Someone around here had a birthday this past week and there were a few roses left in the yard and some blooming field peas (from the cover crop put in last fall) to decorate the cake with... I don't have a picture of that but I do have a picture of the flowers .
After all the flowers were ripped off and the candles blown out. ... Yes.. it is really tall. Elly May thought it would be grand to combine all these layers to make one giant cake. Kind of ironic since the birthday girl isn't really supposed to be eating sugar.... ahem.... but she did taste a little....
And it was very very good...
The Nut Brown Ale in the second fermenter. After it ages awhile here we will have to bottle it... Oh the joy. My favorite part.
Here is a giant block of Grow-Coir or coco peat. Coconut fiber . It is a less acidic alternative to peat moss. I'm going to be making a soil mix for starting seedlings and coir holds an amazing amount of water and lightens up the planting medium . It comes in bricks or bales and you have to expand it with water. Supposedly you just pour water on and wait an hour. But we aren't that patient and had to start poking at it to make it happen faster.
It gets so fluffy.
Didn't think it would get that big did you?
Then we have another wheelbarrow full of sifted compost and then some sand. It was moist and it had been so long since I played in a sand box I couldn't help myself . We spent a ridiculous amount of time playing in it before we finally got around to mixing it in . My sand fish. I want a sand box again . People have those zen rock garden things that they rake through for relaxation and meditation or whatever they do with them. I want a sand box . Is 26 too old for one?
After I mixed all my ingredients together (which consisted of a hefty amount of compost, some plain garden dirt, coir, sand, vermiculite, volcanic pumice, dolomite lime, kelp meal, guano , and some bone meal ) , I added water and started making soil blocks.
I had some very interested observers who kept trying to be participants. They liked to eat my dirt. Guano is very tasty I hear. Or maybe it was the bone meal.
On a roll here
Those messy ones had been molested by various dog noses.... Thanks a lot guys. I now have 100 tomato plugs planted and 50 with chili peppers. Some of the tomatoes are already up! Yay!
And what have we hear? This is brewing nettle tea. You combine nettles and rain water (ideally) and stir every day til it stinks really bad . That is a few weeks. Then you dilute the mixture about 1/10 with water and foliar spray your seedlings/plants etc. Or use on the compost pile (it is really high in nitrogen) . It is very high in nutrients .
For some reason the boys LOVE to drink this stuff. Every time I uncover it to stir it they are right there chugging it down. I guess it is kind of like vitamin water for them. I just hope there is enough for me to use by the time it is ready. These are sissy, domesticated nettles . They still sting, but nothing like the ones you find up in our canyons and mountains along streams. We went and collected some of those the other day and the stings went through my gloves and I had welts on my hands 24 hours later and they were still stinging. Those were some serious nettles. Next time..... I'm taking gauntlet gloves... all the way to the elbow. Anyway , those are now in a much larger barrel and stewing in more rain water. There are more exciting things happening in the garden but I'll save that for another post.
