My First Time...With a Circular Saw

So, a few months ago, I convinced myself that Spring really would come eventually, and decided that I will make a couple more Square Foot Gardening beds of various sizes. Previous things I have built, I have paid 50 cents per cut at the lumber yard to get what I need.

It's embarrassing to stand there like a little woman who is afraid of saws or something while Mr. Manly Man with an Apron  instructs teenage Future Manly Man in the things I could do if only I had a saw.

The cost effectiveness of this decision had to be ignored. Really, it's a matter of pride.

So, I called My Dad, My Hero, the guy who made building everything and anything look so easy for my whole life. My dad's been through a few saws in the last bunch of years while remodeling 2 houses. He and my mom and extended family actually built a house, A WHOLE HOUSE, from scratch before I was born. 

It's like having my own The Learning Channel expert on speed dial. He recommended the 7 1/4 inch Skil saw as the best in my budget.  My budget was stretched a long way by Amazon. I love Amazon. In just 88 cuts, the saw will pay for itself!  

He also recommended this set of blades. It comes with one, but apparently, different numbers of teeth are needed for different types/thicknesses of wood. Dad said one of these will even cut the conduit I use for making Trellises for my Square Foot Garden. That's one more thing I got to stand around like a Little Woman while Mr. Manly Man with an Apron instructed teenage Mr. Manly Man in the art of cutting.  Having the right blade for whatever job I decide to do will make life so much easier, and really expand the uses of my new toy.







So, My saw came in the mail. I took it to the garage, cleaned off the work bench, organized the tools some, etc. It's a good thing the previous owners of the house put up a pegboard and super workbench!  My Power Tool Collection now consists of a Drill, Sander, and Circular Saw.

Fast Forward a few weeks. My two youngest kids start playing in the yard on nice days, digging and digging in whatever dirt patches I'll let them attack. I decide to build them a Sandbox.

Eventually we go to the nearest city where building materials cost slightly less than an arm and a leg. This Mega Sandbox is going to be in my front yard, so I have decided I want to build it out of Redwood (whatever that is...), because my SFG book says it's prettier and lasts longer than Pressure Treated. I head into the store thinking 12x12 for my size, since an awesome friend offered me as much free sand as I could shovel! But...2x8x16 Redwood boards are $32/each. 12 footers aren't much cheaper, and I would have used the extra 4 footers to make a pretty SFG for the front yard. Anyway...For $120 I could have bought a plastic Step2 sandbox years ago. Hello...I'm a cheapskate, and the longest board that would fit in my Minivan is an 8 footer, so ....8x8 or 6x8 became my answer.  The lumber yard was nice enough to make those two cuts for free so they'd fit in my car.

All good homemade sandboxes have corner seats, so 8x8 turned to 6x8 so the whole thing could be made out of $66 worth of Redwood.

So, this morning...it was cold....but not wet...yay Spring!
 I had marked my lines to cut on yesterday.

Called Dad to get advice on which cuts to make first...angles or straights...Angles.

Ok. I opened the box! and got out my BRAND NEW CIRCULAR SAW!!

Oh crap...must install blade. How hard can it be? With directions in 5 languages, after calling Dad to get the push I needed to use force to remove the little wrench from the machine, on the 2nd try, The BLADE WAS INSTALLED, AND TURNING! yay!

Ok, 2 little kids running around the yard will make excellent weights to hold the boards still while I cut.

My cuts weren't perfect, but I wound up with two 6-foot boards, two 8-foot boards, and two identical corner seats. Mission Accomplished!

How I grew up around saws and woodworking and got the highest grade in my 6th grade Shop class, where I was actually THE ONLY ONE who passed the test that actually allowed me INTO the woodshop to build a birdhouse-- without ever operating a circular saw by myself --is beyond me. But--Now I've done it!

What's next? lots of ideas, but first, I need to FINISH the sandbox project!

8 cuts today =$4. Only $80 more cuts till the thing pays for itself!

Spring IS Coming--Right?

Whew! I just got back from a two week trip to visit family in Virginia. Spring is starting to peek its' little head out there already.  As my kids and my nephews and I walked through the woods with my Dad, I could see sprigs of green starting to grow out of the dead, dead ground. Here where I live, it's still dead, dead and snow covered, but today was pretty and 50 degrees. I can see Spring coming soon -- after a few more rounds of snow.

So, Spring is on my mind. I've bought some seeds, and have a desire to buy  more, but am pretty sure I have enough already. Probably too many. I bought a mini greenhouse this past weekend, and can't wait to set it up, but my house needs to get back in shape first. I'm saying that I can't set up the greenhouse until the house is picked up.

