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I’m back from a 5 day trip to Walla Walla wine country. What a beautiful and relaxing 5 days it was too. We saw a lot of beautiful countryside, and tasted a lot of great wine. I was curious to see how the garden would fair on its own for nearly a week. We had just gotten two days of solid rain so I didn’t have to worry about it drying out or anything. The only problem I found when I returned home was two of my indeterminate tomato plants had grown tall enough to fall over, since I hadn’t caged them yet. I put one of my little wooden trellis on each of them for the time being and they’re both doing fine.

	You can see the tomatoes to the top right. They are the San Marzanos. They, along with the Romas in this same bed, all have baby fruit now. The little romas are cute, even as babies they look like romas. The squashes grew the most I think. They are all exploding. There is a summer squash and a winter squash in this bed. I’ll have to thin them out pretty soon I think, but we’ll see. The onions in the foreground are all doing great, as are the carrots and rutabagas planted along the sides.
	When we left the canoe peas had just started to bloom and now look.. tons of little peas! These will grow to nearly a foot long and be filled with shelling peas. Can’t wait to taste a few of these in a few weeks.
	The paper lanterns (as I like to call the tomatillos) are all doing well. There are a bunch of the little guys already. I’m so excited they produced, or should I say, one of them produced. This plant is loaded down, and the other one right beside it is totally empty. Full of blooms even now, but not a single fruit. I’m not giving up hope, and in any event, it was necessary to pollinate this one, so it did part of its job even if it doesn’t produce fruit. Maybe I’ll get lucky and it will set fruit after the other one and I’ll get a naturally staggered harvest.
	All of my early tomatoes have fruit now. Some larger than others, but even the smaller ones closer to the fence (that get less sun) have set some fruit.
	Here is a photo from the trip. It is one of my favorite photos. The road leads into Pepperbridge and Northstart wineries and is lined with grapes on either side.

The garden continues to grow and grow. My second planting of spinach is big enough to start harvesting now. I took a little over an oz out last night. The timing is perfect as we just finished up the last bit from the pound I harvested from the first planting.  The second plantings of bok choi, paris white and flashy oak butter lettuce have all sprouted. I planted these in the same bed as the spinach. This bed is pretty protected and gets enough sun to produce great leaf veggies but not all day sun so they will bolt too early. My first planting of spinach didn’t bolt until after a week of 90-degree temps.

	Both the summer (one ball) and winter (spaghetti) squash have all sprouted and started growing very well in the last week. They went from nothing to this in two days.
	You can see them again in the bigger shot of the newest bed. The tomatoes are the Romas and San Marzanos I got last week. They have all adapted well to the transplant and are all showing new blooms and new growth. I need to get around to making a trellis for the SMs, as they are indeterminates.
	Speaking of tomatoes, Pico isn’t so pico anymore, and he isn’t alone. At last count I have 9 little tomatoes scattered around the Ultra Early plants (3 of them).
	The plants are really growing now. I think the consistent and thorough watering is really helping. I need to get some remesh cages built for these guys.
	The canoe peas are growing taller by the second, and now starting to bloom. I have about 5 blooms so far and a couple of blooms I missed apparently were pollinated well and are forming the first baby peas.
	These are my onion transplants that I started indoors. They are doing so much better than my direct seeded onions which have all pretty much died. I don’t know what went on with them. My thoughts were I started them too early. Next year will be 100% transplants.
	I still haven’t gotten around to deplanting (is that a word?) my peppers. I want to get them out of the bed and into gallon pots so I can get them out into longer sun. They are holding on, but not growing very much. I need to get this done pretty soon, it should start warming up here pretty quickly.
	My tomatillo plants are a bust this year I’m afraid. Both plants are healthy and absolutely loaded with blooms and have been for 3 weeks, yet not one single fruit has set. Either it takes forever to set fruit, or I have two plants of the same sex. Apparently you need 3-5 plants (i have 2) to ensure you get a male and a female. These are pretty big plants so I might have to get creative with this next year.. maybe have a few extra in gallon pots sitting around or something. I’m not going to rip them out of the ground.. but hope is failing quickly. Or find someone in seattle with a different sex and go visit with some q-tips. Hey.. nobody said gardeners weren’t extreme. [Update] After doing some more reading, it turns out there aren’t male and female plants. They are not self-fertile, so I do need two plants (which I have). Apparently it is a matter of pollination, and that seems to be very random for tomatillos, year to year. I might have to break out the q-tip after all.. for real this time. At least I can do it in my own back yard.

My wife and I went to the ‘Depot the other night to pick up some replacement light bulbs and I was distracted by all of the plants they have this time of year. They fill up the nursery and then about a fourth of the parking lot with the bigger trees and shrubs. Most of their stuff is just decorative, but they do have a very small vegetable section. Their veggies tend to be the same as every other location in the US, which is to say, not all that well targeted for our growing season, so I wasn’t very tempted to buy any.

