GARDEN CONTENT INSIDE
Added 2023-05-23 21:11:04 +0000 UTCOkay it's been a month, it's time to unleash this beast upon you.
April 10th the garden was a weird geometric pile of yard waste. Four hours of twisting weeds later...
... I was ready to put in snap peas and my first big wattle fence to trellis them on!
I finally dropped the money on a bamboo splitter (like a big apple corer made of heavy iron), which means I was able to use slats of bamboo this time. I took a time lapse of the process, which you can see here: splitting the bamboo, and here: machete-ing off the nodes of the slats, and weaving them onto the poles.
Here's a gif of the final result, from the fresh green first day to a week later when the sun bleached it brown:
The above shot is from yesterday, after I cleared the rest of the garden, and also added poles to the tops of the wattle fence so I could string jute down from it and train my peas to climb up toward it.
Here they are as lil babies:
And yesterday's work: clearing out the last half of the garden to put in peppers.
I wish I'd taken photos of the corner flower garden before I weeded it - it was overgrown with poison hemlock and giant spiky thistle weed and dead nettle. I cleared it all out (painlessly, somehow??):
... and filled it in with seeds.
There are cosmos, nasturtium, marigolds, sunflowers, catnip, strawflower, and zinnias. Most of them were seeds harvested from last year.
In the herb boxes and behind them there's: dill, bronze fennel (since I now live with a bronze Fennel), thyme, parsley, anise hyssop, oregano, genovese basil, and a barrel full of mint. The dark red plant in the big pot is a sweet potato vine I got from Luke's ag students.
I had no plans for the last quarter of the corner garden, which gets the least sun, so I just tossed wildflower seeds all over it. We'll see how many of these survive my cats.
My cosmo seeds popped up in 4 days!
And my nasturtium (old rusty grill to protect from cats) is already looking for sun!
My snap peas have to be trained toward the jute trellis daily. Actually, hourly. Actually okay I just want an excuse to go outside every 50 minutes.
Finished a sparse mini wattle around the tomato plants I popped in...
And here's how it looks from the front!
It's a pretty easy garden this year, with only one trellising plant (the snap peas) and a lot of VERY HOT peppers: Bhut Jolokia (ghost pepper), Thai Dragon, Habanero, Hungarian Wax, and then a couple sweet colorful peppers for the kiddos, since I made them cry last year.
I'll add a few jalapeños, sungold tomatoes, and some dahlia tubers I got last weekend, and then I think I'm done! That's probably a lie, I'll find more things to plant. But for now, the game is wait-and-watch. I can't wait to see what this looks like in June. :)
Comments
I was late to the comic party and had to catch up, so I made that post prior to reading your comic about harvesting at a neighbor's. My neighbor across the street, a woman in her 80s, snagged some bamboo from a local botanical garden (because no one was looking) and put it along her fence line. I'm sure her next door neighbor loathes her for it. Personally, I'd like to get some from her to make a wall between our tiny back yard and the next one. Pandas on the Potomac, playing in Shepherdsville next weekend. I can live with that tale.
Ruth Merriam
2023-05-30 15:28:53 +0000 UTCI can't remember if I posted this daily comic yet or not, but I wrote about the bamboo after people asked - a neighbor who wanted to rein in her bamboo forest allowed me to come over whenever I'd like to harvest it! Strangely, Shepherdstown has a TON of bamboo. There are a lot of theories about how it came to take over so much of the Potomac river's shores, which I originally wanted to gossip about in Elephant Town (but later realized how nerdy and niche and not terribly interesting it would be to most people)... anyway, I believe it was brought over as a decorative plant from Asia by WWII soldiers, planted in the ground, and just took over on its own. Personally, I prefer the rumor that we brought some bamboo plants over to cultivate on the shores of the Potomac for use as feed for a few pandas at the DC zoo, and it just spread up the river. :)
Danielle Corsetto
2023-05-30 14:37:17 +0000 UTCAnd yeah, I told myself I'd stay modest with mine, too - it's hard to restrain, right? Enjoy yours while you've got it!
Danielle Corsetto
2023-05-30 14:32:47 +0000 UTCHonestly, I DO feel like a badass using that machete (even though if someone were to look closely, they'd notice that my noodle-wrists can barely support the weight of the thing)!
Danielle Corsetto
2023-05-30 14:32:26 +0000 UTCI am in love with the seatless chair holding the big planter, and the anti-litterbox genius of using a used grill. Like everyone else, I'm wondering where you got green bamboo to split.
Ruth Merriam
2023-05-28 14:46:57 +0000 UTCOooooh I love the bamboo so much!! And look at you go with that machete, what a badass. I'm not jealous, promise. I told myself I'd be modest with my garden this year because I may be moving, but that didn't last long lol
Ripley LaCross
2023-05-26 17:35:25 +0000 UTCI *LIVE* for bulk trash week!
Danielle Corsetto
2023-05-24 13:31:26 +0000 UTCI can't wait to see you in it!!!
Danielle Corsetto
2023-05-24 13:31:08 +0000 UTCMarvelous use of bamboo!
David Poole
2023-05-24 13:16:56 +0000 UTCTerrific! And my favorite part of any backyard garden (besides the plants) are all of the bits that got recycled from neighborhood trash. All of those elements that began with the gardener asking someone "Hey, are you throwing those out?" and ended three weeks later with a border wall made out of former institutional-sized metal olive oil totes.
Andy Ihnatko
2023-05-24 03:41:22 +0000 UTCAhhhhh your animated gifs!! Danielle this is looking SO GOOD. I freakin love it.
Erika Moen
2023-05-24 00:50:42 +0000 UTCI look forward to even more progress pictures, as the year progresses! :)
2023-05-24 00:18:50 +0000 UTCYou broke your garden??
Guy Serle
2023-05-23 23:02:10 +0000 UTCHow did you collect the seeds?
Drazi
2023-05-23 22:41:16 +0000 UTCThe bamboo looks great and yes do you grow it or harvest it locally?
Kevin (Your Friendly Neighborhood System Administrator)
2023-05-23 22:19:16 +0000 UTCSuch a cool tool I’ve never heard of! Thank you for sharing! Do you grow the big bamboo yourself?
Jeremy
2023-05-23 22:01:37 +0000 UTCYou know, you'd think it was Randy making kids cry, but nope, innocent looking little Danielle... ;)
Amy Crook
2023-05-23 21:32:40 +0000 UTC