The garage is full of stuff to take to the local thrift store. It needs to be sorted and boxed and loaded up and unloaded. yee ha!

I just bought a circular saw on Amazon. It should be here soon, and then I have more Square Foot Garden Boxes to make and with any luck a sandbox for the kids.

I'd REALLY like to fence some of the back yard so I can let the kids go outside while I stay INSIDE getting stuff done in peace. It's a foreign concept, but one that I'd like to try. Or, so that I could concentrate on my garden stuff for 10 minutes without constantly looking up to see if the toddler has run away.

I want to find a few sources of compost that are free. There are enough places around here with livestock that they should have compost I can get. Crossing my fingers!!  The new SFG boxes are going to need to be filled with Mel's Mix, and I really don't want to have to buy the compost but my own compost isn't ready yet, that I know of. I have NEVER flipped it. Ooh, but that's another thing I am going to do.

I need to build a pallet compost bin system and move all my current compost into it. The new location is going to be about 50 feet from the old location. Doesn't that sound fun?

My front yard is, well, um, ugly. The house has very very little curb appeal. I want to create a flower bed in this dead zone of deadness up near the house. Shady and no natural rainfall (gutters divert it).

The other option for the deadzone is to plant a mass of pumpkins there. It would be green and leafy for the summer and the pumpkins would make nice decorations for fall. Tempting and easy, but not a long-term solution to the ugliness.  The pumpkins have to grow somewhere though, so maybe the side of my house that no one plays in and I like to ignore?  Wait, too near a sidewalk. Kids might steal the pumpkins. They worked well last year, but I'm putting the new compost bin system where I had them  last year.

Right now I'm going to go put away a ton of laundry. If that's done fast enough I'm going to work on a spreadsheet to figure out when I need to plant my seeds in my greenhouse. It's gotta be soon? right? According to a really cool website that lets you search for frost dates by zipcode, I'm going to use May 22 as my last frost date, and my frost-free growing season is supposedly 141 days.  I really thought it was more like 90. Interesting!




Of course, I painted the wooden section of  my house last fall, but half of it only got one coat of paint, so I need to do ALL of it again. yippy skippy.

Garden Update

The 3 tomato plants that I put outside earliest, protected in their wall-o-waters are of course doing the best. I've -also got tomatoes growing in a 5 gallon bucket, a  large dishpan, a make-shift Topsy Turvy, and there's even still one on my kitchen windowsill.


So, tomatoes are a large part of my garden, but I've got lots of other stuff coming along too. Here's the main "Square Foot Garden" section of my horticultural adventure.

I know, you're saying, yep, it's a bunch of green stuff. So, on the left, is a wagon with the 5-gallon bucket and dish pan of tomatoes. They are in the wagon so that in the case of severe weather, I can roll them into the garage for protection. 

Next in from the left are my best tomato plants, some spinach, rosemary, cilantro, a tomato plant that took a lot of abuse in a storm, a bush zucchini plant and some cucumber vines that have a long way to go. The zucchini plant appears to have a female flower forming, if it works the same way as pumpkins, but I haven't done zukes before, so no idea really, and too busy to google. 

The white area in the middle is my compost pile. 

The box on the right has Mint Gone Wild, chocolate mint, an ornamental gourd section, strawberry plants, peas and beans. 

With any luck that  trellis on the right will be fully covered in pea plants. It should have been peas and beans, but oops, I planted bush beans....

Today I finally bought materials for another trellis for the box on the left. The one on the right is 6 feet tall. The new one for the left is going to be 7 feet tall. Tomatoes are crazy.

Next is the Ghetto Garden.  It's next to the shed and behind the dumpster. REALLY prime real estate. This was possibly a sand box area for the last people who owned this house. When we moved in it was a litter box for the local cats. I mulched it with grass clippings for the last couple years hoping it would improve or grow grass or something, but it hasn't really. 

I knew my Giant Pumpkin Plant would need LOTS of room, so I put it over here, knowing that without good dirt, I'm not going to grow any incredibly impressive pumpkins, but I should get some good enough for the kids for halloween. It's had male flowers for a couple months but just finally got a couple female flowers starting to form. I've mulched heavily with grass clippings, hoping that will keep moisture in the sand. At first I wasn't using Miracle Grow. I was just hoping it would grow, but it wasn't growing, so I started putting 2.5 gallons of Miracle-Gro treated water on it every day and it's really taking off. 

Inside the white fence is supposed to be flowers,but it looks to me like weeds. I've decided to just let whatever happens happen in there. The white tube with the flower pot on it is a worm tube composting system experiment.

