Last Friday our dwarf pea plants were four feet tall and they had beautiful little white flowers all over. Two days later, almost every one of the flowers was sporting a 3″ pea pod.

I’d never seen anything grow so fast. If only the rest of our garden kept such a pace.

The beets are too small to eat just yet, but the leaves really are just like red spinach. Tonight we had our first salad made entirely of greens from the yard.

Our neighbor’s tomatoes are very large and already producing many small green fruits. Ours are still less than a foot tall and only the largest of them is flowering. From what I gather from talking to him, I brought the plants outside too soon. They also don’t get nearly as much reflected heat and light as his plants since his are about four feet from his yellow house.

Hydroponics
The original blower I built for the fog hydroponic rig was a simple $7 desk fan that I put inline with the fog stream. It did a good job for a time, but it was destined to fail from the moment it was submerged in supersaturated air.

When it eventually did fail, there was rust on the brushes and every part of it looked like unhealthy electronics. When I got around to replacing it, most of my strawberries had died, but my loofah plants hadn’t yet sprouted so there is still hope for them.

I purchased a nice 60CFM blower, ActiveAir model FN60SYS. Placed on the return side of the fogger, this fan draws leftover moisture in from the plant bays and forces it through the fog bucket with plenty of energy.

In fact, the blower had so much energy that I built a control box with a Home Depot fan speed control knob, a spare grounded power cord, an outlet, and a small electrical enclosure. This allowed me to dial down the airflow until there wasn’t excess pressure inside the bucket causing the water to splash about. Interestingly, decreased airflow translated into increased fog output as there was less turbulence in the chamber forcing the fog back into the water.

Pictures coming soon.

Garden
The peas are now 3 feet tall and are flowering. Some of the onion greens are 1cm wide. The pumpkin plants are getting quite large, and the beets have me seeing lots of red.

In the hanging plants, three of the tomato plants are taking off. No flowers yet, but they should be budding by this time next week. The lettuces are stunted because I didn’t put the light close enough to them as they germinated. They grew long and lanky so they don’t have the strength to produce a solid head. That said, some of them are getting quite leafy and would certainly serve a salad for two.

New comers in the garden include the loofah and my “pickle pot”. The loofah are useful as a medium to hold hydroponic starts in place, so I’ve planted about six of them around a 5′ plant support. Several of them have sprouted and we should see vines soon.

The pickle pot contains pickling cucumbers around the edge and dill in the center. Both have had a slow start but are now taking off quite nicely.

Now that it has finally warmed up in Seattle, we should be seeing some real garden progress. With any luck, one of the melon plants that I’d written off as dead will spring back to life and we’ll have something sweet to go with our beets, peas, lettuce, and onions.

Fog hydroponics shopping list
I’ve recently completed the second phase of my ultrasonic fogger based hydroponic rig. Here are the rough outlines of what I did along with some pictures of the rig.

The device consists of the following major materials:

• 6″ desk fan
• 1″ sump pump flexible tubing
• 1″ PVC pipe, valves, T joints, L joints
• Mainland Mart M0003 ultrasonic fogger (vaporizes 300ml water/hr)
• 5 gallon bucket
• Several long planters and their decorative trays
• Several feet of 1/4″ adhesive foam window insulation
• 2-3 luffa sponges

Lessons learned
Do not add hydroponic fertilizer to the water. It will corrode the fogger discs and perhaps the fogger body itself.

With a fogger as powerful as the one above, either be prepared to make a large rig. The 3 bays I have aren’t really enough. I’ll probably have to build another two to mape proper use of all of the vapor I’m creating.

You’ll have to provide a means for all of the water that collects in the bottom of the bays to drain away or it will collect and stagnate. If you plan to return it to the fogger reservoir, be sure to filter it!

After experimenting with several ways to hold the plants into the growth trays above the fog, I’ve settled on luffa bits. Luffa sponges are the fibrous “skeleton” of the luffa plant. They seem to be resistant to mold and roots just love to take a firm grasp of this stuff.

Slugs
With my fences deployed, I have discovered that its 1″ mesh is no match for my newest arch: the slug.

My garden advisor and mother in-law suggested a product called Deadline. In my enthusiasm to stop these slimy jerks from eating my thriving pumpkins and very last watermelon plant, I rushed out and bought a large bottle. I then proceeded to apply most of its 12 ounces; too much by my advisor’s reckoning.

The scene the next morning was horrific. There were bodies strewn everywhere. As it turns out, Deadline is not only a slug killer, it is also a powerful slug attractant. There were no less than a dozen slugs, all keeled over after their last meal.

The next day, it was even more gruesome. There were more fresh kills, but in every place where a slug had lain the previous day was now just a small pile of jelly. It was as if the slugs’ skin had evaporated and its innards were nothing more than egg whites.

