The Mid-Summer Yard and Garden Tour - Something's Growing! (Part 2)

The garden, which had an inauspicious start and was so sparse just a few weeks ago, is starting to really look like something's happening!  The peppers are peppering and the tomatoes are tomato-ing!

The garden has nearly exploded with growth!  There are tomatoes and peppers all over the plants.  I'm looking forward to the harvest!

Suddenly, Garden! But Then Again...

I didn't have much of a garden last year, or the year before.  My knee had gotten really bad two years ago, and last year I was taking care of somebody else's knee, so...

Anyway, this was going to be the year of the garden restoration.  I weeded around the asparagus patch and dug up the rest of the plot.  In an earlier post, I told about how I'd received the plants I'd ordered from Burpee - delivered upside-down.  I had to wait a week until it was warm enough and hadn't rained the day before.  The weather finally cooperated and the plants went into the ground.

Rosemary

Basil

Bell Pepper

Super Steak Tomato

Super Sauce Tomato

Big Boy Tomato

Here they are - all recovered from their rough treatment by UPS!  Don't they look like happy plants?

Well, we've since had several days with rain, so, again, I couldn't do much in the garden.  When I got out there after a particularly hard rain to check the baby plants, one of the tomatoes was broken off.  Well, the fortunes of war and all that.

Another couple of days of rain, and when I got out there again this past weekend, I found...the rosemary and basil plants.  What the heck?  When I looked more closely at where I had planted the tomato and pepper plants, I found...this:

Nothing but an inch or two of their stems.  Somebunny has been in my garden!  Somebunny is on my naughty list!


We've had a LOT of rabbits and their offspring cavorting in our yard this spring and thought how adorable!  How innocent!  How cute!

Well, no more.  The little stinkers have attacked my poor baby plants.  They are officially not welcome in my garden, darn them.

I've reordered plants, and now we go to war!  I'm putting up a fence.

Everything's GROWING!

It's finally gotten warm enough and dry enough for me to play in the yard and garden.

The garden has lain mostly fallow the past couple of summers, but by golly, I'm going to have a garden this year!  So I got out a couple of days this week and started digging in the dirt and touring the yard.

And like a good tourist, I took a boatload of pictures!  Here we go!

Peonies have flower buds!

A tiny buckeye forest!

A violet carpet! 

Golden forsythia.

One of ninety-six yellow
daffodils in the back.

Asparagus, at last!

Wildlife in the garden!

A fancy daffodil by the porch.

Some random tulip!

Rain, Backyard Chickens, and Sustainability

Rain, rain, and more rain.

It's all my fault.

I went out to work in The Garden Saturday morning, and a rogue thought came to me - "Oh, I don't want to water the garden.  Maybe it will rain and I won't have to."

And it did later that day.  And every day since.

Ugh.

The front yard is flooded, and still it rains.

I got out this morning and ran.  At least it didn't start raining until after the house was nearly in view at the end of my run.  It rained last time I ran, too. I'm tired of trying to run around thunderstorms.

I'm just tired of rain.

But a low pressure system has been sitting over the midwest for a week.  The forecast is gloomy.  No end in sight for now.

So I lost myself on the Internet looking up information on Backyard Chickens.

Yes, Backyard Chickens.  And Urban Chickens.  And Pet Chickens.  And Chicken Coops.  A garden and backyard chickens would go together so well!

Then I found that we can't have chickens inside the city limits.  Curses, foiled!!!

Believe it or not, there is sort of a chicken...movement.  A groundswell.  People in Indianapolis are putting up chicken coops in their backyards, at schools and workplaces!  There's even a Tour de Coop bicycle ride/tour of several urban chicken coops in the fall.  Crazy!  But oddly compelling.

My great uncle Earnest (yes, spelled with an "a") lived in Orange County, California - NOT in the country, and he and my great aunt Edith had chickens and a garden, and fruit trees.  I clearly remember the chickens, and  "picking eggs" for Aunt Edith.

Maybe I just want to relive my childhood.

Or maybe I want to pretend I live on a farm..

Or maybe I'll give it a politcally correct label - an Experiment in Sustainability.

Yeah, that's it - Sustainability.

Maybe next I'll look up goats.

King of the 2-Cycle Engine

Eureka! - Archimedes

In the previous post, I ranted on about trying to start a garden - taking apart the compost heap, digging dirt, digging out bricks (done mainly by That Man and The Boy), then digging some more, and then trying to get the little Mantis tiller running (FAIL).

