Pissing in the Rain

[rredmond]

Posting to try to talk myself out of it.

Did it work?

[Kersus]

I just bought 8 bags of cheap soil to raise a new flower bed. The main thing I had to do first was put in a new Eavestrough because the old one leaked heavily into the flower bed, flooding it every rainfall. The new $2100 eavestrough.... leaks.

[Oedipussy Rex]

Posting to try to talk myself out of it.

Did it work?

Yes, it did. 

I feel your pain, Kersus. The shaded bed I put in has a similar situation not that they leak, but that in the corner, where the gable roof meets the main roof, the water runs behind the trough. Lost my chervil.

[Oedipussy Rex]

Posting to try to talk myself out of it.

Did it work?

Yes, it did. 

Well, it did until a prime deal on raised beds came up. Bought two. They should arrive Friday or Saturday. But in my defense, I won't be moving any extant beds.

[Oedipussy Rex]

And here we are.
   
   

They actually arrived a couple hours after my previous post. Instead of waiting until I had the beds prepared, taking as much time as needed, I made the mistake of immediately ordering the soil to be delivered Friday. It took me three days to prep the ground for one bed, being old and fat and out of shape and a complete embarrassment to the 30 year younger me. I then had only a single day for the second bed.

Delivery day!
Dump truck driver: Where do want the soil?
Me: Right here at the back of the driveway.
Dump truck driver: Can't do that. Tree branch. I can dump it at the front of the drive.
Me: I'm not worried about the branch.
Dump truck driver: I am. I don't want to damage the truck.
Me: Hold on. [Goes around the house to the backyard, comes back, opens the garage door, grabs a 6' tall step ladder, sets up ladder next to the tree, starts up the chainsaw brought from the shed in the backyard, saws off branch.]
Dump truck driver: That works.

Then six hours of on and off shoveling two yards of soil into a wheelbarrow; hauling it back to the two new beds and two old beds that needed to be topped off, sometimes using a makeshift ramp to dump the soil, sometimes shoveling the soil out of the barrow; and schlepping back to fill the wheelbarrow again. "I'm too old for this shit." Should have just paid the neighbor kid to do it for me, but what's a seven year-old going to do with five dollars?

But there they are. I broadcast some peas in the one and that fifteen bean mix in the other, then spread some leaf mould and compost on top to help establish some kind of a soil micro-culture. The plan is to use these beds for trellising plants, like peas, tomatoes, and in a couple years after all the cucumber beetles and squash bugs have moved on to other habitats or just died off to burn in a fiery hell, hopefully some cucurbits.

[Oedipussy Rex]

So. An old bed that's been around for many, many years. Blackberries up the trellis, lemon thyme in front of the berries, and chives in front of the water barrel, which sat on top of two cement blocks that had been slowly sinking into the soil. The bed had a border that was no longer effective and falling apart. And there was an oak sapling growing through the trellis. After three days of digging and shoveling and removing oak trees and garden rocks and landscape fabric (I highly recommend never using garden rocks and/or landscape fabric for gardens and/or landscaping) and other stuff, we get this:

   

Yes, that's a gas meter on the other side of the trellis, so the digging was strictly kept to less than a foot deep. The meter is also why I didn't bother putting any hardware mesh on the bottom of the bed. I didn't want to mess around with cutting around the gas main. If the voles eat what I plant here, then the voles eat what I plant here.

[Oedipussy Rex]

So. Back in January or February while picking up stuff at the garden center/hardware big box, on a whim I pick up a bag of four red seed potatoes for either three or five dollars. Can't remember which but I'm leaning toward five. Potatoes planted in late March or April, hilled in mid-May, and almost completely dead today. *sigh* You watch gardening videos on the youtubes and see all those big, bushy potato plants, then look out the back window, see these sparse stems sticking up, and watch them shrivel up and turn brown. So I pull them up and find that they actually did produce some nice looking potatoes. Five pounds.

I paid three to five dollars to get three to five dollars worth of potatoes on sale.

[Kersus]

That's my experience with gardening. There are some things worthwhile like peas or broccoli but most things are about the hobby. I did Potatoes for years (old tire method) but the work involved and the seed potato cost is rarely worth it. Plus the tire method is ugly.

My dad used to do really well with gourds, squashes and the like.

I always have cherry/tiny tim style tomatoes because I like having a plant I can pick off and eat like the wild raspberries and wild strawberries. I also always have Scarlet Runner Beans as they're awesome in soups/stews and curries - and no where around here sells them.

It's generally cheaper to buy veggies than to grow them. I've moved mostly to flowers.