Irrigation Changes

We've had domestic strife. Our cats are battling hard to be completely banished to an indoor lifestyle. Despite their love of fresh air they keep treating the garden as a litter box. We've had two motion sensing sprinklers for quite awhile. But due to the water supply they're constrained to fixed location. I decided to augment them with two heat sensing ultrasonic cat annoyance devices.

Unfortunately, these things work entirely too well for pets. Other people cats using your garden? No problem, use these guys, they work. But, if you actually want your pets to enjoy outside, don't. Our cats didn't even go outside anymore. In fact, when I was outside I could hear the little chirp the device makes when it goes off regardless of any moving heat source. They have no sensitivity adjustment, or convenient off switch (though, picking it up and placing it face down effectively turns it off). These two strikes were sufficient to stop using it, the kicker was that their usage manual says that if you're out in the garden you should disconnect it. As I mentioned, it doesn't have a convenient off switch.

Given that it isn't user friendly for cats or humans, I returned the two units.

I reorganized our motionsensing sprinklers to better cover our garden. I had a spare whose sprinkler I'd broken, but was able to buy a sprinkler head for. Between the three we have almost sufficient coverage. Hopefully it's enough.

Additionally, I put in an automated irrigation for our patio tomatos. Five roma's and some kind of cherry we're not sure about yet. It's hot on the patio, and the tomatos are doing well, they need to be watered twice a day, so this will be a bit of a relief.

Here's a nice picture of a silhouette of said tomatos on our living room wall.

Dinner

We've been eating out of our garden very regularly since last summer. We had so many leeks we didn't manage to eat them all over the winter.

Here is dinner tonight. Some snow peas steamed in a reduced stock, fresh garlic, basil, and chives. They were delicious.

The strawberries are coming thick and fast and are ending up in our salads. The greens for salad were in the fridge when the picture was taken. They were varied from endive to wild arugula, beet leaves and young red romaine.

Lady Bugs Rule

We have been pretty bad about posting. It's been a wet spring. We've been eating salad, and have just started harvesting snow peas. Our apple tree is doing amazing with about 60 apples. We've made a large batch of garlic scape pesto, and planted a lot of everything.

This post though is about aphids, hops & ladybugs. This year the hops have been absolutely invaded by aphids. They covered the undersides of every leaf, and all over all the stalks. Consequently, we've had a lot more lady bugs than normal. This year they're all over the place. As you can see in the picture, they're having a lot sex as well. There's still lots of aphids under the leaves, but the stalks are clean. The underside of most of the leaves are sporting orangish ladybug eggs, so, soon their larvae will take care of the rest of the aphids.

Sprouting garlic

Last week Michelle removed the fabric on our garlic. It's already up around 6 inches. This is fully one month ahead of last year. But, last year we had two feet of snow, and this year, since we have the Olympics, we have no snow (none on the ski hills either).

$70 per square foot!

Just wanted to point here, a very cool post.

We're not dead. Just been sorely lacking in the posts. We've planted a whole new bed of garlic, about 150 cloves again. We are still eating lots of leeks, carrots and have begun to make a dent in the beets we planted.

Currently the weather is VERY cold. As such we're not able to harvest any leeks or arugala, but they'll come back when it warms up.

Hopefully we'll resume posting regularly!

Our well hung carrot

Couldn't resist ...


And the very first apple we've eaten from our garden, a Gravenstein ...

Future

We have had a technical emergency. About this time last year we purchased a four disk two terabyte network storage device. This machine is an excellent little piece of hardware. We striped the disks to a one terabyte raid 5 volume. Unfortunately, the false sense of security that raid 5 tends to give people bit us in the a$$. One of the drives crashed and on the three disk rebuild something went wrong. As a result all of our computer time has been somewhat devoted to dealing with that.

We have potentially lost every digital image we have taken in our short married life. Including all of those of our garden that we did not post here. Backups? It was raid 5. Yes, I know raid isn't foolproof ... but,but,but. Sigh.

In the future, I will make sure we are appropriately intelligent about backups. Fifteen years of being a computer geek, this is the first time I've had major data loss. It will never happen again.

On this theme ... preparing for the future; we left a few shelling peas on the vine longer than you should would you be planning to eat them. Reason being was to save the seeds for next year. We harvested about five pounds of shelling peas and vacuum packed them for the winter. Here's a picture of some of those peas that escaped the freeze to hopefully sprout next year.


N.B. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Tilia for twenty years of service through the manufacture of their first generation of vacuum packers. My parents purchased it when I was very young. I have used it to pack hops and other harvest for the past four years. I've had to maintain it, but after twenty years, it finally blew a seal (or something) deep inside the vacuum pump. Fortunately I had been lusting after one of these. I am perfectly happy to sound like a shill. If you want a home vacuum sealer, don't go to your local department store. This is a real tool, a delight to use. This is a proper tool, not a toy, lightyears ahead of our old Tilia food saver.