Ms. Green Jeans, 2009

My plants arrived! Yay! On Friday! Yay! As I was leaving town for the weekend... Boo! They did really seem to enjoy the road trip and were good travel companions.

I spent Saturday looking at other peoples lovely old homes and their gorgeous gardens and then came back home and did an entire Saturday worth of work in two hours Sunday evening on my garden.

In the beginning...

And then  after a lot of work and help from my Dad, we really started cooking with gas! But gardens need more than enriched soil and healthy limits to do their job.

I got the hoses arranged but then I began to some issues with the soaker hoses that I blamed on a lot of things that weren't actually the problem. I had two problems : I have two hoses but all the water was being used up by hose #1 and there was no water left by the time it hit hose #2; Problem two was that I had originally hooked Hose #1 directly to the faucet and I was having a lot of problem with water loss because the soaker hose soaking everything in its path between the faucet and the garden - this was solved with a suggestion from my Dad to get a short length of hose that would go from the faucet to the soaker hose in the garden to stop the water waste, Brilliant! but...

 

I still was having a problem of too much water and water pressure on one side of the garden and not nearly enough of either on the other. The water was making it to hose #1 but there wasn't any left for hose #2. Half the garden was a wetlands and the other was a desert. My Dad solved this one too. He suggested adding a splitter to the extension hose and the problem was solved immediately. Now the water pressure was equally shared and so was the water. I also ended up replacing the too long hose #1 with a shorter hose. But as a modern, with it gardener I wasn't done yet! There are more layers of over-thinking to do before we can turn this box'dirt into a garden, note the red "mulch" for the tomatoes, its' supposed to be beneficial. We'll see.

 Now it was onto the problem of keeping the water in the garden where it belonged and keeping out  what did not. The only plants I want  at the party are the ones on The List. I'm all for volunteerism but  I draw the line at  weeds doing  their community service  hours in my garden. It changed a little from this image as I ended up have two rows of tomatoes.

Finally

The  mail order tomaotes and peppers are in, the "mulch" is down and the cadges have been deployed. I even had time to get my compainon  marigolds in and I am hopeful that I'll be able to get my broccoli bought and planted this week.  Tommorow I'll post the images from the flower gardens I visited.