Garden #3: Growing and first fruits

So far so good on actually doing some semi-regular blog posts.  Full disclosure - this entire post is about plants, gardening, and watching stuff grow.  If that's not your particular cup of tea feel free and skim, but you should also give it a shot, it's deceptively and fascinatingly interesting (plus there's some great photos).  There are also a few great shots of Liam and Kristen in here, too.

Last time around we had just seen all the plants safely planted in the garden and getting happy.  Here's a shot of the group one week after that:

These are some tomatoes on our "Early Girl" variety right about this time (4/22).  As you can see they're still very green, but you'll be amazed how fast they get color.

I had gotten out my nice Canon to take these and some other photos, and I grabbed some fantastic ones of Liam, too.

I also got a few great ones of Kristen and Liam together.  Here they're both doing Liam's trademark smile:

And this one is just photo gold:

About a week later (4/28), we found our first squash blossom!  I also found out an interesting fact about squash (and zucchini) blossoms - they open for an hour or two in the mornings, then close back up, and then keep repeating that every day for 1-2 weeks before they dry up and fall off.  Fascinating!

Another shot of the Early Girl tomatoes - it's only been 6 days and those first ones are already starting to get some color.

The cucumber also started to put out little feelers - this one found the nylon trellis and wrapped around it all on its own, we didn't have to train it at all.  Pretty amazing.

Only two days later (4/30) and the Early Girl tomatoes are a strong orange-red.  Liam was so excited, we kept telling him that we couldn't pick any of the tomatoes until they turned red - when he saw these he got ecstatic (even though they still aren't quite ready).

Here's another round of top views to show the growth.  These are from 5/1, just 11 days after the photos at the top of this post.  Pretty astounding how fast this stuff grew, especially the squash and zucchini (squash are top left and bottom center, zucchini are top right and middle right)

Our tomatoes are starting to look like an impenetrable tomato forest.  The square foot gardening book recommended this tight of planting, but I think next time we'll space them out a bit so they can breathe.  Doing great though.

We also saw the first good looking squash of the season!  I managed to get out at the right time of the morning to get the blossoms open as well.

 

On the weekend a few days later I broke out my nice Canon and took a ton of photos of everything - I'll only inflict a few on you here.  These are some of the cherry tomatoes we have going - I absolutely love how they grow in a little array, so nice and neat.  The engineer in me can't help but appreciate and love that design.

Also another example of the cucumber tendrils grabbing the nylon trellis - again completely on its own, no training at all.  Just amazing.

And those first Early Girl tomatoes are looking delicious!  They looked so good, in fact, that I told Liam we could pick them.

 
He was absolutely thrilled!  He got so excited about them, just held them, checked them out, and carried them around for the next 30 minutes.  These are just a few of my favorites during this time.

I jumped the gun on these just slightly - once we cut them open there was a tiny green spot in the middle, but we ate them anyways (as part of a caprese salad, yum).  They were unbelievably divine.  The closest I can come to describing the taste is that it was fuller in every sense than any store bought tomato - eating them side by side just made the store bought ones taste washed out.  I know you gardeners out there know this already, and maybe my taste buds were biased since I knew we grew these ourselves, but they really were amazing.

We're getting pretty close to being able to harvest our first squash I think.  I can't wait until we have enough to fill baskets!  More to come...

Garden #2: Final construction & planting

Back for more of our gardening adventures!  At the end of the last post we saw the garden filled and the soil amended with our lovely compost.  Now it's time to put the finishing touches on this garden and make it, well, awesome.

First up, I made the frame for a trellis out of stainless steel electrical conduit.  I highly recommend this stuff, it's cheap, durable, weatherproof, and just fun to work with.

Next up we laid out a grid with nylon twine.  Kristen found 2 great books on gardening - one that we really like is "Square Foot Gardening" by Mel Bartholomew.  Very cool book, lots of great info, and bonus for me: he's an ex-engineer turned professional gardener, so there's lots of great tips (like the conduit for the trellis frame).  Anyways that's where we got the idea to lay out a 1'x1' grid for planting.

Kristen had already found a few plants at a great nursery outside of Houston, so we went ahead and got those in the ground.  Way more of those to come.

Finally, the reason for the PVC pipes earlier - the ones in the garden serve as anchor spots for more PVC to create a frame to put bird netting over.  My original plan was to get the 1/2" PVC lengths you can see below (standing straight up) and have them bend from one side to the other, creating a covered wagon look.

However, we realized that by putting the garden right next to the fence, there was another interesting opportunity, plus I realized I had made a trellis that wouldn't fit under the original loop.  I found these cool steel flanges at Lowe's (plumbing section), bolted these to the fence...

