Melon Trellis

Today I built a trellis for the watermelons and cantaloupes to chillax on once they get going. I busted up an old bean trellis and reused that wood to build a frame.

For the grid I just ripped a couple cedar fence boards I got at Home Depot for $2 and some change apiece. The boards are 6' x 6" so I just cut them into 1" strips. This was a pretty cool project, I just really wish I had a table saw. I did all the cutting with a circular saw and it got the job done, but holy crap did it take forever.

Now if the damn melons would ever sprout we might get somewhere. I love pretty much every part of gardening except waiting on the freaking seeds to sprout.

Cutworms don't care

At the suggestion of an old dude, I wrapped straws around the base of my plants to keep cutworms from getting to them. I think his exact quote was "the straws are too slick for the little  fellers to climb." Well now i'm pretty sure once I left his house he laughed his ass off at the thought of me painstakingly cutting little pieces of drinking straws and hunching over to wrap them around the stalks of my young veggies. Either he was full of crap or I have a strain of extraordinary caterpillars at my house. I'm thinking the first option. In any event, as you can see the little turd crawled right up the straw and knocked over one of my tomatillos. When I caught him, he was 50% on the straw, 50% on the plant, and 100% jackass. I of course slammed him into the patio, but not until the damage was done.

Enough of the wives tales and old farmer remedies, I'm breaking out the big guns. My wife picked up this Thuricide last year to help with a squash borer problem we had and the stuff worked great. What I like about this product is that it's a protein that affects caterpillar digestion rather than an insecticide. Who knows, exposure to this could be worse but it sounds good anyway. At least if I die slowly I'll do so knowing that the cutworms I hate so much join in my fate. The only downside to this is that it takes 3 days to kill the bastards off, so hopefully destruction is minimal for the next few nights.

Well, Thuricide certainly didn't stop them the first night. I found several caterpillars out there. Look at these mugshots.

Everything is in the ground

It's the end of March, and pretty much everything I plan on growing this season is in the ground. This year in the Florida panhandle we had a really mild winter and I probably could have planted a month ago were it not for wanting to get a couple last batches of greens.Ah, forget the small talk, let's get to the pics!

Here's a new plot I just plowed up for this season. All shoveled and hoed up by hand, because I'm a badass. I have blisters to prove it. I moved some onions that haven't grown bulbs for crap into this plot to make room for peppers in another bed. Hopefully these onions do something in the next couple months.

This is the future site of a bean teepee. Planted are cowpeas and Blue Lake greenbeans. 

Some zucchini has been planted in a couple tires. Hopefully there were some kickass shenanigans like racing or running from the cops done with these tires. I think the zucchini would prefer it. 

 This is the pepper bed. I freaking love peppers. How much you ask? So much that I need a full 4 x 12 bed of NOTHING BUT PEPPERS! Apparently, leaf-cutters love peppers as well because, being the buttholes that they are, they decided it would be fun to start knocking a plant over once a night. I'm fighting back by putting straws around the stem of the plants at the ground. The plants that are too small got dixie cups put around them. I learned this trick from some old dude. Hopefully he knows his stuff.

Awww yeeeah! Those are my babies right there. This year the pepper selection includes Godfather, Carmen, and Orange Sicle peppers as well as an assortment of colored bell peppers. To spice things up a bit there's Serrano, mammoth Jalepeno and a couple banana peppers. There's also some flower seeds my wife put in the bed to look pretty and attract bees and stuff. She's all about the LMG if you know what I'm sayin.

Yep, those are tomatoes. I think it's practically illegal to not grow tomatoes in your garden. We've got a whole box of em. Included are Amelia, Whopper, Cherry, Cherokee Purple, and Tomande varieties. I'm really excited to see how the Amelias and Cherokees turn out.

This is the bed for plants that like to get crazy. These plants like to party. Tomatillos, Fairy Tale Hybrid Eggplants, watermelons, and Amelia cantaloupes have been planted. There are some open squares too for whatever the future may bring. I thoroughly expect this bed to look like the hill from the book/movie "The Ruins" in two months. Those poor eggplants are going to feel like a senior couple that thought they were attending an AARP conference only to find that they are slap in the middle of a Lil' Wayne concert.

These tomatillo plants like to hustle! They've only been in the ground a week and they're already forming flowers. Granted, I started them from seed inside about a month ago but still. It's easy to see the buds too because my camera's focus is so awesome.

My wife hooked it up with an herb bed. There's dill, basil, cilantro, and other delicious herb seeds in there. If you're not seasoning your food with fresh herbs, you're really missing out.

So that does that. I hope to update with pics of larger, flowering plants in the near future. Can't wait! LMG

Drew

So I decided to start a gardening blog...

I love gardening. As in, I think about it constantly. When I'm at work, I daydream about my garden. It's pretty bad. At age 29, I seem to be ahead of the curve when it comes to vegetable obsession. My job takes me to a dozen or so folks' homes a day, and I'm always on the lookout for gardens. When I do find one, it's usually at the home of someone over age 60 or so. They are usually quite surprised when I break out into garden talk, being the strapping young lad that I am. OK so I made the second part up, but you should see the look on the old timers' faces when they find that I have more success with turnips or whatever it may be than they do! Perhaps there was a time when it took years and years of experience to nail down successful gardening techniques. Nowadays, with the help of the internet, even young bucks like me can quickly learn how to master gardening skill (or so I like to think).

To be perfectly honest, I probably haven't mastered anything. I'm actually fairly new to gardening. Sure, I've grown tomatoes in pots here and there and had an unsuccessful attempt at a small garden a few years back, but nothing to the extent of what I have now. And that leads me to where I am now: this blog. I love my garden so much that I've decided to share it with the world. I've enjoyed looking at other fellow gardener's blogs and learning from them, so here's to hoping I can help a few folks out myself. LMG

Drew