Done for the year

Actually, the garden has been done for over a month now. All in all, I think we were very successful. Everything we planted grew and, aside from the smallish corn, was bountiful. Right now, the garden is back to being a patch if dirt and mud that is home to lots of G.I. Joe, Star Wars and other assorted action figures. A couple weeks ago, we got the hose out and Alex, Isaac and I had a muddy good time.

I don't know if this blog will return next year. The garden will for sure, but between work and work and writing and life... I think this journal may have reached its life expectancy. Thanks for reading and sharing our summer of growing.

Peace.

The Fruits of Labor

Wow, been awhile, but this is called the INCONSISTENT Gardner after all. In the preceding month+ our little patch has sprung forth many delicious goodies. Green beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, zucchini (my God, the zucchini), green peppers, and parsley have all been and continue to be harvested and enjoyed.

We've finally begun to reach a tipping point in terms of volume and Isaac took advantage by setting up his veggie stand. Within an hour, he made a sale - 3 zukes and a cuke for $1. Can't hardly beat that deal with a stick. (And no, he's not really cross-eyed, he's just a smart ass like his pops.) He was told to price everything $0.25 each, but took it upon himself to call our fare "organic" and charge $.50 each. Then he realized that our customer actually paid only $0.25 per veggie. He began to speak up, but I waved him off and said we were happy to have a customer at all. Then, this gentleman found a dollar bill lying on the sidewalk as he was leaving, and gave it to Isaac. There's probably some kind of karma thing at work there, if you believe in all that jazz.

The corn is coming. Soon, soon. We also have dozens of green tomatoes slowly changing color and the carrot experiment to check on. With such rocky soil, we weren't sure if they would grow with all the obstructions they're likely encountering on their way down.

I also added another fish - a death from our indoor penitentiary, also known as an aquarium. Don't worry, there was very little sadness. He deserved it.

Thieves and a Harvest

Good news and bad news to report today. First the good:

We have harvested the first offering from the garden. Lovely, aromatic, crisp romaine lettuce. I've never smelled lettuce before that had such a distinct scent, a bit sweet and oh so fresh. I can't wait to eat it.

Also, all five tomato plants are blooming and we have about a half dozen little green tomatoes coming along. We have our first bud on a pepper plant, the zucchini plants are huge and beginning to bud, the green beans are tall and budding and the corn is robust. We're not sure about the carrots, though. While their sprouts are big and green, Michele wondered if our horrbly rocky soil would block their southward growth. This week's rain and humid weather will likely have a huge effect on everything next week, though a couple corn stalks took the worst of the torrential rain yesterday morning.

Perhaps I'll use the fresh lettuce as a bed for a meal of fish, which brings us to the bad news...

We have suffered a security breach. Alex's scarecrow, Senior El Gato (as named by my sister, Sara) has come up missing. Blame has been cast toward neighborhood miscreants, out at night looking for something to fill their idle hours (idle hands and the Devil and such). I suspect something more sinister, though - revenge.

I shall double my vigilance to keep these creatures at bay lest they return for something more precious the next time. (Note to self: caution Michele against wearing white bathing suits.) Perhaps I'll exact a bit of revenge of my own. Anyone have a nearby lagoon I can pee in?

Something Wicked This Way Flops

I received this weekend, as a well-intentioned gift for our garden, a bucket of dead fish, courtesy of my sister, Sara, and her burgeoning brood, Nathanael and Cassidy. The fish were intended to be planted. No, dear reader, not to grow more fish as I initially mistook, but to be buried as fertilizer to assist in the abundant growth of our vegetation, a tradition, my elder sister assured me, dating back to the American Indians. As a history major (and apparent good student, though details remain sketchy), I took her at her word.

In preparation for this new gardening task, as I was not familiar with the proper way to prepare and bury dead fish in the ground, I placed the offering, bucket and all, into our chest freezer for a later date. With Tuesday's rain washing out the sporting contest I was scheduled to cover, I seized the opportunity to plant my fish, but first, like any good journalist, or gardener, or responsible home, pet, car, and child owner should always do, I turned to the InterNet for research. My findings were shocking.

Like a latter-day soothsayer bewaring me the Ides of March, the InterNet showed me a sinister world where fish are not our friends, or mere morsels of delicacy or even fertilizer, but rather a race poised to attack us at our weakest moment, when we least expect it. Long have we known of gilled creatures that prey on human flesh, but until now, these attacks have occured mainly in maritime settings.

However, led by fiends the likes of which many of us can hardly imagine, the day is coming when fish will take to the land and reap their revenge upon us. In this hour, it will be every man and his family for themselves. All the more reason to plant your garden now and prepare for the coming apocalypse. Therefore, I took this as an opportunity to prepare.

I retired to the yard with my bucket of frozen captives, an axe, my children armed with the camera, and the morbidly obese beagle to prepare the carcasses for internment in our yard. I will save the more faint of heart in the crowd the specifics, other than to note that within 10 minutes, my bucket was filled again with an assortment of thawing fish hunks. Holes were dug around a foot deep in three separate areas of the garden. Fish parts were tumbled in and covered over with soft, packed Earth. Each spot was marked with a pile of rocks. While I toiled, the obese beagle scoured the grass for any overlooked remnants of the axe-wielding carnage that I wrought. I would like to say that I took no pleasure in this gruesome task, but that would not be truthful.