Beyond the white fence, there is a reusable shopping bag growing potatoes, and a potting soil bag doing the same. Beyond those potato bags is a green plastic tub full of rabbit manure. Gosh, each piece of the Ghetto Garden could be its own blog post. Ok, eventually. 

Next up is my attempt at increasing curb appeal.

 

Some genius put rocks all around this side of the house. Just a bed of rocks. No plants, no big rocks, nothing. This corner was especially ugly. So, I took a random plastic bin that I had scavenged from a trash pile long ago, drilled holes in it, and filled it with potting soil, to make a raised bed. The bin is Sparkly Pink, so I had to camouflage it somehow, and these logs from the historic cottonwood tree did just the trick. 

The pine branch leaning against the wall will hopefully be covered in flowering vines...if the growing season is long enough. 

A neighbor was nice enough to let me take as many of his Hens and Chicks as I wanted, so I took a bunch of them and planted them along the side, along with some other succulents that I bought. 

There's another couple pots of not so beautiful stuff, so I won't bother to show them. Carrot tops are not very exciting!!  

So, that's where my garden stands as of July 6, 2010!

Square Foot Garden 2010

This may not look like much, but check out my first SFG post if you want to see what it was 2 years ago!!

Since we didn't eat a bunch of what I grew last year, I decided to only plant my two "real" 4x4 boxes plus some giant flower pots.

Ugh, Nebraska. It's almost June and my tomatoes aren't even in the ground. I planted seeds for everything else today, but my tomato plants ar rin the ground today, before a hail/thunder storm complete with tornado sirens, but thankfully no tornadoes.

Here's how it turned out yesterday, and the trellis withstood the 67 mph wind gusts yesterdat afternoon, so I'd say it's secure.


I try to do things on the cheap.  Have you noticed that about this blog?  So last year I attempted a wimpy, ghetto, string trellis, and it supported some peas and beans but basically sucked. We didn't have nearly enough peas or beans either. Just 1 square of each if I remember right. My kids ate them as fast as they ripened. For a trellis this year I bought the string grid that is recommended in the SFG book. However, it still wasn't going to look very good. and putting up poles to support it was going to be a LOT of work. Then I saw my lattice panels that had a use in Hawaii but hadn't found a use since we moved here. They are 2.5' x8' panels of plastic lattice, with one rigid side each. I wound up experimenting with them until I decided to make the garden extra fun for the kids. I made the tunnel they can crawl under while the vines of cukes, zukes, beans, peas, and ornamental gourds grow over it. It's going to be a mess of vines, but it should be fun! I have 1 more panel of lattice that I haven't decided how to use. I might make some kind of cage for the beans that are on the far side of the box away from the tunnel. With 2 squares each of zukes and cukes, and 4 squares each of peas and beans, plus 1 square of ornamental gourds, we are in for a LOT of vines.

The giant pumpkin isn't going to be trellised. I haven't actually figured out what I'm going to do with it. or where it's going to be planted. It's a whole other post waiting to happen.

 This Flower BED below is also going to be another post.

Square Foot Gardening

When I say this is my 2.5th  year of SFG, I mean that the first year, we moved into this house in July, but were living in a hotel in town in June, so I prepped my soil in June (before we actually closed on the house), and then planted some broccoli, pumpkin and tomato plants in July. I didn't use a grid, or box, just amended existing soil, and hoped for the best.I used info I found online to know how many plants/square.

Here's a picture from that year, 2008:

I know, you're thinking WOW, that's one SEXY garden. Well you see, I planted and then went out of town for a couple months. We came home to that. So, with no watering for 2 months, I still would have  had good broccoli, tomatoes and pumpkins--if we had been here to eat them. That works for me!!  I based what I did on the info I found online about the SFG technique.

The next year, last year, 2009, I bought the SFG book, built  2 boxes, spent a fortune buying the ingredients for Mel's Mix, and planted a mixture of seeds and store bought plants. I planted the 2 4x4 boxes plus the 4x4 patch of ground from 2008. Everything did really well, except my pepper plants were complete failures and the tomatoes had blossom end rot. I grew but didn't eat many of the onions, radishes, beets, lettuce...but they were fun to grow. The broccoli flowered too fast and I missed eating them at the  yummy point. They were so yucky that I fed them to the dogs. The flower pots had potatoes, pansies and nasturtiums. One was supposed to have carrots but that was a big mess.

Here's a pic from a main harvest day, before a big frost/hail was expected:

My next  post will be on my 2010 SFG!