Home And Garden

A teacher's life can be quite hectic between Monday and Friday and some days i get a little guilty as I enjoy one more day off or my usual afternoon at home before I go in for my night shift. Layne spent a good part of Saturday afternoon napping, her precious iPhone never too far away..She is counting down the days to summer vacation which starts in mid June in Monroe County, and then there will be weeks of free time, time to allow kids to be at home to bring in the harvest(!). Very 19th century, I'm sure. Cheyenne joined in the favorite family pastime.It takes a fair amount of time to keep watering the plants this drought season. It's hot (95 degrees) and dry out there.Our tomatoes are still producing a fair bit of fruit and I have had mixed success keeping the iguana away. They have torn up my eggplants and bell peppers most annoyingly despite my best efforts with Neem oil and garlic powder repellent.

The plants Therese bought, on her visit from Paris, are flourishing. The jasmine flowered and faded but the vines are strong.Heavy rain drowned the bougainvillea but I am notorious for killing off those hardy plants. I could never grow them in California where habitually they flourish.The iguanas seem to have made a bed out of the flowers. I am patrolling with my pellet gun but they are the very devil to catch napping. This lot are doing quite nicely. I have fresh head of lettuce growing in the Earthbox and so far I have kept it iguana-free.

I hope Therese comes back next year for some more plantings.

Gardening Envy

The boys picked me up at my house so we could take all three dogs to No Name Key for a sunny afternoon walk. Chuck patiently followed this elderly Vespa at 35mph on the Overseas Highway. I have seen the Vespa parked at Big Pine and spoken to the owner who uses it regularly, though this was the first time I'd followed him. I admired his devil-may-care ability to enjoy the ride at ten miles an hour under the speed limit. When I tried to ride a ghastly slow Stella 150 I was always pulling onto the shoulder to let traffic go by. We got to No Name in the end and met the local inhabitants:And we took a very pleasant walk which quite tired out the Vizlas, Zuzu and Tootie.
Cheyenne sprawled in the back behind Wayne and chewed on her host's rawhide. She likes to make the point that she feels like she is the alpha dog around here. It was a glorious sunny day,a fine time to be out and about and i was grateful to Wayne and Chuck for dragging me out into it. This is the bridge connecting No Name to Bog Pine over Bogie Channel.Soon enough we were back home watching other hardier souls take to the water on a windy day.My vegetable patch got the third degree from Wayne and Chuck. We introduced them to Earthboxes and now they are experts and wanted to see what kind of cock-ups we'd made. My big issue once again is iguana attacks on my vegetables and those dinosaurs are starting to piss me off big time. They climb everything, chew everything down to a nub and they run at the merest hint of trouble. I've tried stalking them and I've managed to shoot two with my air gun but one is only allowed to shoot on one's own property and I desperately afraid of shooting across the canal, which fear crimps my style. besides I'd rather they just stayed away and minded their own business elsewhere. The problem is they have no natural predators and they lay eggs as copiously as ants.This is my third attempt this winter and so far, touch wood the plants seem to be growing unmolested. Wayne and Chuck haven't yet exposed their boxes to the iguanas that cross their lawn but when the brutes discover their plants they too will be at risk. At the moment the boys are being rather smug...Better living through chemistry is my philosophy and I have been trying anti iguana sprays for my plants. The best we have used is called Iguana Rid but it is horribly expensive, 20 dollars a quart so we tried a new local formula. It's said to discourage iguana from crossing anything it covers but it never worked for us. That was two crops of plants that got et. #$%@&! Lisa told me about a home made concoction she has used to great effect.The formula is simple enough, a dose of garlic powder, Neem oil and off you go. In consultation with my wife we decided to add cayenne pepper to the mixture to give the bastards something else to think about. My wife is fussy about the proportions (which I can't precisely remember) but we let the pepper and garlic sit in the water for a while to infuse it properly. I pour a generous dollop of Neem oil into the sprayer and then using paper towels to filter the mixture I pour it through a funnel. This whole bottle of Neem oil which should be good for half a dozen bottles of spray costs just eight dollars at Home Depot.It smells ghastly, like decayed dog piss but at these prices i can spray stuff to my heart's content.And so far my plants remain uneaten...The broccoli and pepper are flourishing......and the lettuce is a favorite meal of the wretched iguanas.I'm hoping there's shade enough so that the lettuce won't get bitter.I wanted to re-use a dangling Topsy Turvy but unfortunately the plastic had become rather thin and weak. I had a tomato plant I needed to find a home for, so I wrapped the container in a plastic soil bag, added some gorilla tape and called it done. Ugly but functional. The boys were polite enough not to comment on it's appearance.However Chuck couldn't help but gloat. After they got home I received an e-mail titled simply "We have a tomato!" And so they do as evidenced by the attached photo:I will too, one day......if only I can keep the damned iguana away.Irony of ironies, Chuck asked if he could please borrow my container to spray his plants down "just in case." That made me feel better.

