squashes. We also got a couple landscaping plants, which kind of feels like growing up, or at least like paying attention to our yard.

(There are so many icky houses on my commute - cars on blocks in the yard, junk in the yard, no mowing - that I consciously DON’T want to be one of them. Not that I think T. would ever stand for that sort of mess.)

So once we GOT all those plants, then we had to address the issue of the garden beds.

If you look at a map of NY, you can see where the glaciers dug these long trenches (Finger Lakes) and then… stopped.

Where they stopped, they left all their gravel. Which is just about in my side yard.

So we have 8 4’x6’ raised beds (nothing longer than 6’ locust boards easily fits in my Yaris, sigh). But I screwed them together a few years back, and I didn’t use long enough screws. More Sigh.

Which means that a few of them have started to look more like \_/ than |_|.

So we pulled off those sides, shoveled the dirt away from the side, drilled holes, inserted bolts with big washers, and bolted them back together.

We can has planting now?

Not yet.

So, first, we have to loosen the soil, add some more soil (peat, compost, coffee grounds, ground eggshells, ashes), then we have to lay down weedcloth, cut some holes in it.

THEN we can has planting.

As of this posting, I’ve got 5 tomatoes (4 plum tomatoes, 1 black cherry) and one eggplant (“ghostbuster”) in. And tonight’s the next bed over.

And THEN we have to deal with the walking onions...

Comments

[ranunculus]

Yay Garden!
Maybe a pic?

[aldersprig]

I want to get a pic of the nuts that is the walking onions tonight~. The beds themselves are never very photogenic.

[kelkyag]

<garden envy>

Yes, walking onion pictures, please!

[aldersprig]

This is the first year in a while we’ve done this much this fast. I’m pleased!

[clare_dragonfly]

Onions can walk?

[sauergeek]

They can. Sufficiently enthusiastic ones will convince you they can run, too.

[aldersprig]

Yep! They definitely can.

[aldersprig]

These things:
http://www.egyptianwalkingonion.com/
The top of their heads with the little cthulu onions drops down and those cthulu onions make more onions…

[clare_dragonfly]

Cool!

[aldersprig]

They’re hella invasive, but kind of fun. Also tasty.

[sauergeek]

There's also walking garlic that works the same way. The bulblets are tiny and hard to peel, but they're otherwise just as good garlic as the underground bulb. I've also tried chopping up and stir-frying the stems, which is a milder flavor.

[aldersprig]

That sounds really cool! We use the stems of walking onions like green onions.