The onions I planted never got bigger than a golf ball. The pumpkins were also disappointing, but now that I’ve stripped the rest of the garden down to the soil and clipped off a few juvenile pumpkin starts, the remaining large ones appear to be taking off.

I believe the reason for our sub-par growth was perhaps a bad soil mix. I laid compost down on top of the soil that was there when we bought the house, but I never tested that deeper soil to see if it needed any repair.

I have a soil testing kit that I’ll run some dirt through at some point. I may also take a few samples into Tilth, who apparently does soil sample testing as well.

Even the cat liked them. A lot.

Hydroponic Luffah Roots

Pickle Pot

Baby Pumpkin

Full Garden

Emily really enjoys the smell of the pumpkin flowers. She says they have a light lilac scent. We are also told they are very good to eat, but I find it hard convincing myself to chomp on something so pretty.

From the looks of things, I may soon have more flowers on my hands than I can possibly sniff away. I’ve already trimmed each plant down to 2-3 prominent vines (I couldn’t manage the recommended 1-2 vines) and now the remaining greenery has begun to shoot up big new flower buds at almost every joint. I’ll let those bloom and make a tasty dessert on Tuesday or so.

The pumpkins that have started to grow look like baby watermelons. The vines have also grown so long that I may have to give up a portion of my grass yard for the fruit to grow properly in the coming months.

It took quite a bit of trimming and negotiating to get the fast-growing vines untangled from the beets they had grown through, but I’ve successfully rerouted the remaining vines around the outside of the beet patch.

Beets
The beets are also doing quite well. We have passed the point where we can eat the greens (reds) as spinach and are now waiting for the veggies to grow to proper eating size.

While it lasted, the beet leaves were very tasty indeed. When I made several gallons of gumbo a few weeks ago, I included several beet leaves and they were a welcome addition to the stew.

Pickles
My pickle pot is coming along marvelously. The dill is about two feet high now and the cucumber vines are dangling down all around the edges of this large planter.

Tomatoes
Only one of the tomato plants is doing anything worthwhile right now.
All of the hanging plants are still languishing, while the one I planted upright is doing a fair job of keeping alive.

The one start we have that came from a store instead of from seed is growing quite nicely. It is about four feet tall and already has some small green fruit growing.

Hydroponics
Indoors, my hydroponics rig is doing very well. During the dry spell, all of the non-established plants died off, including the peppers, one of the lettuces, and all but two of the strawberry plants. The remaining plants are doing very well with my latest fog rig.

I have also planted several luffah seeds in the third hydro bay. They seem to be taking to it quite nicely. The roots grown with this hybrid hydroponic/aeroponic method are beautiful white structures with intricate fiber patterns. I’ll have to transform the lighting from horizontal to vertical soon in order for these loofah plants to take off as they are naturally viney and should grow to be six feet tall.

Photo credit: bebouchard

I understand that this is a spreading variety and that for some reason the black squirrels either push out or breed away the lighter colored ones once they appear. So, I guess the old saying is true: once you go black, you don’t go back.

They seem just as curious, hungry, and harmless as any old squirrel so I for one welcome our new ninja squirrel friends.

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.

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.

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.

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.