One of the biggest issues with taking plant cuttings is disease.
This tip says to use cinnamon to alleviate the chances of getting fungal infections in your cutting, improving your chances of success. Since I know that some of us are interested in rooting plants, it should be worth a try.
In other garden news, only our radishes and onions came up, all the other seeds planted in the garden were failures (save possibly a single nasturtium, but we will see with that one). Next up is transplanting our seedlings from inside, which historically has had about a 20% success rate. So we will see.
Friday, May 4, 2012
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Spring Garden
Due to some landscaping reorganization and projects (the never ending masonry wall), our garden moved this year from its typical location to another one between the garage and the addition to our house. This area is west facing, so it gets a LOT of afternoon sun, which may be good for tomatoes, and should extend the growing season into November. Hopefully we will have a better growing year than last year.
A disadvantage of this location is that it has not been growing plants very long, so it had about 2 inches of top soil and pretty much pure clay below that. I forked it over a few times, and added some lawn clippings, which should help a bit, and every plant will go in to either compost soil or river bottom soil from my parents' house, which ever bag is closer to hand at the time.
Here you can see young Master House and myself relaxing after planting. (Please excuse the hat hair, tangled mess in the left foreground is the compost pile, and as always, click to enbiggen)
Seed row planted this weekend, which you can see below:
From left to right we have: Dill, Basil, Cilantro, Radishes, Thyme, Lettuce, and a whole bunch of red onion sets that I let sit in the garage too long. We will see what (if anything) comes up.
Onion sets:
We also have an array of seeds growing inside the house, which should give us our tomatoes, tomatillos and so on. (including sweet potato) We have typically had about 60% of our seedlings die when we transplant. Not sure if it is due to transplant shock, or too much sun or what.
In other home news, we finally broke down and got an electric lawn mower... more on that later.
A disadvantage of this location is that it has not been growing plants very long, so it had about 2 inches of top soil and pretty much pure clay below that. I forked it over a few times, and added some lawn clippings, which should help a bit, and every plant will go in to either compost soil or river bottom soil from my parents' house, which ever bag is closer to hand at the time.
Here you can see young Master House and myself relaxing after planting. (Please excuse the hat hair, tangled mess in the left foreground is the compost pile, and as always, click to enbiggen)
Seed row planted this weekend, which you can see below:
Onion sets:
We also have an array of seeds growing inside the house, which should give us our tomatoes, tomatillos and so on. (including sweet potato) We have typically had about 60% of our seedlings die when we transplant. Not sure if it is due to transplant shock, or too much sun or what.
In other home news, we finally broke down and got an electric lawn mower... more on that later.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Recycling
An unfortunate feature of having a house with a crawl space and county ordinances restricting the height of fences is that a fence is never tall enough to block the view of the neighbors. Since we have little desire to increase our level of familiarity with the neighbors too far, we have been looking at ways to reduce visibility.
Planting trees in line with the neighbors' windows was the first step, and following a lucky find at Costco of all places, we now have three pink Jasmine plants in between them. Since Jasmine is a climber, the plants needed a trellis, and we quickly realized that we had something that might work; left over wrought iron fence pieces.
As you might recall, when we moved into the house over two years ago, the side yard had an iron fence, but we replaced that with a redwood one (with great labor). The cut out pieces have been sitting on the side of our house ever since, waiting for an opportunity like this one.
Here is the result:
Since this picture was taken, we added cement blocks to the bottom of the fence to make it a bit taller and more sturdy, and took out the stick in the middle of the plant to let it spread out a bit more. I expect that by this time next year, the whole of the iron fence will be covered with plant, and hopefully the neighbors will be that much harder to see.
On a side note, I cut down the last pieces of the fence this weekend, and let me tell you, there is nothing so fun as taking a Sawzall to metal fences. Cut it like butter.
Planting trees in line with the neighbors' windows was the first step, and following a lucky find at Costco of all places, we now have three pink Jasmine plants in between them. Since Jasmine is a climber, the plants needed a trellis, and we quickly realized that we had something that might work; left over wrought iron fence pieces.
As you might recall, when we moved into the house over two years ago, the side yard had an iron fence, but we replaced that with a redwood one (with great labor). The cut out pieces have been sitting on the side of our house ever since, waiting for an opportunity like this one.
Here is the result:
Since this picture was taken, we added cement blocks to the bottom of the fence to make it a bit taller and more sturdy, and took out the stick in the middle of the plant to let it spread out a bit more. I expect that by this time next year, the whole of the iron fence will be covered with plant, and hopefully the neighbors will be that much harder to see.
On a side note, I cut down the last pieces of the fence this weekend, and let me tell you, there is nothing so fun as taking a Sawzall to metal fences. Cut it like butter.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Grilled Nachos
As a late fathers' day present, I got a new charcoal grill, upgrading from my 11 year old portable grill that I got as a birthday present after graduating college, to a gas ignited charcoal grill with about four times the space, as well as some other nifty features. [mainly not having to crouch down to use it] I will try to post a review of the grill later, after I have had some more time to get used to it.
Every new grill needs new recipes, and after cooking the obligatory barbecue foods like steaks, chicken legs, corn, and kabobs, we decided to try something more ambitious. We also had 2lbs of chips left over from a party. Result?
Enter Grilled Nachos.
This basically used the grill as an outdoor oven, although I did grill the steak ahead of time. I got the temperature up around 250 degrees Fahrenheit and kept it there for about 20 minutes, with the nachos on a cookie sheet wrapped in foil to protect it from baked on cheese and grill flareups (of which there were none). Aside from the steak, I also grilled some tomatoes and tomatillos from our garden (featured in the last post) and some onion, all of which were added to the nachos.
Here is the final result:
Very tasty!
Every new grill needs new recipes, and after cooking the obligatory barbecue foods like steaks, chicken legs, corn, and kabobs, we decided to try something more ambitious. We also had 2lbs of chips left over from a party. Result?
Enter Grilled Nachos.
This basically used the grill as an outdoor oven, although I did grill the steak ahead of time. I got the temperature up around 250 degrees Fahrenheit and kept it there for about 20 minutes, with the nachos on a cookie sheet wrapped in foil to protect it from baked on cheese and grill flareups (of which there were none). Aside from the steak, I also grilled some tomatoes and tomatillos from our garden (featured in the last post) and some onion, all of which were added to the nachos.
Here is the final result:
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
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