Mid-June Maintenance

It's been hard to work in the garden for the past few weeks.  We've had sporadic rains, making the soil too wet to work.  Yesterday afternoon, I was finally able to do some maintenance: tilled the grassy middles, sprayed for bugs and blight, used the hoe where the big tiller would not go.

We ate our first ripe tomato yesterday.  It came from a potted patio plant, which already had a little green tomato on it when I bought it.  The plants in the garden are pretty far from having ripe tomatoes, but they are coming along nicely.

The Grandson's tiger eye beans are beginning to bloom. 

We'll be eating squash and zucchini by the weekend.

The pepper plants are going nuts making peppers.  This seems odd to me, as the pepper plants don't generally kick into gear in our garden until later in the season.  I hope they don't poop out before the tomatoes get ripe so that I can use them in salsa.

Blight Control

Today, I fired the first round - or so I thought - in the battle with blight.  Doused the tomatoes with fungicide, put down some landscape fabric around them, and snipped off any leaves that were touching the ground or even thinking about touching the ground.  I only thought that I was firing the first round because I had not closely examined the plants; I thought I was making a pre-emptive strike; in truth, the blight was one step ahead of me.  Some of those lower leaves that I cut off were already looking yellow and sickly.  It's a good thing I struck when I did. 

Watch it rain tonight or tomorrow and wash off the fungicide.  :-\

Re-Bean

Very few of the beans I planted on 5/16 actually came up.  Maybe I planted them too deep.  Maybe the moon wasn't right.  Who knows?  In any case, I re-planted today.  The purple hull peas need re-planting, too, but I'm out of seeds at the moment.

The squash and zucchini seeds sprouted nicely, as did the cucumbers.

Tomatoes and peppers growing nicely.  Some of the peppers even have peppers big enough to eat.  Go, peppers!

Memorial Day Check-In

According to the Facebook tag, it was on April 7 that the Grandson and I planted some tomato seeds in those cool little expand-o peat pellets.  Of the 25 (or so) seeds we planted, only about 10 sprouted.  Today, I planted them in the garden.  I should've waited to let him help me plant them.  Maybe I'll put him in charge of their care. 

The rest of the garden is coming along so-so.  The first planting happened 10 days ago.  The seeds are starting to come up, but not as thickly as I would like.  It has rained several times since the seeds went in the ground, which compacted the dirt on top of the seeds.  Now, the soil has a crust, with a rupture down the center of each row where the seeds are trying to poke through.  I hope the rest of them make it; otherwise, I'll have to re-plant.

The SkeeterVac is humming along nicely.  We turned it on a week ago today, and I was worried that since we replaced the standard regulator with one made for gas grills we'd burn too much gas.  The tanks usually last for 14 days.  If this one runs out much sooner than that, I'll order the "official" one.  It seems to be catching bugs about like normal.  I wish it had caught the one that bit me above the eyebrow a couple of days ago.  It raised a monstrous knot on my head, and turned my eyelid an alarming shade of fuschia.

SkeeterVac Review - Year 3

I was bitten by mosquitoes in the yard last week, and decided it was time to fire up the SkeeterVac.  We put on a new propane bottle and did the lighting routine.  We could hear the igniter clicking, but the machine wouldn't start.  I went online to the SkeeterVac "troubleshooting" page, performed all of the suggested remedies, still nothing.  The Husband took the fuel filter out of the gas line, and it looked rusted, so we ordered a new one.  It came in the mail at the end of the week.  We installed it and did the lighting routine again.  Still nothing.

I called the SkeeterVac hotline and spoke to a nice lady who gave me some other suggestions.  One suggestion was that we turn the gas knob only 1/2 a turn (as opposed to 2 full turns per the instruction manual).  Tried that.  Nothing.  The lady said maybe our "regulator" was bad, or maybe the gas tank, itself, was bad.  The Husband tried the gas tank with a different gas appliance, and it worked fine, but we could not test the regulator, as it would not fit the other appliance. 

We found a "How to Fix your SkeeterVac" video on YouTube that showed how to disassemble the unit and clean the various valves.  We tried all those tricks.  Still nothing.  Okay, so maybe the regulator is bad. 