Around back of the store, out by the dumpsters, they have racks and racks of dying or dead plants. I really wanted to go rummaging through and try to rescue a few of the ones that could be saved, but they were stacked on racks along with a bunch of other stuff that was just in storage.. pallets of merchandise that was just in storage, not trash. I didn’t want to risk getting hassled by an employee or end up getting arrested for stealing or anything.. and I couldn’t work up the nerve to ask an employee about it either.. so I did the next best thing. I raided their clearance section.

My goal was to only buy perennials that were a little past their prime for the season, and stay away from the annuals. I succeeded for the most part. My newest flower bed is shaded pretty well. I mainly made it into a bed so I didn’t have to mow under the trees, not because it was a great location. I also picked up a little surprise for my wife.

	Since I do the cooking in the family, my wife does the cleaning up afterwards. This is the view from the kitchen sink window. Aside from the little potted plant the view isn’t much to speak of and she has asked me to liven it up a little. Her mom sent us a packet of sunflower seeds that I planted against the fence. Most of the seeds were damaged though, so I’m not sure how well they will turn out. Just to be safe I bought this sunflower at the Depot. It is supposed to grow to about 5’ tall and have several heads. I’ll keep you posted on its progress. Eventually when we fence the yard we plant to make a little fountain or something more fun here, but for now, a sunflower should add a little something.
	This is the newest bed I mentioned above. This is also where I added all of the new perennials. I have 3 pink creeping phlox around the front edge so hopefully it will spill over a little in the next couple of years. In the middle are two “shade perennials” which I can’t remember their real names. Along the back we planted some flower seeds for some taller flowers. The seeds have all sprouted now too, so hopefully this bed will start to fill in a little now.
	Remember where I said I was ‘mostly successful’? My poor steps are just drab and grey. We do have plans for a remodel up here when we add our front deck, but at $3 each including the planters, I couldn’t resist. Off to the top right you can see my lettuce planter growing flash oak butter lettuce. The top left is my mint I got from my grandmother in Arkansas and flew back on the plane in a wet paper towel. It has certainly done well!

I went for a little faire du tour de jardin last night with my lovely wife and was shocked.. SHOCKED I tell you, to see the first fruit set in the garden! Look at this little beauty!

Is that not the cutest little guy you’ve ever seen? I’m one proud Poppa, that’s for sure.My only concern is that the plants themselves are still pretty small. I’d really like to see them start to fill out some more, but they are growing pretty steadily, so I won’t complain.  This shot also shows off my not-so-hard-to-see drip tape. I’m not sure who thought designing garden drip tape in bright turquoise was ideal. They are lucky it works so well.

I took a photo of the bed-side of my new irrigation system that I wrote about a few days ago. This is the bright drip tape I mention above in all of its glory. In this photo I’d had the tape facing up, which sprays small streams of water 3 feet into the air. I’ve since turned the face down to act as soakers, not sprayers, on the tomato bed.

Most of my plants are doing pretty well so far. The few days near 90 has caused my spinach to start bolting. I snipped the seed heads off and now the temps are back to normal, highs in the low 70s.

I think one of my bigger problems, especially once it starts to get hot in earnest, is consistent watering. Most vegetables need not only lots of water, but regular and consistent watering. Since I know I’ll fail at that, I decided to let my home automation computer do it all for me. I found this idea over on the cocoontech.com forums.

	Start out with a standard sprinkler valve. These are small solenoids that turn water on and off to in-ground sprinklers. It run off 24 VAC power, and sell for about $13 at Home Depot. HD sells the power adapters for about $15 as well.
	The valves have threads that are different from standard garden hose threads, so you’ll need two adapters, one for either end. One male and one female. The friendly people at the ‘Depot can help you find the right ones if you decide to do this yourself.
	Pick up some teflon tape for about $1 while you are there, then wrap all of the threads. I believe the standard is to wrap it three times around.
	Next up is to attached the whole thing to the outdoor faucet. This is a bit different than how its normally used. These valves are mounted in a box in the ground and mounted horizontally, not vertically like this. It works fine though.
	I have two different bed groups that I need to water, and they all get watered at the same time, so I installed a splitter. Here I’m testing with a small flow of water to make sure there are no leaks. I also tested with the splitter closed but the faucet on full blast to test the set up under pressure. I let it sit like this for half an hour or so and it was bone dry.
	I happened to have lucked out because I have a power outlet right next to the faucet. I’m not sure if its such a good idea, so I’m going to move the power supply to the inside of the garage (which is what’s on the other side of that wall) just to be safe, but for testing this worked well. The little white box is an X10 Appliance Module that allows me to turn all of my irrigation systems on and off by either remote or on computer controlled schedule.

On the other ends of these garden hoses are t-tape irrigation drip hoses. Like the title says, this is phase 1. The next phase will be run underground PVC sprinkler pipes down to the different beds for permanent placement. With the garden hoses you have to remove them every time you mow the yard, so the underground pipe is really the only way to go. You could bury the hose I guess, but I doubt it would last more than a couple of winters. PVC is the right way to do it. I’ll do up a post on that when I can get it done in the next few weeks.