Monday, April 27, 2009

Anticipation by Gardener Cumax

I have 3 major projects happening at the same time:
- Prepping my veggie garden and getting ready for seeding
- Installing xeric and winter hardy succulents in the front yard
- Building 4 compost areas in the corner of the backyard.




The veggie garden prepping is basically finished. The area you see in the foreground can wait a few more weeks when I take possession of several tomato seedlings. A few weeks after that I have 6 more seedlings arriving and then I have black plastic mulch to install as well as drip irrigation.



The seed screen is that chickenwire frame you see here. The purpose of this screen is to help me plant veggie seeds. If you haven't planted lettuce and carrot seeds, then it can be rather stressful if you don't know where to look.

What I do is use the screen as a guide to poke my holes in the dirt and then drops the seed(s) in. I then pinch the hole closed.

Before I could even make this screen I had to completely dismantle a riveted patio umbrella than got knocked silly by a rogue wind storm last mid-July. Trimming trees is dangerous. I was 20' up in the huge 45 year old apple trees we have when the wind picked up. My intuition said to get down immediately; so I did. Immediately the wind blew from the south with such force that is took the umbrella and its 65 pound weighted anchor and slammed it up into the picnic table and hurled all 3 items about 25'.

Whoa!

I'm sure glad I got out of the tree because that was quite the powerful wind burst.

I retired the umbrella to the garage until I could figure out how to recycle its material; that's where the seed screen comes from. Turns out this umbrella is really, really old. The wood is teak. So I'm the proud owner of a teak seed screen that won't see much use but a few days a year.