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Oh Look, Another Post About Gardening

Yeah, well, that’s what we’re doing these days.

Managed half the rose garden reclamation yesterday, along with finishing the front stone borders. Managed to piss off my left knee adequately that nearly every step today includes nausea-inducing pain. Whee. 

We’d severely neglected the roses for over half a year, mainly due to Husband’s diabetes, and it was a jungle of weeds, overgrown plants (one cane off the Mr. Lincoln was taller than Husband’s 6 feet), and crazy-scary suckers. Husband kicked ass and got all the weeds out, and discovered the cypress vine coming back. Last year it climbed the gutter downspout and generally made opening/closing the screen door a major trial. This year we have that spiral thing for it to climb, and hopefully it can grab the screen itself. It’d be nice for it to go up on top of the enclosure.

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We’re using eucalyptus chips this year, hoping the natural oils in the wood will help deter some of the billions of bugs we have to deal with down here. The roses don’t care one way or the other as long as they get their blood meal, bone meal and triple super phosphate. Sick, eh.

Onward…

Out front, I added a Gladiolius to the plantings.

 

Container gardening update. The tomatoes are doing well, except for that pesky blossom-end rot thing. We lost almost the entire first crop of the cream sausage tomato to this crap…cannot find the calcium chloride spray anywhere locally. Going to try one last place then sodding ordering it off the ‘net.

The San Marzano plants are booking right along, they should do much better in the fruiting department since they never got miracle-growed during their growth. Lemme explain… If tomatoes grow too fast due to heavy-nitrogen feeding, such as what you get with Miracle Grow (yes, even the tomato-specific food), then they will be calcium deficient, which will result in the aforementioned blossom-end rot. So, don’t use Miracle Grow on the tomatoes, be sure to lime them about once a month, and supplement with dolomite and calcium chloride spray.

For the melons/gourds we’re growing, I put down this (so far) excellent dirt-colored landscape fabric around the bougainvillea, so the vines can run down that hill a bit. They’re happy with the arrangement thusfar…

The future-pickles, onions and carrots are doing well. And the Meyer lemon tree is covered, COVERED I SAY, in fruit.

In the planting boxes, seven of the nine planted Sugar Baby watermelons have sprouted. And I truly expect the other two to pop up any time now, just to be sure we’re overrun by little 8lb melons all summer.

Still waiting on peppers. Had to go ahead and buy the two I nom most, red bell and poblano. Gotta have priorities.

The lemon cukes have sprouted. This is an odd duck, looks like a tomato, allegedly is sweeter than a regular cucumber.

Our first of many (I’m sure) zucchini.

Transplanted 1/3 of the radishes, after paying attention and discovering that they (unlike the parisier market carrots) do NOT like to be overcrowded. They all fell down for a couple of days but it looks like they’re going to recover just fine. Veggies and herbs are basically big weeds, they can take the abuse folks.

Also in that box are the newly planted Sultan’s Golden Crescent beans (which will go up that trellis), the Yellow Pear tomato and a regular old red cherry tomato.

Sooo, what’s the best way to mail produce to someone??