Photolog 10/15/2009

With this post I come armed with a new camera, a Nikon D-40. The pictures are coming out much better than my hundred-dollar point-and-shoot Olympus POS, and I hope to get back to blogging more often now that the weather is cooperating with my gardening efforts. Look forward to next week's post, as we going climbing this weekend with the new camera (and the dog).

Last week I planted some pretty stressed out broccoli transplants (they were the only ones left at the garden center). I also, in anticipation of rain, planted spinach seeds last Friday. Amazingly, it rained that night and off and on for the next two days! Now I've got little spinach sprouts :).

The fall tomatoes are a disappointment once again, partly because I did not prune them. They are nine feet tall and have basically no fruit. Note to self: next fall do black-eyed peas instead of tomatoes.

The basil is out of this world though, and is enough to supply four families with year-round pesto. (Anyone interested?) I bought it in a container with four separate sprouts and just planted them as they were without spacing - a technique I will have to try again next spring. The bees love it, and I have to keep pulling off the flowers to prevent a permanent basil infestation. I'd bet the honey made from basil flowers is delicious!

Spinach sprouts! Barely bigger than an acorn.

Elephant Garlic

Broccoli transplant.

Fall tomatoes

Bailey by the Basil.

Murder in the City by The Avett Brothers

I had the pleasure of seeing these guys at Austin City Limits.

Travels with Bailey

On August 14th Bailey and I left for Hollywood Florida to pick up a Casita travel trailer for Jamye. Here are some pictures of the trailer and my trusty companion. We went to the beach early on a Sunday morning and were the only ones for miles! It was her first beach trip, and she loved it! We spent the remainder of the week making our way home with the trailer. I had fun meeting up with my aunt and cousins in Destin FL, and stayed with my grandparents in Houston for a night before finally coming home on Thursday.

Franz Ferdinand - Take me Out

A fun band I discovered on Pandora... these guys have been around for a while. The song really gets going about a minute in. I'll post an even stranger video of theirs later this week. Think Interpol and Modest Mouse with the goal to get people dancing. I especially like the music sync with the shifting boxes and the little professor guy with the pencil... Enjoy! (and expect to see more posts that have nothing to do with gardening... because it's too damn hot!)

In the heat of summer

I haven't been able to do much blogging lately, so here's an update. The only thing that's growing in our time of 100+ temps and drought is Basil and Okra. I can't wait for a rainy season! Abbey got some Okra seeds from a plant-exchange deal and I planted them in the right side of the garden about three weeks after the other Okra, that's why they are a little smaller. It will be time to plant fall tomatoes soon, but I think I am going to save the space for leafy-greens. I am also definitely going to plant Broccoli again, and I think I want to try soybeans... see y'all in a bit.

Harvest: 6/3/09

Well, I pulled up the onions and carrots because the soil temp is preventing them from getting any bigger. The onions were a bust (the largest bulb being only 2 inches across), I think I will try planting them again in the fall. The carrots turned out better than I thought though - pretty good for a spring garden in south Texas. I also picked some tomatoes and my first squash. De-lish!

Nothing is wasted! The tops of the carrots and onions are now the top layer in the compost bin :)

Elephant Garlic

Photolog 5/7/09: The birds and the bees of corn and ladybugs

After a few days of rainy weather the sweet corn has sent out it's male and female flowers (tassels and silk, respectively). The tassels drop pollen down onto the silk, each string of silk fertilizing a single corn kernel. To maximize fertilization one should always plant "blocks" of corn (as opposed to a long, singular row) because one corn plant can fertilize another. This way you will get nicely filled ears.

Bailey by the garden

First red tomato!

This corn stalk will make two ears! Probably a result of high fertility and proper spacing. Look how the peas wrap their way up the stalk. Down below their roots are all entangled and the nitrogen-fixing bacteria grown by the peas are fertilizing the corn.

And the third sister: squash. They are leaning out of the shade in an attempt to get at the light.

Aphids love to gather around corn tassels and suck at the sugary sap (they look like little green fleas that all pile on top of one another). Left unchecked, they can really do some damage because they reproduce exponentially (I'm talking billions of descendants). Good thing for me, ladybugs eat aphids (plus they are a sign of good luck!). At first we only had a few ladybugs, but now there's probably thirty or so red-bodied aphid-eating machines out there. They mate and lay their eggs near their prey so their babies have something to eat when they hatch. Oh mother nature, I guess there's always a bigger bug... 

Now try to imagine if I had sprayed nasty chemicals at the first sight of those aphids. The few lady bugs would have been killed too and the aphids (which reproduce way faster) would have come back with no natural predators to keep them in check.

Aphids vs Ladybugs on a corn tassel.

POOL!

Last weekend we got to play in my parent's pool, and learned to swim for the first time. For a Lab, this is a very special occasion. We had so much fun we had to get a little pool of our own! At first she would only put her paws in, but before long she was jumping in and out growling at the water. Hilarious! 

Photolog 4/28/2009: 3 Sisters Update

The last post was quite lengthy, and I imagine that most people (myself included) simply scrolled down the blog while looking at the pictures. If you read the whole thing (God bless you) then you have too much free time. So here is what we all want to see, mostly pictures! Abbey and I have been doing lot's of landscaping in the backyard, so things may look a little different...

With all the rain everything is very green and growing like crazy! My Three Sisters garden is booming. This companion-planting technique was used by the Native Americans to grow all kinds of plants (mostly corn, beans, and squash). To plant a Three Sisters garden you need to plant a "square" of corn. When the corn is about 8 inches tall, plant pole-beans between each corn stalk. When the first of the pole-beans sprout plant squash around the outside or wherever there's a sunny spot. The corn will continue to grow and will support the pole-beans, the pole beans will grow nitrogen-trapping bacteria along their roots, which is like a living fertilizer, and the squash will creep around low looking for light and will crowd out any weeds. It works! You can also bury some fish real deep in the garden before planting if you want to really feel like a Native American (this acts as a source of fertilizer).

The Three Sisters Corn, Beans (the triangular-flat leaves) and Squash (lower middle-right)

Carrots (left) and Onions (right)

Tomatoes

Eggplant

Cucumbers with a squash in between

Garlic sacpes. These will taste great when I sauté them in butter!

Bailey by the Three Sisters garden. She has also been growing exponentially! Can you tell which end of the garden I buried the fish at? I didn't think it would make that big a difference...