A long, hot Sunday

This Sunday we finally got ahold of a tiller to use on our garden plot. It really only took a couple of hours before S. had almost the entire plot tilled. After an hour, we ran out of gas and had to go get some, but after that it was smooth (if extremely hot) sailing. I had a turn at the tiller's helm, and gained a new respect for how strong S. is. I had a hard time steering it, and it started to get away from me (I was doing pretty well until I came to the end of the row. Turns out the tiller likes moving forwards a lot more than it likes going backwards)! But I gave a shout and he came running to rescue me before I got the tines tangled in the fence. He had a nasty sunburn on his arms by the end of the day, but I somehow managed to escape that. We came back in the evening to plant some bush beans seeds (one short row each of Blue Lake, Sonesta (dwarf wax) and Green Crop) and some yellow onion sets. S. planted the onion sets, while I did a bit of raking to smooth out the tilled areas.

It's interesting when you garden on land that someone else used to use. We've found a couple of interesting artifacts lodged in the ground. You can see them: from left to right, some sort of knife blade (it has teeth, but it's not quite a saw, either...perhaps for harvesting salad greens?), then an odd but very sharp hook with a short handle, and finally a hoe head (not the handle, just the metal part.) Fascinating.

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!