You see, these desiccated interlopers from the sea have more than one purpose. As fertilizer for our garden, yes, but also to serve as a warning for the future invading hordes: Abandon hope, all ye (fish monsters) who enter.

Now I must go bathe said morbidly obese, and smelling awfully of fish, beagle.

Scarecrows reporting for duty

Meet Bob Lowbob the Scarecrow, one of two scarecrows we put up Saturday morning. Bob is Isaac's creation. We don't have any actual issues with crows yet, but we figured, what's a garden without a scarecrow or two? Bob looks pretty simple, but he was real enough to fool Daisy, the obese beagle in the background of this picture. Now that was funny.


The garden is a great conversation starter. We put a couple things to sell this morning, and the first thing potential customers mention is the garden and how cool it is to see it out front. One guy asked when the corn would be ready, then he asked me if I would be willing to sell my truck. I gave him a half-joking price of $2,000 cash in hand and he said he had to think about and would be back. I totally didn't expect that to happen.



With the amount of rain we've gotten and are currently getting as I write this, the corn is almost knee-high already and we're still 3 weeks from the 4th of July. Maybe I'll quit my job and turn the whole yard into a farm. Or maybe not.

Here's Alex's scarecrow. He is without a name and has since donned a sombrero. Feel free to suggest a moniker. We can even make it a contest, with the winner receiving an assorted bag of vegetable goodies, once they're ready. Leave your entry in the comments.

Critters & Rubberneckers

About a week ago, Michele and I went outside around 9 PM, and there he was. Puffy, white tail, perky ears, twitching nose. Nibbling away at the back row of corn. We knew we had to fence in the garden eventually, but now it was imperative.

We ran about 3 feet short of chicken wire. We made due with an empty flooring box. It's workng for now.

This morning, we discovered about half a dozen little holes in the dirt. I'm assuming moles. We have always had grubs in the yard, and we've seen either moles or shrews before. Not sure what to do about that yet. I suppose it's time to Google 'moles in the garden'.

Three new tomato plants were added. They're already budding and we've got a pepper plant beginning to bud as well. And look at those beans and corn.

Now that things are green and growing larger, we're getting comments and questions and odd looks from folks walking and driving by. One lady even hit her brakes, stopping in the middle of the street, and exclaimed, "Oh My Gosh! Look at that garden in the front yard! That's so cute!" She drove off laughing. I think it made her day.

Look at what last week's rain did to our garden. Boom goes the dynamite.

One of Michele's co-workers also drove by and later asked Michele, "Uh, is that corn? Growing in your front yard?" Why, yes. Yes it is. The bi-color is going nuts, but the yellow corn stalks must have been a favorite of our bunny buddies because they look a little decimated. Hopefully, they'll come back.

You can clearly see which corn stalks Peter Cottontail was snacking on. Silly wabbit.

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One final note on the flooring install. Should you ever decide to tackle this DIY project, let me pass along a couple tips.

1. Don't buy knee pads. They save your knee caps, but the straps dig into the soft, fleshy area behind your knees. My solution: I folded up an empty cardboard flooring box then wrapped it with the foam padding placed between the rows of boards in said box. Cost: a few pieces of tape.

2. When possible, the hell with Big Box stores. If you have a local store near you, and they are increasingly rare, please frequent that establishment. I found everything I needed, including some advice, at Hill's True Value Hardware on 933 North. They didn't have things like underlayment, but I'm guessing everything else I got at Menards, I would have found at Hill's. What I did get from Hill's was a new, fine-tooth blade for my miter saw, an invaluable hand-held T-square and several smaller items. The best part about Hill's - they're 2 minutes away and as soon as you walk in the door, someone asks what you're looking for, then (gasp!) knows exactly where you can find it in the store and will take you right to it. Try getting that kind of service from Johnny the snot-nosed teen at Menards.

3. If, like me, you have never used a pneumatic hardwood nailer, sacrifice a board or two and practice a few times with it. Make sure the shoe is adjusted properly and if you do make a miss-fire and shoot a nail into the top of the board instead of the tongue (and you will, believe me), get used to pulling that board out and fixing the mistake. By the second day of using the nailer, I got it down to where I had no problems, but you definitely have to get a feel for it.

At long last, completion

Well, not in the sense that it's "all done" but for all intents and purposes (as well as intensive purposes), the floor, she is down. A few choice shots:

There is still work to be done. The last few boards in the dining room by the back door have to go in, one more row in the hallway that will have to be ripped on the table saw, the rest of the trim work around the stairs, and the quarter round trim (which I haven't even purchased yet) around the entire perimeter.

In all, it was both a rewarding and exhausting experience. Would I do it again? Maybe in a smaller room that is square. The intensive lay down lasted four days, mainly due to the measuring and cutting and adjusting I did around the stairs. But I took my time and I think it shows.

The most amazing part of this job was, despite my wavering walls and my typical inability to get things just right, my boards were perfectly straight all the way across. I varied between 1/4" and 1/8" all the way down the far wall, which I could clearly see was not straight. The house ain't plumb, but my floor sure is, and that is truly amazing to me. Our only problem now is a battle between dark flooring and little white dog hairs. I plan on purchasing stock in the company that makes Swiffer.

This concludes the flooring interlude. Now back to regular programming. I'll get a shot of the garden soon, now encased within chicken wire walls and thriving.