We went to the hardware store and bought a regulator meant for gas grills.  The opening in this new gas line was bigger than the opening in the old one, and when I dropped the fuel filter into the opening, it went right down the tube!  We shook it out, connected the hose without the filter, and the machine fired right up.

Probably I will order an "official" regulator this week, as I suspect the machine is using too much gas. 

At Last....

(You know the tune.)

Aaaat laaaaast, my love has come along
With a tractor and some disk blades.
Now I can sing my garden song.

Eggplaaaaaant, squash, zucchini, too.
Tomatoes and bell peppers.
Bush beans from lakes of blue.

(Ok, ok...yes, enough.)

Seriously, The Husband disked the garden yesterday, and I went at it with the tiller this afternoon.  Tilled up 7 rows.  Nearly killed me.  But there's a threat of rain tonight, and I wanted to get the plants in the ground while it's dry enough.

All that stuff you saw above, plus some carrots, went in the ground today.  And I still have lots more room.  If it doesn't rain, tomorrow I'll plant some tiger eye beans that my grandson picked out of the seed catalog (no idea what they'll be like) and some cucumbers. 

(Note to self:  yes, you put down fertilizer in the rows you planted.)

Good Intentions

This post is related to gardening only because it started with a warm, sunny day....

On warm, sunny days, I like to drive with the top down on my Jeep.  When I do, I like to wear a hat to keep my big nose from sunburning.  When I wear a hat, I like to tie a scarf around it to keep it from blowing off my head.  I have (had) several scarves, but on this particular warm, sunny day - the first top-down day - I could not find a single one, and I drove without a hat.

A good hat scarf is hard to find.  The scarves in the stores are usually either too wide, too long, or too short to tie around a hat.  And so as I drove to work that day, I thought about making scarves, maybe even hand-painted scarves.  That evening, I went online and ordered a couple of yards each of chiffon, georgette, and organza ($60).  The next day, I bought fabric paint and brushes ($25).  Two days after that, I bought permanent markers ($18).  By the time the fabric arrived, I'd done some sketching and formulated a plan, and I was itching to get to work.  I cut a 6"-wide strip of white chiffon and sat down to practice.

Sadly, my brain can conceive of things that my hand can't produce.  The design I'd sketched looked amateurish.  The paint ran into the "channels" of the weave, making everything look slightly out of focus.  I switched to the markers.  The ink didn't run, but the colors were wrong.  I formulated a new plan that coincided with the marker colors at hand - peacock feathers instead of wispy fern leaves. 

Imagine my excitement when I saw that the new plan was actually going to work!  I cut a new piece of chiffon and started on the "real" scarf.  It turned out okayyy, but the inked peacock feathers lacked the irridescence of real peacock feathers.  I pondered ways to up the "wow factor."  Among my art supplies, I found a metallic gold marker and thought, "That's IT!"  A few wispy swipes of gold on the feathers would set them off perfectly.  But the hand (and the marker) failed the brain again, and I ended up with big blobs of gold that muddied up the feathers and robbed them of their wispy aspect.  *sigh*

Ok.  New plan.  Embroidery, not paint or markers. 

I spent two hours yesterday afternoon digitizing a morning glory design.  Spent another hour trying to get that wispy strip of chiffon to stick smoothly to a strip of self-stick fabric stabilizer (imagine trying to stick a length of toilet paper to shelf paper and you'll have the idea).  Finally got the fabric hooped for the embroidery machine, turned on the machine, and...nothing.  The machine gave me a message: "Raise the Presser Foot," but it was already raised.  It would sew without the embroidery unit, but would not embroider.  I could hear something rattling inside the machine.  I took off the cover to have a look.  Sure enough, a little metal gizmo had come loose.  In the process of re-installing the little gizmo, I knocked a wire loose from another gizmo.  Now, I'm going to have to take the machine to the shop.  This will cost me at least $150.

Thinking back to that warm, sunny day in the Jeep, if anybody had suggested that I should spend almost $250 on a scarf to tie around my hat, I would have accused them of having gone off the deep end. 

That is all.