We threw an old, very heavy, very hard squash into one of the overgrown raised beds long ago. I went to remove it today, only to discover it’s light as a a feather and …
… it lives!
Tag: garden
Planter logs
Since I had both dogs on leashes, I walked the way I used to, before. It has been a while. The big eucalyptus tree has finally been cut up, and some of the logs turned into planters. Interesting idea.
Worms!
Our local comadreja (possum; translates as weasel) has wrought havoc in my little 1/3 barrel compost pile. Like most things garden I do these days (I had a wonderful garden pre-internet), it’s a half-assed affair, without enough mass to heat up and, on rainy days like today, getting entirely too wet.
So I decided to transfer its contents into a full-size plastic barrel with drainage holes at the bottom, in which I have tried unsuccessfully several times to grow potatoes (to be fair, once in the campo where the alambreros (fence guys) upended it, dumping the contents, so they could stand on it.
However, once again I have grown a rich crop of something unplanned: a dense, wriggling mass of worms. I don’t know how they got in there, but obviously they find it a good environment. In case you’re not a gardener, worms = good. When we moved here, we could not find a single worm on the property. We looked. Now we have an abundance.
Garden update: I have several of these type things in the garden now. This plant (predictably) didn’t make it. I did harvest and dry some insanely hot little orange peppers from here a week ago. The first year here, we had volunteer tomato plants everywhere; the second year squash. And the first summer in the country we had an abundant supply from plants I didn’t plant.
Maybe this summer will be the one I actually get my gardening act together. Just need to take a quick look at my Google+ account first ….
The remains of my pathetic garden
A couple of pepper plants persist, even as the sun sinks lower and lower in its daily path. I figured well, maybe I can give one of them a little more sunshine with a piece of sheet metal I had lying around. Note the ashes from the wood stove in the lower left.
We live at 34°45′ south (about the same as Raleigh, NC in the north).
Not sure what I was thinking
Mr. “real” Anonymous who comments here gave us a mango tree, one of two he had in a sheltered nook of his property. The other one died, not entirely surprising considering it’s a tropical plant and the Oriental Republic is not a tropical place. He and his wife have been in purge mode plant-wise after this last horrid-growing-season mucked-up-by-HAARP summer, and I agreed to take it.
I got as far as a basic structure with top and front sheathed in plastic (at times I’m not real good with math, as in buy the amount you actually need all at once). Yesterday’s strong and prolonged wind basically trashed it. Apparently the wall anchor (taco Fischer) was not adequate for the closer crosspiece. Back to the dangerous power tools.
To his credit, Mr. “real” anonymous did not claim we’d be making homemade mango chutney from our backyard a year from now, though a Uruguayan did tell me this afternoon that, though not allowed, it is quite possible to smuggle fresh mangoes in your car from Chuy, on the Brazilian border, one of the few places in Uruguay where it’s actually fun to shop, because shit is cheap … as long as you have a foreign passport to show when returning. Not for the mangos, which you’re not revealing, but the other goodies: electronics, alcoholic beverages, and such.
Lemons, lemons everywhere
Though it doesn’t show well in the photo, the lemon tree I planted over three years ago is finally producing a healthy amount of fruit.
Alas, nothing compared to that of a friend, who showed up with two bags of lemons from her backyard. On the counter…
A lovely addition to agua con gas, they’re alkaline-forming in the body.
And they have a ton of other uses as well.
The harvest
The younger brother of our albeñil (mason/contractor) said the yellow squash and pumpkins should be brought in before the last rain, so I did last week. Except for the six in the foreground I found today. Yes, you would think they’d be hard to miss.
These all came from volunteer plants. I know of about a dozen more smaller, green squash still on the vine.
The green ones lower left are loofahs, which I did plant, from a loofah I bought at Tienda Inglesa that had plenty of seeds inside. When they dry out completely, the skin will crack off easily. I hope. I tried to speed the process using heat on the first I picked. Wrong.
Quick tour of the volunteer garden
A couple of large zapallo (squash), each about 16″/40cm long:
One I only spotted from the road the other day, growing behind the chiquero (pigpen; unoccupied). It had wedged itself into the fence; I removed it, maybe damaged stem. If so, it becomes dinner.
Finally, two of the loofahs (which I did plant), joined on the left by an even larger zapallo, which I didn’t.
This year’s volunteers
Our country property included two pig houses, one collapsing. When I took the latter apart, I discovered volunteer zapallos (I think; some kind of squash at any rate). You might recall my fascination with the volunteer zapallos last year.
At some point, I will take up the neighbor’s offer to plow the area between here and the house for a garden, in exchange for letting him graze cattle on our land. Meanwhile, I can be happy that part of my garden has already planted itself.
New lettuce
New lettuce, and one cabbage plant, amidst very happy cilantro (growing with a top-dressing of seaweed). All volunteers, dug up from friends’ unworked garden that was very active garden last year.