Have I caught you up yet?

Last semester, I gave an assignment to my students to blog about their research papers as they wrote them. It was an exercise in organization, frustration management and group therapy. Whereas they did enjoy the process, as with everything that involves teenagers, they stated that I was hypocritical for loving blogs so much and yet not having one myself.

I do love blogs; I follow the ones I read religiously. Blogging can seem so overused especially if only for a limited purpose like, say, gardening. Again, please insert whiny teenager voice pointing out the hypocrisy here being that all I follow ARE gardening blogs AND what's worse, this thing here that I've started looks awfully like a blog to me. :)

I figure, hey, give it a shot. Besides, it's keeping me busy and away from grading those research essays! No one really has to see the blog except for me. Maybe in time I'll send the link to a few friends or family...most of whom would most likely laugh amusedly, pat me on the back, look sympathetic, sigh and move on.

Below this post, or rather you'll have to look to the side for the very first post, you'll find the goings on of the last year's transformation from container gardening to SFG. Most of these postings originated as posts of mine on GardenWeb's SFG forum. I tried to date then accordingly.

In today's world, the weather is really throwing us for a loop. After weeks of weather where the low was a measly 40 or above, we're having two days of below freezing temps. Last night it only seemed to get below freezing for an hour or two. Tonight is going to be worse.

I've moved all of the peppers, eggplant, SSPeas and other tomatoes and beans in containers either in the garage or basement. Hopefully they can all survive the two days without light. I was conned into planting tomatoes and peppers in the SFG by the man and the boy. It was far too early and we all knew it. I put plain straw over the peppers which seemed to work well last night. One of the green bell has a beautiful flower about to open, so it will make me sad to loose it if it doesn't work as well as tonight. For the tomatoes, which each had several flowers open yesterday morning, I decided on a different approach. I read somewhere that one man had put plastic grocery bags and then 5 gallon buckets over his toms and they survived low temps. I thought to add the bit of straw on the toms, the bag over the straw and the bucket over the bag over the straw. (sing:and the green grass grows all around, all around...) The sun is out now, even though the highs are only in the high 40's, so I'm hoping the buckets and straw are soaking in that heat and not cooking the plants underneath We'll see if it works.

I pulled two radishes to put in our dinner tonight. I actually pulled a third one, but you could see where the root maggots that decimated my peas had gotten into that radish as well. So far, the rest we've pulled have seemed fine. Hopefully it was an isolated incident.

Yesterday I took the truck and trailer to the landscape supplier and got myself a yard of what they called "plant mix" it was billed as a combination of compost, mushroom compost, humus and native soil "perfect for raised bed gardens". I unloaded the entire trailer last night and I must say, I wasn't too impressed. It was chunky and most of the clods were what seemed to be straight GA clay. I broke those up as much as I could as I was unloading it. The yard didn't quite fill up as much as I needed it to, so I sent the man today to go get me a yard of straight compost. We'll see what that looks like when we add it together. IF I can add it together. I need to empty the trailer tonight as the man needs it tomorrow, but I only have one dinky shovel and no wheelbarrow so it's one shovel load at a time.

That, and it's bleedin' cold out there with the wind whipping like it is. If you've got a frost warning like we do, good luck tonight!!!