Ahhhhhhhh, Summer

Garden tomatoes!









A reminder of what the yard used to look like.
<----------------








Preview of what it looks like now.
<-----------------











And last but not least, Ranty and the Good Scientist at Kingman Studios last Saturday.





Wheeee!

Ummm... oops?

Made a little one of these...









...and the neighbors sent over one of these.

The Backyard

So I posted about all the yardwork and gardening I've been doing but I didn't add any pics. Fellow houseblogger Litter Box House totally called me out on it!

I was actually thinking that I should add some when I made that post, but as usual, I wanted to wait until everything was totally perfect before posting photos, lest someone think "hrm, that doesn't really look so great, how many hours did you work on that again???"

Or maybe that's just my inner critic!

Anyway, if I wait until things are perfect, I'll be dead before anybody sees anything, so screw it.




Here is a little flower bed I made out of "re-crete" gathered from the crumbled edges of the pad from a former garage. (Now reincarnated as a patio, since I don't feel like jackhammering it up.)

The flowers are white columbine which I planted from seeds gathered from my mother's garden several years ago. I'll plant some other stuff in there too, but I still don't know what.






These are my raised beds. The small one in the background is a nursery bed, where I've planted other flower seeds for future transplantation, as well as a few rows of gathered seeds of unidentifiable genus. (I forgot to label them when I gathered them. Oops!)

In the foreground bed I have cold crops such as lettuce, mesclun, radish, turnips, kohlrabi, and various herbs.

I need to build AT LEAST two more such beds, since I have a dozen eggplant seedlings at home which are beginning to flower already, plus roughly two dozen brandywine tomato seedlings which are bursting their peat-cups.










This is the weird mound to which I referred in my previous post. It's kind of hard to see how high it is in this photo, but suffice it to say that when I stand on it I can see OVER THE FENCE.
Bizarro. I suppose it could be the result of some earth moving which came from the demolition of the garage... Who knows? At any rate, I intend to dig it down and spread the dirt around in an attempt to reduce the rollercoaster-like unevenness that characterizes my yard.

After that fun task, I'll probably just seed the lawn and be done with it. (My ideal yard would be landscaped with no grass at all, but one must be practical when one is operating on a deadline!)

I didn't take any pics of the boulevard garden yet, since there's not much growing there at the moment. (Stuff is still under the dirt!) As soon as things begin to come up and I get it mulched, however, it will be properly immortalized on this blog. (Being sure, of course, to avoid shots of the front yard proper, which is a disaster right now!)

Eggplant, anyone?

So I was a little over-excited about planting this year, and did something very silly: I started seeds in February.

It wouldn't have been so bad except that I had given away all my pots when I sold my last house, and all I had were these little peat-cells in which I started about 80 zillion eggplant seeds.

Since I don't have 80 zillion pots, nor do I have 40 zillion bags of potting soil, things are getting a little hairy around here as the plantlets are bursting at the seams of inadequate cells.




So now they all look like this:



I'm keeping them alive as best I can, and the few which I have transferred to pots are thriving.

As for the rest? Well, that's the reason for this post.

Does anybody want some???

If you're inside the city and want a few, I'll give them away for free. I just really don't want them to die...




The other thing I should mention is that these plants came from a variety pack, so I cannot say for sure which eggplant is which. They will probably look like one of these though:




















Any takers???

Let the nude sunbathing begin!

Just kidding.

But the privacy fence is now complete!

I thought about doing this myself in the summer, but when I saw an ad on craigslist for winter fence installation, I just couldn't pass it up.

I really hate digging footings anyway.






Now I just have to make a nice firepit to burn up all the waste these guys left behind...