Monday, March 22, 2010

On to the Garden!

I have a bit of a green thumb.

splorp! told me (a few months after we moved in together), "I knew you collected books, but I didn't expect the plants."

I confess, I have done well with houseplants, though the trick there is mostly choosing hard-to-kill varieties, like pothos.

Then in our last apartment we had a bit of a garden area, and I planted some vegetables. The carrots and the radishes did so-so, the onions would have done better if I watered better, but we had tomatoes coming out of our ears (but they were oh-so-yummy). And the basil plants grew gigantic.

Now that I have an actual backyard with lots of space, I gently twisted splorp!'s arm into buying some fruit trees. We have a nectarine tree, an orange tree, and an apple tree. I'm looking forward to the apple fruiting later this year because it has 5 types of apples grafted onto one rootstock.

Lately it has been quite warm and sunny here, and when it hit 80 degrees (Fahrenheit) earlier this week I decided it was time to buy some garden soil and set up my planting bed.

The one I have is similar to the one I stuck a picture of here to the right. Mine is made of black recycled plastic, and it doesn't have 2 levels, but maybe someday I will graduate to that. I like the idea of 2 levels, for more deeply-rooted plants, but we'll see.

I went to the gardening center of one of our local home improvement stores, and I bought a couple bags of steer manure (2 cubic feet) and 2 big bags of garden soil (6 cubic feet). Plus I bought 3 kinds of tomato plants, 2 basil plants, and a rosemary plant (which I am going to plant in the half wine barrel that was left in the yard when we moved in).

I'm also going to look in my box-o-gardening crap for extra packets of vegetable seeds. It seems like I have some left over from last year. So all in all I should be in pretty good shape for gardening. Now I am just waiting for the sun to go down a bit and the temperature to cool some more before I set everything up and give it a good watering.

Oh, and I cross my fingers that Dart won't dig up my plants.

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