No, the garden hasn't been started yet

• Apr 7, 2009

No, the garden hasn't been started yet

Building the planter bed was the agenda for today, but there turned out to be a lot of little tasks to get out of the way first.
It wasn't long before I accepted that I wouldn't be constructing the raised container today.

First thing I did was to take down the sheets of wood from the roof of the shed (which I used to angle rain water off and keep my shed from rotting), so I could reuse the wood to make the raised planter bed.
Then I replaced it with a sheet of plastic (from a wardrobe move in the rain months ago) raised in the middle like a tent, metal taped to the sides of the shed.

Then I was distracted by the rain system. The tubing on both sides need a bit of adjusting. The barrel was almost full and it rained today, so I used my new watering can to transfer 4 gallons of water stored from the last rain to my potted plants. Then I remembered that when I purchased this RV trailer it came with an external waste water tank which I have never used. It holds 32 gallons. I filled it from the storage barrel to make room for today's rain.

With the barrel half empty, I had a chance build a better and higher platform for it. Wood which I had kept from dump runs years ago because it might come in handy someday, finally came in handy. My new 18v cordless jigsaw made short work of custom fitting the wood to the barrel.



Watering the plants, I noticed that some which had grown a lot last year weren't doing so well, so it was time to give them some more room. Three were replanted, using soil from my compost bucket behind the house to fill in the extra volume in the bigger pots (the pots came from a dump run; they've been sitting behind the house waiting for this day). Having one simple compost bucket, there is no place to separate recently added material from finished compost, so extracting soil to use meant going through it one handful at a time and separating out the food scraps and worms, (and then going back through the soil twice more to get all the scraps and worms I missed the first time).
As I suspected, the roots were totally compacted.

Last fall I happened to be up in Joaquin Miller Park on the day of the last sale of the year for the native plant nursery. I bought a CA strawberry plant. The strawberry was one of the ones which got replanted today. I have two strawberries already! They are very tiny, and may not make it to edible size for months, if ever. But still, they are very clearly strawberries already. There is also another blossom which should join them as fruits before long.

Also, my lupine has blossomed.

These are exciting times :)