#florida weave

[jensownzoo]

All my tomatoes and tomatillos now have some sort of support system, which was my need-to-complete task for today. I have four different systems going on in the five places they're planted.

In the front in-ground bed I have a Florida weave going on:

There are only two lines right now and half aren't quite tall enough to reach the second line yet, but it's in place. There are so many self-seeded cosmos behind the tomatoes that you may not be able to pick them out! Well, I say "self-seeded", but I was actively helping that along by stripping seedheads last year. The bees will be ecstatic in about two weeks or so.

Finally got my overhead lines with clips attached to the tomatoes/tomatillos today. Made new longer earth staples for them out of wire coat hangers I picked up over the winter with this purpose in mind. The lines are attached to metal conduit pipes attached to the structure of this quadruple-sectioned raised bed.

Then there are the ones attached simply with figure-eight ties to an A-frame trellis that the pole beans are currently working on climbing up. These are determinate tomatoes so need little support in general.

As a bonus, the loofah finally came up on one of the sides:

The other side either didn't sprout or wildlife ate the seeds. I need to check if it would be worth replanting now as I'll need more than one vine to set fruit properly.

And then finally some tomato cages for the raised bed (and two containers not pictured) that doesn't have an overhead structure for lines/clips to work. I've got hyacinth bean, morning glory, and pole beans climbing up old wire crib spring panels attached to the fence. Once those have grown up and over the top, I may run lines from the fence to help support the tops of the tomato plants if they need it. It's a part-shade location so I don't expect too much from these, but I ran out of good places to plant.

[jensownzoo]

Okay I finished phase 5, the final phase, of the replacing part of the front lawn with a garden bed project exactly a week ago. Though I was ELATED to be done, at that point we hadn’t had any significant rain for nearly four weeks (everyone surrounding the city had had plenty—just that weird warming column that comes from so much asphalt and concrete dried up every storm that passed over :-/) and with a clay-and-fill-rock soil that I was literally breaking up by hand...well I couldn’t move my hands for typing up a post for some time afterwards! But here it is:

The eggplants look a little sad about being transplanted, but they’ve since recovered. I’ve got four varieties—Black Beauty, Ping Tung, Antigua, and Thai Frog’s Egg—to give me a nice mix. I interplanted with clover, nasturtium, and candytuft. Then on the slope down to the sidewalk (bordered by some salvaged concrete edgers colored with teal concrete stain I picked up on clearance years ago), I basically threw every seed I had that was over 8 years old. Mostly flowers and herbs, but it will be an interesting mix. There were so many seeds that if even 1% germinate, that slope will be packed. Which will help with the erosion that would happen otherwise.

I had some old panels of wire fencing that I installed in two offset rows behind the edgers to keep people and dogs from walking on the loosened soil. Also found two pieces of pound-in plastic edging that had a serrated-style bottom—which due to my rock problem didn’t “pound in” but I had to make a trench—that I put in along the side with the grass to help keep the zoysia from immediately crawling over into the much nicer fertilized area.

Anyway, we finally got a bit of rain this week, and just in time too since I’ve been hand-watering with buckets of water from the rain barrels and they’d run completely dry the day before. We had a storm yesterday that completely filled all three of them, so I’m feeling much less anxious. The tomatoes LOVED the rain—just look at how much they’ve shot up in only a week:

You can see that I had to start the Florida weave, which is going really well in the front row since I managed to get those tomatoes planted in a straight line. I was going for a vee in the back two rows, but ended up with curves which is not working well for the weave. I think it will fix itself as the plants grow taller though.

The nice straight row:

And the rows that you can laugh at:

But even though getting this garden bed in and planted is done, I still have related projects to accomplish, namely:

I think my dad gave me the barrels something like 15 years ago to convert into rain barrels. At the time I didn’t have the know-how nor easy internet access so they ended up shoved in the garage (and I bought pre-made ones later). Dragged them out and gave them a base coat of brown spray paint to prevent algae growth (since they were translucent white). I’ve got the bulkheads and a hole saw on order. I’ve got old screening and roughly a 1/4 tube of silicone (leftover from the diy olla project). I know I have at least one spigot, but I need to look through my plumbing supplies a little more closely. Anyway, one of the barrels held Mountain Dew syrup and I’ll be putting that one on the front porch to water the new garden bed. I’m going to have to reroute a downspout for it though since all mine currently dump at the rear of the house. The other held industrial cleaner and will be reserved for scrubbing out pots and similar. I kinda wanted to get this all done before the heat and mosquitoes arrived, but oh well.