That Man worked and worked on that tiller.  He drained the old gas from the tank (yes, there was 22-year-old gasoline in there, I'm embarrassed to admit), yanked on the cord a few hundred times, took the carburetor off, shot Gum Out into every crevice, cleaned the fuel filter, took the carburetor apart, put it back on, adjusted the idle and high screws, and frankly, spent most of the day fighting with the infernal machine.  He could get it to start (with starter fluid), but it just would not continue to run.  Stubborn.

We decided to give it a rest, put the tiller in the garage, and think about it for a while.

I did some research on the Web, and some people said it's basically a "disposable tiller" and that the best thing to do is to junk it and buy something better.  Oooooooooh, that just rubs me the wrong way!  When it was working, it was wonderful!  The tilling width is only about 8 inches wide, it weighs less than 20 pounds, and it did a great job of tilling, weeding, and digging holes.  Brand new, the tiller cost only about $150.00, and a new one now costs about $300.00. So, where's the break even point?  A carburetor rebuild kit costs about $12.00.  A pack of six air filters costs about $10.00.  A new fuel filter costs about $5.00.  Plus about $5.00 shipping.  I think $32.00 is getting off pretty easy!

So I ordered the parts from Mantis, and they should arrive this week.

In the meantime, I did my Santa Claus impression and hoe-hoe-hoed to break up the worst of the clods, spread the compost around and get everything relatively level.  FUN.

I bought some tomato plants and put them in the ground.

I bought some garden seeds.

I dusted my plants with Dipel.

Just biding my time, waiting for parts to be delivered.

Until TODAY.

That Man got a wild hair and decided to work on the Mantis some more.  He yanked the cord.  He choked it.  He yanked some more.  Over and over.  He rubbed a spot raw on a finger pulling the cord.  It started and ALMOST ran a little.  He played with the set screws on the carburetor.  He came in and asked me which screw was which.  I read to him from the manual.  He went back outside and messed around some more.  He fiddled and fiddled with those screws quite a bit, and finally, he pulled the cord, the tiller started, and IT DID NOT STOP!

MY HERO!

He also works magic on my boat's outboard motor every year.  After it sits over the winter, it needs some encouragement to start, but once it starts, it goes.  Then I have to make sure to run it once a week so that it continues to cooperate.  It usually takes just one or two pulls to start.  Unless I neglect it a couple of weeks - but that's another story!

This year, however, he noticed gas leaking from the motor.  He popped off the cover and found gas dripping, but from where?  He poked and prodded and squinted and stared.  Finally, he narrowed it down and sent me off to buy some fuel line.  He replaced it (all one and a half inches of it!), I started the motor, and, voila!  No more leaks!

It took two and a half hours of concentrated troubleshooting to accomplish.  He's more stubborn than the machines!

Anyway, I've decided to crown him King of the 2-Cycle Engine.  Or Wizard. Or Wizard King!

Now, the only 2-cycle motor left is the chain saw.

Oh my!

P.S. - After writing this, the parts arrived later the same day - of course!

The Garden - My Latest Attempt

The last time we had a real garden was 22 years ago.  It had been a large garden, and we planted all sorts of things.  We had the usual tomatoes, zucchini, green beans, and lettuce.  We had carrots, beets, blackeyed peas, broccoli, sweet potatoes, watermelons, and canteloupe.  We had kidney beans, red beans, pinto beans, and navy pea beans.  We had a compost heap and a little Mantis tiller.  I froze and canned our produce.

It was a serious garden.

The summer after The Girl was born was our last garden. She was such a demanding baby that the garden was neglected and huge weeds took over.  We raised the white flag and surrendered.  No more garden for us.

Two summers ago, I bought a couple of beefsteak tomato plants and planted four hills of zucchini.  It just so happened to be a summer when nobody got much out their gardens.  We harvested four undersized tomatoes, and three zucchini.  

Pitiful.  Demoralizing.

I decided to finally take the old compost heap apart and make a garden out of it and some extra ground next to it.

So, I dismantled the compost pile frame Saturday and pulled two 30-gal trash bags full of weeds.  I started early Sunday to dig up the new space for the extended garden plot. Suddenly I hit something really hard - concrete?  No, bricks! 

I got That Man and The Boy out there and we dug up a huge pile of bricks!  Bricks neatly laid out like a small patio, about four inches below grade. All level and laid straight with a careful limestone border.  No more!  All piled up, ready to be hauled away.

So I finished digging the area, and That Man got out the Mantis Tiller, and it all came to screeching halt. 

He worked on the tiller all afternoon and couldn't get it to run. It would start, but not run. Ugh. I guess I'll have to either break it all up by hand with a hoe, or borrow Dad's monster of a Troy-Bilt for this little 10' x 10' garden. 

What possessed me?