Monday, July 9, 2007

A Weekend Well-Spent

I am so excited! Both of us are, actually… See, we found a garden plot to rent! It's only 5 minutes away from our apartment! 25 square feet of dirt of our very own! Awesome! We were out there working all weekend long in the horrible heat. Here's a photo of what it looked like before we started.
There are a lot of deer around (the area is bordered by some woods) so our first order of business was to get a slightly less patch-worked fence up. Saturday we shored up the old fence with zip ties, and bought some fencing and fence stakes. Sunday morning, (it only took us one hour—truthfully the work was all S.'s, I just helped out with the zip ties) to get our new fence up around the old one. So now at least it won't fall down. Although it's still probably not tall enough to really keep deer out, it's better than nothing.



Then we went over to Behnke's to see if they had some plants (after having no luck at the TP Farmer's Market—guess it's too late in the season). We finally (after nearly giving up) found some cayenne pepper plants. So we got one of those. Then we spotted some tomatoes! Victory! We got a Sweet 100 cherry and a Better Boy. (all of the Early Girl variety had early blight, so we didn't get any of those). We also picked up some garlic and onion sets. On our way home, we stopped to check out Home Depot where, to our delight, we found a few more veggie plants! So we picked up a Blushing Beauty Bell pepper, a Sweet Banana pepper, and another Bell Pepper (it was a green one, but I don't remember the variety.) Then, back out to the garden plot where S. nearly worked himself to death and heat exhaustion hoeing an area large enough to put the plants in the ground. I helped out by raking up the weeds and hauling them out of the way, as well as some hoeing, and, of course, pushing cold water. So here is a photo of our plants in the ground. After that, we went home to cool off and get some dinner. Then we heading out yet again. This time to the grocery store. See, there's no water up there by our garden plot. We have to haul it all in by hand. To this end, we bought two 3-packs of gallon water jugs. That way we can refill them as needed. Water in-hand, we went back up to our garden plot one last time to water everything. Wow! Now that's what I call a weekend well-spent. Now all we need is a tiller for the rest of our plot!

1 comment:

Ed Bruske said...

Hi, saw your link to my blog, The Slow Cook, and see you are also linked to D.C. Urban Gardener News. We'd love to have you write sometime for our Urban Gardener blog. Would you? Send me an email at euclidarms@yahoo.com.