To The Surbiton Manor Born

All is not proceeding according to plan in the garden just now. The reason: fruit flies.  As interesting as they might be for experimental science, I am not super keen on having them in the house.  It seems that there were eggs lurking in the potting soil that I started the first round of seedlings in. They have multiplied.  We tried the old standard make a trap with a skinny escape leading to apple-cider vinegar with limited success.  Then I read somewhere on the internet that they die when sprayed with a solution of water and dish soap. I've also read that dish soap sprayed on plants can keep some pests away, so I figured, what could go wrong? Well, it turns out quite a lot. By Thursday of this week, quite a few of the seedlings were looking yellow and ill. The sweet banana peppers seemed especially hard hit. Their progress has been disappointing to begin with. They've been in the greenhouse since mid-January, and have yet to develop true leaves. Now they started dropping the

Not a resounding success. I planted a two foot long row of it in one of the planter-boxes in early January, and this is what we got. Admittedly, it was under one of the old, woefully inadequate grow-light strips from last springs in the greenhouse. On the other hand, it was placed closest to a south-west facing window, and got a lot of actual sunlight.  Seriously, this was it? I'd thought an herb like this would work better.  Ah well, more room for seedlings as we approach Zero Month, March.  

  This post was delayed by the theft of my stepdaughter's catalytic converter. Instead of blogging, I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to figure out how to fix a $1,300 problem caused by some dirt-bag (and not the good kind of gardening dirt bag) for less than $1,300. Then there was the follow-up research on how to protect your catalytic converter from being stolen in the first place, which it turns out there's a whole industry that's developed. Just have to find a place to get that installed on our cars now. In any case, yesterday's addition to the greenhouse was planting a few zinnia seeds. Slow and steady.  Another strategy had been to add the SunBlaster grow lights to the greenhouse one by one. The problem that's arisen is that as seedling season approaches, the price has gone up from the low $30 range to the low $40 range. I almost didn't pull the trigger on a purchase yesterday, but then decided to go for it because chances are that they're not goi

  Today is Valentine's Day. Kiki gave me the lovely llamas in the video above. It looks like you can't see it until you click on it. It is worth it. They are cute. I will repeat...as I think I am starting to do inadvertently as one day bleeds into the next day of pandemic isolation: I believe we did the right thing starting peppers and marigolds early. The tomatoes were up in just a few days. We may have jumped the gun on those.  On inspecting the garden plans for this year, which are, for the time being, "finalized," I noted that they call for a ton of marigolds. Marigolds are reliable, nice looking little flowers. Rumor has it that they also keep some garden eating critters away. Other rumors say no. Only one way to put it to the test. Also supposedly good for this purpose are nasturtiums. So we started six of those tonight. Along with a set of six Bulgarian carrot peppers. ["Bulgarian carrot peppers" should be read in an exaggerated, cartoonish eastern Eu

Maybe because it plunged to -15 Fahrenheit, before adding in the wind chill, last night here at Steepmeadow, it seemed like time to start some tomatoes.  This is slightly at variance with the plans for the beds (which are now complete for the spring). The original plan was to start tomato seedlings on April 24th, which is last hard frost date [May 11] minus six weeks.  But I reasoned that last year our tomato plants didn't start giving us tomatoes until later in July. They were still going strong when the first killer frost hit. So if the seedlings get a running start this year, so much the better.  We didn't go all-in yet, and only planted about half of what we intend to plant. We used toilet paper rolls to make sure that (lesson learned from last year) the roots of the seedlings don't get tangled in each other. I made a tube out of office paper, and dropped shovels full of seedling starter soil into them. I gently firmed them in, then gave them a good soak. Only then did