This made me feel good.

I realize that I probably shouldn’t take joy from the eviscerating death of a literally mindless pest, but I’ve developed a parental attachment to my garden. After all, what would you do if slugs came in the night to eat your children?

I thought so.

For the past week, I’ve been out of town in Chicago. In the meantime, my wife watered the indoor garden, had the mower repaired, and (probably) continued to throw her sandwich crusts in the front yard to attract crows (we’re not trailer, I swear).

Lawn Mower
Last week, I thought the mower may have a cracked block due to the profuse oil leak from the air intake filter. When Emily took the mower into the shop, the repair man said he’d charge a $20 inspection fee and then roll that charge into the repair charges if needed.

She spent less than an hour in the shop before leaving, having only spent six dollars. That day, several important things were learned:
1) When buying a used mower, always assume poor maintenance. I replaced the spark plug in January, but I never replaced the air filter.

2) Apparently, you can’t possibly generate enough torque to properly install a lawn mower blade with any wrench shorter than two feet. Though it may be easier to remove the blade and take it in yourself for sharpening, the gent we dealt with indicated that you should just bring in the whole mower. It won’t cost any extra and you won’t have to deal with problem #3 either…

3) Finally, you can’t roll a mower on its side. The oil will drain into the air filter, then get above the cylinder and create billowing clouds of oil smoke and cause oil to sputter out of the muffler. Oops.

So, in conclusion, know what you are doing before you fiddle with your mower. Odds are good that you didn’t crack the block and that you may not need to buy a whole new one when the old one starts acting up.

Yard
The second Weed & Feed application I put down last weekend (two weeks after the first application) worked extremely well. Yesterday, I raked the tree debris from beneath the trees and re-seeded these areas. With luck, we’ll end the summer with a fairly nice yard with all of the low spots patched and filled.

Garden
The garden had become quite green in the week I’d spent away. Unfortunately, most of the green was weeds.

I spent about 5 hours hand-picking undesirables out of the garden, throwing the weeds into a bucket and the grass blades out into the yard.

Current inventory:
Pumpkin A: 4 plants
Pumpkin B: 4 plants
Beets: tons of plants
Watermelon A: 1 plant (maybe)
Watermelon B: 1 plant
Canteloupe: 1 plant
Sunflowers: 1 plant
Peas: ~15 plants
Soy: 5 plants
Onions: ~5 plants

Indoors
Inside the house, I still have strawberries, hanging tomatoes, several tomato starts, and several other sprouts growing.

The cat has discovered and destroyed the trays of lettuce, dill, and cucumbers. I disconnected the hydro rig for a few days and managed to kill off three strawberry plants. Of those, one has shown signs of new life emerging from the dead leaf matter. Perhaps the others will come back as well.

The tomatoes are doing very will now. The ones closest to the grow lights have grown rather large and I believe it is about time to move them outside. Some other tomatoes that have been farther from the lights are still about the same size as when I transplanted them. I’ll move those ones into the place of the now outdoor planters.

While I was away, my new industrial fog maker arrived. This one will produce several times the amount of mist. Now I can finally complete the fogger project and get employ all three growth bays.

I was mowing the lawn today when the mower started making clanging noises. I stopped the engine and turned it on its side to check for blockages. Not finding any, I righted it, started it up again, and this time a white cloud billowed out of the exhaust. I inspected the engine from above and found oil pouring out of the air intake filter.

I think this is bad.

The engine still runs strongly, though a little rough and with a definite clang with each compression cycle. I’m guessing some internal engine component has gotten below the piston or maybe part of the engine has cracked (though it is still able to maintain compression).

Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure part of the engine cracked. When hand-rotated, there is a “sloosh” noise with each stroke that sounds like the piston plunging into a pool of oil. I’m pretty sure you only hear that when the thing has about bitten the dust.

I do like the idea of working on small engines, but I think I’m going to shelve this mower and consult the latest Consumer Reports magazine which just rated the latest lawn mowers. Hopefully I can get one with variable engine speed and a simplified deck height switcher. This one has just one engine speed and a very rudimentary power drive.

I can say that having your mower blades sharpened was a great idea. I was able to jaunt through grass that would previously bog down the engine. I could get a full mulch in a single pass instead of backtracking over each cut I’ve made. The sharpened blade was nearly knife sharp. The factory blades aren’t even butter-knife sharp, so it might be a good idea to get your blade sharpened even if your mower is fairly new.

Last night I happened to find a 50′ x 3′ roll of plastic mesh fencing with 1″ square holes. It cost me $10 and will cover my garden perfectly when laid out in two strips, side-by-side. Now I’ll be able to remove the garden cloth which ought to be a boon because I’m pretty sure it’s not good for these young plants to be smothered like this–even if it is for their own protection.

