I think I'm doing better this year with my veggie gardening. Here's this week's report.
Carrots are sprouting.
Lettuce might be sprouting - should know for sure in a couple days.
Spring onions are sprouting.
Zucchini may be sprouting - again, I'll know in a couple days.
Mini greenhouse has nothing sprouting yet, but all the seeds in there say 10 days or more.
Cauliflower is looking a little limp, so I watered it twice today.
Broccoli is about the same as the cauliflower.
Strawberries are down to one plant out of the six I planted. That one is looking pretty good, though. I've still been watering the other five in the vain hope that something will still come of them.
The apricot tree and nectarine tree are starting to drop their petals now, and the leaves are coming out. The smaller apricot tree is looking pretty much dead, so at some point I think I'll rip it out. Same with the former peach tree, although that one needs a saw to come down, or a strong wind.
Our bottlebrush is finally blooming as well. And I finally got around to pulling all the weeds out of the flower patch next to the driveway, but all we have left there are pink flowers. Here's hoping the other colours (red, orange, maybe white & yellow?) come up again next year.
So I've got this grand dream of growing all my fruits & veggies at home, because I'm cheap. It's working okay for oranges & apricots, because those were here when we moved in. And it worked all right for peaches too, because we had those when we moved in, but that tree died last year. And last year I tried a veggie garden, but the only thing that came up was ONE rockmelon (canteloupe) seedling, which a bird ate. So as you can imagine, I wasn't too happy, and gave up fairly quickly. Hopefully not so this year. Here's some pictures of what I've done so far.
This is my new veggie patch. I dug it, edged it, AND planted it all in one day, on Wednesday. If you look close you might just see the clothes pegs marking the rows. Left to right: carrots, cos (Romaine) lettuce, spring onions, zucchini.
And this is a modified greenhouse in a shoebox. A friend on a forum told me how to do this. She said a clear plastic bag, but I didn't have any, and all they had across the road was some Glad wrap. So I took the shoe box and a couple egg cartons and away I went. Top carton: capsicum (peppers) and cucumber. Bottom carton: rockmelon & watermelon.
This, and the previous picture, I did this morning. Here we have some actual growth. I bought these seedlings at Big W the other day, total spur of the moment decision. Left to right: cauliflower, broccoli, strawberries.
And this is our nectarine tree. When we moved in it was much larger, but last spring, the wind knocked it over. There were a few little sprigs growing off the bottom that Darrin left when he chopped the rest of it down, and now they're flowering. Since the only essential difference between peaches and nectarines is one has fuzz and one doesn't, I can live with that.
So in honor of that, I'm trying to pirate an old Swirling Eddies album on mp3, but sadly I can't find a file that contains all 21 tracks. The most I can find is 15. Now, true, most of the 6 that aren't in the torrent file are on The Berry Vest, but that's not the point.
The last few nights (about a week), Caleb's been getting a really snotty nose overnight, so of course when he wakes up in the night, he has more trouble getting back to sleep. I was having similar trouble, but I chalked it up to too much refined carby stuff. I figured, hey, he's got half my genes, he's probably suffering from the same thing I am. But guess what? It's not that (although that certainly wouldn't help). It's a cold. His first ever at 17.5 months. And we've both got it. So we had chicken soup for tea tonight instead of the enchiladas I was planning to make. He's coping with it really well though, except a) at night, and b) when I try to clean out his nose. And he was awake (more or less - every time I thought he was finally asleep he woke up again) from 5 am till about 7 am this morning, but then he slept till almost 10:30. No fever, just a nose thing so far, although I've thought a couple times he sounded a little hoarse. But he's otherwise happy, which is great.
So I sold something on eBay today for the first time in I can't even remember how long. My item sold just hours after I listed it with the "Buy it now" option. So yeah, I'm pretty happy about that. And she paid right away, so that was good. So I went to leave feedback for her, and there was this popup message in the page saying that buyers can no longer leave neutral or negative feedback. Come again?
They claim it's to encourage honesty from buyers, because SOME buyers were concerned that if they were honest, the seller would leave them negative feedback. Well come on, what about the seller's right to be honest? What if the buyer really sucked, was rude about everything, or never paid, or never contacted them, or something like that?
Now don't get me wrong. I was going to leave positive feedback for my buyer anyway. And I'm normally a firm believer in the old saying "the customer is always right." But this is going WAY too far.
I have a better idea. Why don't they just ask both parties for their honest feedback, and not make any of it public till they've both given it? Secret ballot type thing. But oh no, they can't do that. That would actually make sense. And they're not after sense, they're after dollars. Ha ha ha ha...please don't shoot me. But yeah, you can't trust a company when it does things like that, and say you can only use OUR system of payment (or tries to and gets kicked back by the ACCC) when all along you've had a choice of several options.
And then hopefully some of my back pain, knee pain, and foot pain will go away. Ugh. Ever since Caleb was born I have all these new aches. It's annoying and I don't accept that I should just have to "put up with it." Which is why I see a chiropractor.
Of course, since I also KNOW my aches get better when I'm eating real food, I should do that more often, but do I?