Monday, May 14, 2012

Introduction to Great Garden Experiment of 2012

Hello there....it's been a bit, I suppose.  I get really good at this blogging thing...until I don't any more.

I am going to attempt to track a few of my crafting projects, as well as my Grandiose Garden Experiment of 2012.  About which I am fairly excited.

So here's the deal.  We bought a little townhouse last year with a postage stamp sized yard in the front and our entire backyard is pretty much deck.  And a cherry tree, which the birds love.  The deck would be awesome, except that we're fairly certain that it was constructed out of "reclaimed" (i.e. one man's trash is another man's treasure) scrap wood.  So, it needs some work.  But that's not at the top end of our continuously growing homeowner's list.

But the reason I am telling you this is not to whine about my house.  I realize it sounds that way.  I actually really, really love my house.  It's perfect for our little, two-person family and will continue to be perfect if and when our family hopefully grows someday.  The reason I'm telling you this is to explain what I'm doing in this gardening experiment.

So we don't really have much backyard to work with, which is not a problem because our house is south-facing, which means that our front yard is way better for gardening than the backyard.  So, I want a vegetable garden, but I also want it to look decent.  So a container garden it is.

Last year, I planted a zucchini, which did pretty well.  Well until Mr. Gardener tried to help and started watering the zucchini twice a day, which caused the fruit to start rotting...  but he was genuinely trying to help.  :)  It did eventually recover.  And I learned some lessons last year, which I'll attempt to apply this year.

I started planting this weekend and I'll track my progress here.

I am getting tired because I am an old lady, so I'm going to wrap up.  Except to say this:

This evening, I came home from the church core team meeting (it's kind of like an advisory council, which I sit on) and I was admiring my peppers (because they were one of the few survivors of a couple of my important lessons that I've already learned this year).  And there were slugs everywhere!

First of all, slugs completely disgust me.  Yuck.  Nasty, spineless ickiness.  So I salted the earth.  Well, actually, I ran inside, yelling at my husband, "I need the salt shaker.  Those damn bitches are in my plants!"

Then I salted the earth.

Then I googled ways to stop slugs and have two ways that I am going to implement.  One is drunk slugs.  I put the lids to little glass jars in the pepper plants and filled them with beer.  The slugs will crawl in to drink the beer and then get drunk and drown.

They also hate coffee grounds.  And plants like them.  So tomorrow morning, guess where my grounds are going?

Dear Slugs,

Give up now.  I will win.

Ask my husband.

Love, Ashleigh