Garden ⁽¹⁰⁵⁾

Brian Bilbrey May 15, 2012

Garden Progress

Moving right along, I managed to take a picture this evening as the clouds started rolling back in. Here's the state of the garden today: The potatoes are coming in nicely, as are all the other plants. The snow peas ... they're in production. I'm pulling a meal's worth out every two days, and they're barely started yet. * * * School is started too, and for grins, the first project in CMIS 485, the capstone course for databases, involves PHP and an Access database. Yeah, Access. Whatever. I've mostly completed the design of the required tables based upon the…

Brian Bilbrey April 29, 2012

Garden and War

Yesterday, I mowed the yards, and little else, since rain was inbound. We got another 2/10", which is all to the good - perhaps a total of 1.5" over the last week. That'd be a wonderful regular event. Today, I planted all the seedlings in the garden. It doesn't look like much right now - 28 or so tiny tomato seedlings spread out through two beds, zucchini and butternut squash, cucumbers, and half-inch tall jalapeño plants. None of the cerrano peppers germinated. I've got spares of some of the tomatoes bedded for now where the cold frame was, in case…

Brian Bilbrey April 14, 2012

Third day and done

I decided not to add a new category: Pain. It belongs here, but it'd (hopefully) be so bloody rare as to be much like a broken pencil. You saw one before-ish (more middle-ish, really) picture from the front yard, day before yesterday. Here's one more deeply before picture: the right-hand bed off the front porch: You might need to click on the image to get the full extent of the pain this bed caused me yesterday. Bracketing the bed are a pair of golden euonymous bushes (pre-trimming. In the center is our wonderful batch of tiger lilies. They're being owned,…

Brian Bilbrey April 13, 2012

Spring: Sprung

For the second morning in a row, early temperatures in the mid-30's Fahrenheit put a bit of a damper on morning yard work. I've taken a couple of days off to get the front yard in order. I'm peeling out all the old mulch, weeding everything, edging around the trees, and re-seating border bricks around the beds. What I didn't count on yesterday was finding that a couple of the beds needed a deep turning. When I uncovered the bed you see above, the soil seemed a bit lifeless and compacted, in keeping with the tepid growth of the few…

Brian Bilbrey March 25, 2012

Good news, bad news

The good news is twofold. First, my penultimate deliverable for the Software Engineering class is in the hopper - two sections (about 11 pages) of an SDMP document. One more week of reading and writing puts that class to bed. Second, it looks like my effort to finally purchase materials and get the cold frame built (see yesterday's post) is going to pay off: we're likely to see frosts Monday and Tuesday nights. With luck what I built protects what I'm growing. Third (yes, third, this is a bonus good thing, for some definition of good), I've got a week-long…