Saturdays have become our refuge from the inane idiots we work with, the mentally-stunted customers we have to deal with, the blind-in-one-eye/can’t-see-out-of-the-other people we have to drive with on the way to and from work… Saturday is inevitably Outside Project Day here, and I seriously, SERIOUSLY, do not look forward to the day when we can’t think of anything else to do in the yard…
The daylilies out front went mad this winter, tripled and quadrupled themselves, so I decreed the front bed around the crape myrtle be QUINTUPLED in size. That’ll show ’em.
Yeah, it’s huge. It’s also shaped, inexplicably, like an egg.
Out back finds the tomatoes ready for transplanting. They go in pots inside the enclosure, of course, because tomato cutworms are pure lime-green evil.
The tomatoes are also surrounded by multiple basil plants, since whiteflies really suck (heh), and companion planting lore has it that basil can be quite the deterrent. Plus, when things start to ripen, pluck tomato, pluck basil leaf, wrap together and nom right there.
We filled the new boxes with some good soil and the contents of our compost bin (hurrah!), and transplanted the melon starts:
While at Lowe’s picking up basil plants (yeah, I have seeds, but I was ready to PLANT, dammit) I ran across these nice-sized Sequoia and Quinault strawberries, snapped up a dozen and a half, and they’re going along the fronts of all the melon boxes:
The cucumber box, too:
The melons will grow from hills in one end of the box, down to the lower end of the box (hence the arrows), and as the pepper plants mature, I’ll be putting a few of them in between the vines. Later when it’s bean planting time, we’ll just place the tripods around the vines and let the beans go on up and do their things. When you’re space-restricted like we are, you gotta go vertical.
The tree nursery is coming along. Husband transplanted the volunteer maples into the box with the being-nursed-back-to-health pomegranate (suffering from too much frost and too much kitty attention):
Speaking of kitties…here’s Oliver, still sporting his shaved leg, supervising the entire proceedings from a place of shade and comfort:
He climbs in those pots I’m going to use HIM for mulch.
*It’s a Twitter joke, not a misspelling, I promise.