Earthbox

Sometimes it's worthwhile having friends, even if they live in New Mexico. Bruce (2009 Triumph Tiger) and Celia wrote to let me know that winter is closing in on Santa Fe and they are putting away their Earthboxes, which is about the time Key West residents start thinking about planting.Bruce told me about these planters he had researched and I was keen to try them. However by the time he was planting his, our growing season was pretty much over as the heat of summer bore down upon us. It is actually possible to grow stuff in summer I think but it will take some more practice with judicious use of shade in the hottest months. My key lime tree did splendidly and we squeezed limes into our drinks all summer long. A couple of weeks ago my wife and I planted some broccoli seeds and bell pepper seeds and we decided it was time to try transplanting them. Into our brand new Earthboxes. The first thing was removing all the labels stuck to the boxes including the extremely difficult to remove label stuck on the screen that fits across the bottom of the box. There is a place in hell for whoever thought to stick an advertising label here:My wife got the hair dryer on it and I peeled with my finger tips and a knife blade and eventually we got almost all of it off. Had someone from Earthbox been on my deck at the time they would have been lucky to have escaped with their scalp. Then I stuck the casters on the bottom so we can roll the planter around at will, and very nicely they work too, especially as tow of them have brakes to prevent ruanways...
We bought the planters from the helpful people around Mile Marker 100 in Key Largo, known as Holiday RV's (305 451-4555) and at around $65 a pop for the organic models we were glad to see they came with all necessary stuff, as we shall see, for a season's planting.

The Earthbox is a clever idea, as it supposedly waters itself from a reservoir in the bottom of the box. The screen keeps the earth from falling into the water and the whole shebang regulates itself thanks to a small hole drilled above the floor. When one pours in too much water the excess flows out here, indicating the reservoir is full. And that is that for watering, the plants absorb as much moisture as they need on their terms .
It seems the plants water themselves thanks to some form of osmosis where the piles of dirt in the corners stay moist in the water reservoir and wick the water up to the roots:All the gardener has to do is keep the reservoir filled using the black tube wedged into one corner. And to start the process fill the bottom of the box with about one and a half watering cans to get the water to flow out of the overflow hole...It's really no hard to assemble the Earth Box as long as you have a couple of gallons of water and one and a half large bags of potting mix (not, for some reason, potting soil). Don't ask me, I just do as I'm told. And there are easy to follow instructions on line at http://www.earthbox.com/
and my wife printed them out so we could follow them step by step the first time out.

With the screen in place and soil in the corners and all nice and wet we simply piled dirt on top of the screen not minding if some fell through into the water below.And then there is a little white packet to open with something called dolomite which gets spread around like snowflakes:It's all part of the Earthbox package and we spread it around, my wife and I before mixing some more dirt on top and moistening it down.

Once the box is full of nicely moistened earth one makes a little mound down the middle and fills it with the contents of the second packet which is fertilizer. The idea is that the fertilizer will propagate itself for the entire growing season and it sits in the middle of the planter where it won't get wet,which means you can't use water soluble fertilizers. Like I said, I prefer using the supplies that come directly from Earthbox on the theory they know what they are doing.

So by this stage we have a plastic Earthbox loaded with water and dirt and half a dozen seedlings planted and ready to go.Here's the other trick part of the Earthbox, not only does it water itself, it also weeds itself. It comes with a plastic cover, white side out for hot climates, summer in Florida or Arizona, say, or black side out for cooler climates. With the cover in place and some dastardly difficult holes to cut for the plants to stick out you have one completed Earthbox planter:The cover keeps the rain off the fertilizer an prevents weeds from growing and with just some water to to fill the reservoir from time to time the plants should grow on their own.Earthbox recommends 6 to 8 hours of sun a day, but I am going to keep the box partly shaded to start with as the sun is hot but so far we seem to have lift off.

We filled two boxes with our first batch of seedlings and I have high hopes for them especially as they should be away from the deprivations of the iguanas which did huge damage to my summer beans, wrecking the bed completely. I hope that up here with some judicious application of anti-iguana repellent on the stairs leading to the deck, my plants will grow in peace. We have three more boxes to fill including one with a trellis supplied by Earthbox to grow some beans. I m looking forward to seeing this work.Here is the completed box en route to it's alloted, partially shaded corner. and not one picture of a Triumph Bonneville included.