Some Doggy Photos New and Old

Little puppy in our living room.

Little puppy in the small area that connects all the rooms

Not so little puppy in the small area that connects all the rooms

A view from within the garden

Another view. At this point he was playing with a stick.

Transplanting Outdoors

Today I finally started transplanting plants outside in the garden. Below is the layout (projected and planted):

Green = Already planted.
Orange = Intended planting.
Blue = Open space



If you guys have suggestions please let me know. My mom recommended planting flowers, which I might do in one or two of the open spaces. Below are some pictures of what I did today:

 Here you can see the transformed and ready to plant garden! The white plastic there is to warm up the soil for tomatoes. I added the wooden frames today by taking apart a bed I had from some time ago. The red cups mark the transplanted seedlings. They protect them from the wind and too much sun. Not to mention birds etc. I can also cover them with another cup to protect them at night from too much cold or excessive rain. The closest 3 cups marks the location where I planted golden zucchini.

 Sideways view corresponding to the layout cartoon shown in the first picture.

Here is a closeup of the first block. The first row of 5 cups correspond to the Broccoli. The two beneath it are the butternut squash.

Stay tuned! Next post will be more about work. I've been working on this paper for months now but I've made some nice headway in the analysis. The first few posts are of-course going to be general discussing the problem and how to think about it.

Indoor Planting

I started planting indoor as suggested by the books. But I wanted to get a feel of direct planting so I planted some hard plants outdoor first. These plants were Golden peas, Bloomsdale spinach and Pablo lettuce. That was some time ago and they are taking their sweet time coming out (fingers crossed). I planted Broccoli, Butternut squash, Tequilla Sunrise peppers, Golden Zucchini, Egg plant, Matchbox Hot Peppers, Tomatoes, Dragon Carrots, St. Valery Carrots, Slobolt Lettuce, Parsley and Basil indoors. Below is a photograph of the first germination of Broccoli indoors!

Doggy Problem and Fencing the Garden

The biggest challenge was to create an environment that was doggy safe while I was digging. Since I'd have to protect the garden from rabbits anyway I decided to fence it. This is what it looked like:

Hopefully it gives an idea of the area. Following this I covered it up with mulch which comprised of leaves from fall and pine needles from the Christmas tree we had in winter. The latter helps in lowering the pH too! After all that these are some pics:

The arrangement of the beds isn't clear due to the leaves, but the garden is separated into two blocks. The block in the top picture corresponds to a series of 4 rows. Where as the block further away - a zoom of which is shown in the picture below - corresponds to 3 columns.

Garden Activity

Kelly and I had been talking about having a vegetable garden for a while. I was holding off cos of the work load, but now that things have settled down, I was able to start and make rapid progress.

There's a patch behind our garage that someone had used in the past for a garden. So I decided to continue with it, since it looked like a nice spot. I checked the sun levels and it's really good getting full sun throughout the day. The first row has some partial sun regions too which would be nice for shade plants.

Started with reading 2 book: Vegetable Gardener's Bible by Edward Smith and The Complete Vegetable and Herb Gardener by Karan Davis Cuttler. Both are good but the first one is more like a manual where the latter is more like a reference. I found myself looking at both, but more of Smith. So the first step was to figure out the pH and N,K,P levels. This I did using a soil testing kit. As it turned out the soil is very nice with medium to high N levels, K and P levels. The only problem is with the pH being a bit too alkaline, but that I read was fixable.


I first decided to go with French Double-Digging style.  The basic idea is shown below in the figure, but I decided to add a caveat based on Cuttler's book. I started by digging up the sod which is the first/top layer of grass growing in the garden area. I save this for between step A and step B shown below. Step A is just digging up a bed or a row (or column) of soil.The soil is kept aside. Following this I put the sod face down into the hole. Next, as shown in step B we dig up another bed and use that soil to cover up the first row. This is continued for all beds, with the soil from the first row being used to cover up the last row.