The Garden Part 5 - May 2, 2009

The big news this week: all the seedlings have begun to sprout! During the early part of the week I noticed that the radishes had begun to come up, and shortly after that the lettuce and then the peas followed. This weekend I went about the task of thinning out some of the plants to desired spacing.

Investigating the lettuce, and deciding who stays.

After thinning them all out, I sowed a second planting of radishes and lettuce as well. And as far as the vegetable garden goes, that was all I had to do this weekend.

But it wasn't all the work that we did. While at Russell's Saturday morning, buying some fish emulsion and a window box for the deck, we decided to purchase a couple azalea bushes for the front that had a few "empty" spaces. They fill up the front border pretty well.

New azalea bushes.

The house has a lot of nice landscaping outside, and could obviously use a lot of mulch. I decided to get a delivery of dark pine mulch this week, as going to Home Depot and buying 200 bags just seemed like too much. The mulch was delivered on Friday, and after planting the bushes, we set about spreading it all around. After a couple of hours we got the front and part of the back yard finished. But there's still plenty to do.

The front garden, all mulched up.

One other item to note this week. I got an email from Steve who said he mentioned my squirrel worries to a co-worker. This co-worker just so happened to have a side company that sells machines to keep garden pests (such as deer or squirrels) away from your plantings. It appears to do this in 2 different ways. First, it sends out ultrasonic pulses whenever an animal approaches the area to deter it away. If that doesn't work, the 2nd line of defense is that it then shoots out pressurized water at the critter. It didn't sound all that promising, but at least it's environmentally friendly (uses solar power to run, and doesn't use chemicals), and Steve said his co-worker would be happy to send me a sample or two free of charge. Hey, if it's free, it's for me, so I'll be waiting for them to arrive. (And for those curious, their website is here: http://www.aimergard.com/.)

That's about it for this weekend. None of the potatoes have begun to sprout yet, but that's not too surprising, as they do get buried kind of deep initially. Hopefully they'll pop up soon. There won't be much going on with the vegetable garden for the next few weeks. My plan is for the tomatoes, peppers and squash to go in Memorial Day weekend. I probably could plant them a week earlier, but no sense in trying to push that frost date.