My wife has been in Virginia since my last post. She was helping to keep the new grandbaby while the mom went back to work. She teaches in a school nearby but a 30 to 45 minute ride due to traffic. The other 2 kids got out of school this past friday, but since Katy teaches in a different school system she had 2 more weeks to go. I came up to help with the other two and brought Max with me. I really had no idea how long I would be able to stay, since Max went wild when the newborn was first brought home from the hospital. He was so wild that we left early to bring him back home. This time Max is much better behaved, but gets upset if the baby is crying. Seems to want to see that the baby is okay. I will probably be here a couple of weeks and go home when Katy is out of school. Amy is planning to stay another week to help out while Katy's husband is out of town.
I got started late with my garden this year and decided to try something different. Maybe I should have done a little research on this before I tried it but...
So as you can see from the pictures above, I put down landscape fabric to keep the grass and weeds down. Then used landscape timbers to keep the fabric down. You can see that it is doing a great job, exactly like I thought it would. The bottom picture shows a row of radishes covered up in grass. We have had a lot of rain the past couple of weeks and there was no way to weed the garden. The whole garden would look like this had I not experimented. Once I put the fabric down I was wondering how I was going to plant the seeds. Then I found out that there is a stand up planter that I could buy or make if I had the materials to build one. I opted to just purchase it. It is called Stand n Plant. To say that I was a little skeptical would be an understatement, You just jab it into the ground and pull the trigger as you lift it out of the ground and it is supposed to deposit the seed and cover it with dirt that falls in on top of it. As you can see it worked much better than expected. Of course I have not picked but 4 cucumbers and two tomatoes so far. Maybe when I get home I'll have beans and peas ready. Also, I started my tomato plants from seeds in February. Those plants were about 4 ft high (top picture) when I left and had just started to bloom. Should have lots to pick when I get home. From the picture you may can see I tried something different for tomato cages. My son told me about using concrete wire, an idea he got from WebCajun's youtube videos. These heavy duty cages will not blow over in a storm as the other ones do. A little more expensive, okay a lot more expensive, but they will last forever. Every year I've had the flimsy cages blow over and the plants end up on the ground. It will take a tornado to knock these cages over. Well, we are now caught up with everything, so until next post....
