Harvest picture

I braved the heat (3 steps outside my front door), to pick some tomatoes yesterday.  My tomatoes have done quite well so far.  I can't say the same for my peppers.  A few moments ago I picked the only four jalapenos that were anywhere near big enough.  I hope they will be enough for some decent salsa.  The zucchini is destined for bread and muffins.  The pattypan squash will probably be grilled or sauteed alongside some chicken for dinner tonight.  The pathetic onions are some of the only ones I managed to salvage from my sorely neglected back garden.  The whole thing got so overgrown that we put about 30 meat chickens in there a couple evenings ago to hopefully eat some of it down (though I suspect they are more likely to just poop on everything really well).  I pulled the brussels sprouts before letting the chickens loose so those will be dinner tonight as well.

My new Easter Egger girls finally started laying (well, at least two of them).  Their eggs are a very nice medium green color.  If they could just figure out to lay them in the nest box instead of the middle of the coop where I practically have to crawl in to get them.





Anyone want some zucchini?  We have plenty of extra...

Lettuce Gutters

I got this idea from a gardening forum I belong to.  Someone had posted a picture of gutters that had been mounted on the side of a house and were being used to grow lettuces and other shallow-rooting plants.  I thought it was a great idea that would fill a blank spot on the front wall of our house.  We modified it to look a bit more decorative and keep the gutters from touching the house itself and therefore trapping water against the house and possibly causing a problem. 

Here is the wall we wanted to put the gutters on.




Dave started by mounting two 4x4 posts to the wall.




Then put 2x4s going across to support the gutters.




Attached the gutters to the 2x4s.




We didn't put a gutter on the top row because it would have been too high to comfortably plant, water, and harvest.  We didn't put holes in the bottom for drainage because we thought that it would dry out too much in the hot weather we get here but we should have.  The first planting, things didn't sprout because underneath the very top layer of soil, the dirt stayed too wet.  I will be planting pictures again once it is all sprouting but that will have to wait until fall since it is too hot to try and plant lettuce now.