Indoors
Due to the unseasonably cold spring so far, I have opted to keep my upside-down tomato planters inside until I am confident the sprouts have taken firm root. Out of 7 hanging planters, six of them had at least one sprout survive the first week. I probably broke the root of the sprouts that dying.

I have plenty of starts to spare, so I re-planted the dead sprouts and put some more lights up for all of the plants.

This photo shows the plants hanging above a mirror so the tomatoes below can get as much light as the lettuce above.

Outdoors - Yard
The dandelion killer I used did a really good job of suppressing the flowers and seed puffs, though most of the leafy foliage is still around. I’ll lay down another layer of the dandelion product this week and fill up yet another wheelbarrow with dandelions.

Hopefully I’ll have the yard to a point where I can reseed it soon.

The front yard, which I stripped bare, re-leveled (no new dirt), and re-seeded last June is looking as lush as ever. A spray with that same Weed & Feed did a great job knocking back the crab grass and dandelions while leaving the grass unharmed.

Our lawn mower came with our house. It’s a pretty good Crafstman model; it has power drive, but it only has one blade speed. Anyway, I just checked the blade for the first time on Saturday. As it turns out, I hadn’t been cutting the grass so much as battering it with a cutting surface the equivalent of a gnarled coat hanger.

I removed the blade and took it to my local mower shop for sharpening. It’s only about $8 for sharpening and $17 to replace this particular blade. The guy at the shop said it was far from the worst he’d seen (apparently some people like to mow their gravel too), and that this clearly had a few sharpenings left in it before it needed to be replaced. I’ll probably get the blade back tomorrow and give my yard the first proper mowing its had in a while.

Garden
I found that my tent-style netting was doing no good. Apparently the creature that had acquired a taste for my watermelons and onions was small enough to creep under the 8″ tall tent and between several 3″ spaced wires to continue gnoshing on my tender fruit sprouts.

I decided to stake the tent to the ground with enough slack for the new plants to push up against it with minimal resistance. My soy beans are doing nicely this way; they’re now more than a foot long. The other plants are surviving, though I’ll have to rethink this soon because I can’t go this route all summer. Weeding and watering are problems as-is. I may have to invest in a chicken wire tunnel for the whole garden.

As for the other seeds, I’m not seeing any action on the pumkins, beets, or sunflowers. I am seeing several peas sprouting, so they’ll require some cages in a few weeks.

Jerk Pests and Their Jerk Hunger
I have seen the enemy… and it likes watermelons. And onions.

Okay, I haven’t necessarily seen the enemy, but I did spot a squirrel, a crow, and a robin all making advances on my garden as I stepped into the back yard to see how my little green beauties were doing.

Foul beasts unknown had torn asunder no less than six watermelon sprouts and two onion starts. The watermelons are unlikely to survive, but the onions may yet live. I don’t have enough sprouts in reserve to replenish all of the downed plants, so hopefully the ones they ate (the tallest, greenest, and fattest sprouts) would have turned out to be the ones that would have produced poisonous, spikey fruit.

Pest Control
Instead of deciding to stake out the back yard with an airsoft pistol and wait for the culprit to return to the scene of the crime, I immediately dashed to Skyy Nursery and purchased some garden knit to hopefully keep out my would-be aggressors.

And then I sat in the yard with the airsoft gun.

Seed Scores
As mentioned several times in the past, I planted a large number of sprouts and was met with varying degrees of success. These are the results of my planting (before the slaughter of Cinco de Mayo).

Two of these varieties were seeds packed for the 2006 season. See if you can guess which ones.

As you can see, the edamame and the Sweet 100 tomatoes have the worst record. I believe I may have used bad watering technique on the edamame, but the plants that did grow are as long as eight inches right now. If these ones don’t survive the cool soil (they prefer 70 degrees), I might try again but keep them indoors with the hydroponics.

The Hales Best and Striped Klondike were the seeds from 2006. They fared far better than I expected, so I’m glad I hadn’t thrown them away. The peas I planted outdoors yesterday are also from the same year. We’ll see how they do down the road.

I checked the garden this morning as I left the house. I noticed an unnatural cylindrical hole in the ground and didn’t have to look far to see what came out of it.

One of my 4″ Charleston watermelon starts had been yanked out, pod and all. Whatever took it must have been a small creature because there were no signs of digging; it dragged the pod only a couple of feet before eating the rest of my precious plant. We don’t have many squirrels in our yard, but we have a lot of crows who love the crawly treats in the garden dirt.

Fortunately I have a few backups left in the grow lab that weren’t garden ready yet. I’ll replace the pod when the next available start is ready.

I’ll keep an eye on the plants for predation over the next few days. If this continues, I’ll have to net the garden.