And voila!  Custom frame for the netting extending all the way to the fence, and more importantly, over the trellis I had put up.

I attached some bird netting to the frame and also put up the nylon trellis material on the conduit to create the finished trellis.  In a flash of brilliance I bought some 1/2" round dowel pieces and attached them to the bottom of the bird netting (check out around the edge below).  This gave a really handy way to easily lift the netting in sections to get at the actual garden...

...like so.

 Last but certainly not least, we picked up a rain barrel and I tied in the gutter on the back of the house so that we can always (or just mostly) water the garden with rain water instead of tap.

That's about it for the construction.  You may have noticed in the last few pictures some plants magically appeared.  Here are some shots showing close ups of the plants in their infancy.  First, the left half.  Going top to bottom, left to right, starting in the top right corner we have: squash, cantaloupe, chinese eggplant, squash, zucchini, zucchini, cucumber, sage, and basil.

On the right side is basically all tomatoes - we went a little tomato crazy, I think Kristen picked out 12 different varieties if I remember correctly.  We figure we'll see which ones grow well and which ones we like and refine our choices for next year :)

All of this initial planting happened by April 12 or so - thanks to a timely rain right after I installed the rain barrel, we've been able to water the garden exclusively with rain water, and the plants definitely have loved it!  Next update, I'll show the growth of the plants up to now along with the first fruits!

Garden #1: Initial construction

So Kristen and I have wanted to have a garden for years, and this year we finally figured we could pull it off now that Liam's a little older and easier.  We started doing a lot of research on different types and quickly decided that a raised bed would be ideal - you don't have to worry about your soil and any amendments, they're well draining and modular, you don't have to bend over as far when working in them, and (most importantly) I get to build something.

We decided to start with just one 4'x8' plot - all the tips we read repeatedly mentioned that first time gardeners' biggest mistake is usually starting too big.  I went with cedar for the structure (2x6's for the frame and 4x4's for the posts).

This one was pretty straightforward, but still fun.  Just had to cut the 4x4 post into sections and 2 of the 2x6's in half, then start drilling and screwing together.  The eagle-eyed among you will have spotted the PVC - I'll explain that later.  I had a great helper throughout this whole project (note his tools in the bottom of the next photo).

If you're wondering I built this upside down, the posts sticking up will go into the ground to anchor it in place.

We wheeled this back into the backyard, got it in place, dug the holes for the posts to sit in, and set it in the ground.  Those are cut pieces of 1" PVC bolted on the insides - you'll see why those are there in a bit.

We got a bunch of old newspaper and some really great dirt and started fillin' her up.

 We've also had a big compost bin going for about a year and a half, we finally got to use some of it!!  That's some seriously good plant food right there.

Forget the gym, just till a garden by hand with a shovel.

Ah, finally finished - that garden is ready for planting!

Stay tuned for update #2 - final construction and planting!

A long over-due Liam update

Hey gang, I know this is what everyone is really interested in: an update on Liam!  I've been really bad about getting out the nice camera to take good photos of Liam, but I have a ton of random ones from my phone, as well as a ton of video.  I have my nice Canon and we have a nice handheld vidcam, but it's just so much easier and convenient to whip out the phone and snap a few pictures or a minute of video!

So as of writing this post, Liam is only 2 weeks away from being 2.5 years old, which blows my mind.  In fact, the last time I posted anything on here about him, he was only a couple months over a year, so we've got a lot to catch up on.  First, some very recent pictures from Easter (about 3 weeks ago).  These are just a few of my favorites:

For more like these go check out the Picasa album here.  It's just amazing when I look at him these days - he's definitely a little boy now, just kills me how grown up he is.  And he's quite the comedian - he's always coming up with hilarious stuff from out of nowhere.  I've managed to capture a few things here and there on video, which of course I will now share.

This is a very recent, random moment before dinner one night.

Liam got a trampoline for Christmas (thanks Mimi and Papa!) which has turned out to be one of the best gifts ever.  Here's a typical session (admittedly he's showing off a little for Aunt Hannah), from about a month and a half ago:

This one always makes me smile.  Liam loves to put on our shoes - this time, he was putting on my tennis shoes and clomping around.  Wait for when he says "hi" - melts my heart.

Last but not least, another short bit of him on the trampoline.  He's developed a trademark smile when he knows he's on camera, this one shows that off at the end.

He's really grown up on us, it just amazes me.  And if you're wondering - no, we still haven't cut his hair.  It's just too darn cute!  I'll finish up with one of my favorite all time snapshots of him from just a few nights ago - he was modeling his mama's new sunglasses and looking ridiculously cute.