The Garden

Not much progress (actually it's pretty much like no progress) has been made on my seeds so it's not even worth sharing.  But I did make some serious progress on the garden front.  I figured I should start looking around in case putting together an area where I could actually grow something takes awhile.  So I wandered over to Home Depot to see what was there.

I found a kit for a raised garden.  Now since the area I've been eyeing was never used for a garden (and is actually pretty thin with soil in general) so I figured doing a raised garden would be the best way for my vegetables to stand a chance.  And there it was...a kit with instructions telling me what to do and having everything all spelled out for me.  So I picked up two 4x4 kits and made my way back home.  A few minutes (well more like 20) later and....

Now you might be thinking 'hey it looks like you have almost no soil' and you'd be right.  Now the kit recommended 8 cubic feet, so according to them I'd need 16 in total.  And at Home Depot all of the bags of gardening soil were 1 cubic foot.  The idea of me dragging home 16 bags of soil seemed completely ridiculous.   Not to mention I wasn't sure that I would actually want 16 cubic feet in total.  So I bought 2 cubic feet to figure out a good gauge of how much more I would need (and plan on shopping online for larger bags).  So here's what 2 cubic feet get me:

So yeah maybe the 16 cubic square feet is a good number to shoot for.  The other thing I will need is some kind of fence to keep everything protected from...

Number of times I had to chase Spock around to get a piece of wood or Styrofoam from the bock : 3
Number of times I had to shoo Spock away from chewing on the 2 cubic feet of soil I have: 2
Number of times I had to shoo Spock out of the garden itself: 2

So yeah...before any plants go in (and who are we kidding any more dirt goes in) I'm going to need to figure out how to puppy-proof it.

Week 1-ish

I was planning on making sure I updated every Sunday (with extras if anything particularly interesting happened) and of course am already a day behind...but it was all for a very good reason.

So here's what thinks look like this morning.

Which of course doesn't look any different from when I first planted them.  But if you look real close (which I don't think you can in this picture) I can see a couple green bean seeds cracking open so hopefully I'll have at least a couple sprouts next week.

One other thing I wanted to show is what's under the dome for what I'm calling "Proof that I can make some progress growing plants"

The way the plants are winding together is getting me thinking that I won't be able to transplant them to the ground very well...but we'll see.  Also the straws were my attempt at giving the plants something to wind around (which isn't working I know).

I'm also planning on making some progress in the backyard this week...so hopefully I'll have made enough progress that it's worth sharing.

The Challenge

 So here's the deal.  I've been wanting to get outside more and get more active.  Now last summer was filled with closing on the house and then settling in, but this summer I'm going to have more time.  I've got two goals for this summer.

The first one (which I'll start getting more into when the weather really turns) is that I want to start golfing.  I had lessons way back in the day, but will probably need to think about getting them again.  I've also got Mom's old clubs so that will make starting pretty easy.  There's also a golf course about 3 minutes from my house.  So later on I'll probably be stopping by and trying to get started.

Now for the vegetables...this idea was really inspired by a Christmas present.

Inside that are the plants that will make a mean salsa.  I've got tomato, cilantro, and jalapeno plants sprouting. I was getting excited at the idea of being able to make my own salsa and starting thinking that it would be nice to grow more vegetables.  So my small goal is to be able to eat something that I've grown.  My big goal is to have a whole salad made from things I've grown.

So it's still too cold for anything to be outside, but it is about the time when it's good to start seeds inside.  So I got some started today!

Now I put the leftover seeds from my salsa kit so I've got a few more tomatos, cilantro and jalapenos on the way.  And here are the other seeds that I'm starting.

So hopefully in the next week or so things will start sprouting.  Then the other nice thing with the containers I got is that they're meant to be planted directly into the ground, so doing the transfer should be pretty easy.  Then at some point in March or April I'll be putting in the other seeds that are meant to go straight into the ground in the early spring.

That means I've got about a month or so to get my backyard ready.  I've been keeping any eye on the area of the backyard that gets the most sun and think I know where I want to set up the fence.  Because (as I'm sure you've already guessed) I've got one big wildcard.

If the mat carnage in the picture doesn't give you enough of a hint, Spock does love to yank on things.  Of course he can really jump...so I'm going to have to do some more homework on the best way to fence in the garden.

So that's the plan.  I don't know if anyone is going to care to read this, but I'm probably going to keep going at the very least with the pictures to see how the plants progress.  So wish me luck!