To The Surbiton Manor Born

Shiningshadow Model I While it may, at this point, be difficult to remember, I started building this guitar last fall. The body is dyed with beet juice from the garden. The pickguard is a custom job by Rusted Relic s with a honeycomb design, and the tone and volume knobs are bees. The final bit, the MusiKraft neck, arrived on Tuesday, and I was able to set it up and make it playable last night. It's an interesting guitar. I was going for something that was basically loud and bright. It's almost too bright, and it is stupefyingly loud. It's the first guitar I've played with 500k pots (vs. 250k). I'd read that they are brighter. They are definitely that. I honestly wasn't sure I could pull this off. It was fun to piece together - ordering each of the individual parts and getting them exactly the way I wanted. The neck is a duplicate of my favorite neck (until now), the one on my Charvel San Dimas Style 1 HS, only improved by having the truss rod adjustable from t

  Flock of Robins I was looking back in the archive, and the flock of robins that descended on our place this year on Monday the was a few days later than the flock of robins that came March 15 last year.  I don't blame them. We are being subjected to another icy blast. Winter is not done with us yet. Grey. A sea of grey and puddles. Grey skies. Leafless trees. It is getting a little old. A little wearing. Temperature this morning was 12 degrees. It's the end of March. That's nuts - and not the kind that squirrels fancy.   We had to make way in the greenhouses for milkweed and hollyhocks and some yellow pear tomatoes.  Delicious Tomatoes Moved Out of the Greenhouse Fortunately, some of the tomatoes are now big enough to get out on their own.  It's not winter forever. 

  Megalithic Raised Bed Lowered by Local Man Over the winter, I kept looking at the new raised bed. It struck me that it was raised to the point where it would be pretty much impossible to actually reach the plants and garden in it. So yesterday I cut it down from the photo below to the photo above.  It was a fantastic day for it. The temperature reached the mid-fifties by the time I was toiling away in the late morning / early afternoon. Now we just need to get some dirt and put up some chicken-wire and it will be set for planting. The tale of two tomato plants continues. The Delicious tomatoes are reaching the point where some of them may not fit in the greenhouse. Which is fine. I'll pot them up using some garden soil and put them in a window. The Beefsteak tomatoes from Pure Pollination I'm beginning to think are a total bust. They've got two leaves and they've been in the greenhouse for a month. So I took measures this morning and ordered some of our old reliable W

Delicious on the left, Beefsteak on the right   The plan this summer is to plant two main varieties of tomato: Pure Pollination "Beefsteak" tomatoes & an heirloom variety called "Delicious."  In the past, it's taken a very long time to get tomatoes from germination to ready to plant seedlings. I started both varieties in the same soil, under the same lights, in the same greenhouse. Both had excellent germination rates. While the Beefsteak variety is performing as expected - taking a very long time to grow, justifying the extended period in the greenhouse, the Delicious variety has gone nuts and they are basically ready to plant today. I mean - check that out on the Beefsteaks. Two lousy leaves after a month under the grow lights. On a completely separate note, I put more nasturtiums and milkweed into the greenhouse this weekend, along with some eggplant (twice as many as I expect to put in the ground, just in case). 

Two Greenhouses, Like Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson , the Composer While it would be difficult to guess it from a glance outside the window, spring is coming, and there's no time like the present to bust out the second greenhouse. I've learned a lesson about why we "pot up," and WWIII may have started. The Little Blue Electric Snow Blower that Could The "Delicious" variety of tomatoes that I planted are going completely nuts. The lesson I've learned here is #1, they are apparently a great variety, as they have grown 3-4x as fast as the "Beefsteak" variety or the yellow pear tomatoes. #2, it wasn't such a brilliant idea to plant them in the 3" pots to start. An advantage of the smaller seed starting pots is that you can then pot them up. This allows an opportunity to bury the stems deeper, thus deepening the roots. I'm going to do this anyway, but it's going to be a pesky bit of work. Also, while planting 4 seeds in oppo