Kevin Harbin, Gardener

baby watermelon

I’ve been steadily watering my garden, except during out latest rainy spell. Anytime you want to feel good about gardening toss some beans in the ground. They do well almost anywhere.

I have a dozen or so tomatoes that are still green, I’m sure they’ll come along eventually. I picked a cayenne pepper, it’s doing ok despite being shaded out by two tomato plants. I have a tiny watermelon growing! I’m excited to get at it eventually. The pumpkins seem to be getting reato make a fruit here or there.

The corn didn’t turn out too well. Not very many kernals were fertilized. I don’t really have the space to do it, and I might not next year, unless I do a whole bunch in a larger area.

We’ve recently had some rain after the rain barrel finally gave out.

Everything is looking pretty good, except the Sugar Snaps which have dried out.

I planted my peanuts about 3 weeks late, but they seem to be coming in well enough.
The corn and pumpkins are all doing well.
I weeded over the weekend and took out tons grass that I had been neglecting. It looks pretty good now and I’ll try to stay on top of it better in the future.

Since a rabbit decided to eat all of the tomato and pepper plants that I planted I purchased replacements this weekend. I took the opportunity to also do a few up-keeping things I meant to do already.

I purchased four more landscape timbers to increase the depth that I’m capable of in Garden #2. To keep rabbits out I used 48″ rebar rods to anchor each corner, sinking each 12″ into the ground. Attached to the rods I have surrounded the plot with the same metal fencing I used to build the compost bin.

I’ve had this idea for a while: what if instead of bottling into bottles we did it into bags?

Boxed wines have been around for a while and have a stigma of being ‘cheap’.  For good reason, if a wine maker wants to keep the price down on his wine a good way to do it is to sell it in a box which weighs less and ships easier.

I had an opportunity to acquire a few bags from Corbett Canyon brand boxed wine. The bags are 3L, which is roughly (depending on how we fill) 4 regular sized bottles of wine.

The plastic tap are easily removed to allow access to the interior. I cleaned two bags with a sanitizer solution and left them to dry. When bottling last night we filled two bags and replaced the taps, attempting to remove all of the air, and put the bags back into the boxes they came from.

Apparently the taps do not hermetically seal. This could be an issue for long term storage. I’ll again update once we’ve tried some of the wine from the bags.

The tree in my front yard has a robins nest. The mommy robin didn’t much care for me taking this picture.

This is much preferable to the birds that are trying to make a nest in my dryer vent.

Yes, that is tinsel.