Experiment #2

And hopefully this one will turn out better than the excruciatingly painful straw bales....

Last week our local evil-that-is-walmart had these upside gardens in the clearance section, marked down from $40 to $15. For $40 I wouldn't try one, but for $15 - hell, I'll try two.

I have plans to grow cherry tomatoes, sage and basil over the fall and winter, in my office, right over there next to the HP All-in-One. The first idea was potted plants set on a gravel base inside one of our 20 gallon aquariums.

Then I saw these.

How perfect!



Easy assembly. Or at least not too bad. Here's the base and the top piece.

And the various leg pieces and connectors. (They're sitting on top of two rolling plant caddies I'm adding to the idea, so I can move them when necessary.)

The legs -if you end up doing this, use a rubber mallet or a block of wood to connect the pieces tightly.

Voila!

All I need to do is add 30 lbs of sand to each base once they are in place in the office, add potting soil to the top, then in a month or so, plant two tomato seedlings in each one (hanging down of course) and seed the top of one with basil, and the other with sage.

I'll be back in September with the update.

Morning Glories Should Be Good For Something

The path to my garden. It's in there somewhere.

The cukes I planted 2 months ago. They should be long winding vines by now, loaded with cucumbers.

The blueberry patch, after a month of drought and 2 torrential rains. I cannot even begin to think about where to start.

Straw bales - totally not working. Almost the entire tomato crop was planted in these.

Butternut squash. Vine is dead, leaving this little mutant.

One cherry tomato plant in the straw bales has fruit, although every single one is split from too much rain at once. Note the healthy flowers that are climbing up the tomatoes.

There are several healthy gourds. Not a bumper crop, but a few.

This is this year's bumper crop. Anyone who knows me well knows this is my favorite flower. Roses can come and go, but a morning glory is breathtaking.

Plus they're easy to grow, don't care about water, propagate themselves, and are next to impossible to kill.

They also cross-breed, resulting in all sort of color combinations.

Cloudy days bring out walls of blossoms.

Deep jewel tone colors show up on both flowers and leaves...

This vine had both pink and purple blossoms -I've never seen that before.

Sometimes the colors reverse to white with a star.

And sometimes they blend and produce two colors on one blossom -with a glow from inside.

But usually a morning glory is just it's usual intense breathaking beautiful self.

Now if I could just find some way to harvest and eat them.