The garden has been hard at work teaching me lessons. Let's see, on conventional side, here's how things are looking:
In the latest setup, we've got chicken wire poultry mesh in place, drip hoses laid down and the garden partially covered in mulch. Why only partially? It's not some attempt at A/B Testing, no, we simply didn't have enough spare mulch to cover the entire garden. (Looks like another Home Depot trip is in our future - argh). The drip hoses turn out to be a no-brainer to use. The weather hasn't been terribly hot, and the soil is doing a fine job of keeping the moisture in place, so we've only needed to run the hoses a few times. But doing so is far less annoying than configuring sprinklers.
If you look closely at how the chicken wire is being secured, you'll notice cable clips are doing the job. I saw pretty obvious evidence that something was rooting around in the garden, and I needed to plug the holes using whatever I had on hand.
Our tomato plants are growing well, so well that we've kind of sort of staked a few of them out. I assume we'll to get fancier as they continue to grow out. What a good problem to have.
On the X-Garden side of things, I've throw a few more seeds in containers to see if anything shakes out. Inspired by this article and this article, I went ahead and planted a few tea related seeds:
The green and yellow sticks represent rows of Camellia sinensis which is actually tea. The purple stick is a Lavender, and the blue is Blue Flax. This last one isn't tea related but was a freebie from the person sold me the lavender. At least one web article suggested soaking the tea seeds in water for 24+ hours, which I did for plants in green row. The plants in the yellow row are just tea seeds dropped in the ground.
This whole colored stick thing is me trying to be more organized. One challenge I'm learning from the larger X-Garden: because stuff is basically randomly planted, it's not possible to tell which sprouts are valuable plants and which are weeds that were blown in and seeded. Next year, I'm so color coding this bad boy.
The mint we planted (also part of the tea motif) is doing well enough:
And I'm especially excited about this Red Leaf Amaranth:
For weeks absolutely nothing grew in the planter, and slowly but surely, these plants have been coming to life.
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