My all con­sum­ing love for Pixar con­tin­ues unabated.

Today is Blue Beanie Day. Where all peo­ple involved in web design, devel­op­ment and other sub-industries are asked to wear a blue beanie on their heads (dig­i­tal or oth­er­wise) to show sup­port for web standards.

There’s even a Blue Beanie Day Photo Pool for those who enjoy tak­ing pho­tos of themselves.

So much has hap­pened since the last post. Here’s the rundown:

Bugs and failure

The prop­a­ga­tion tray was a dead end. Only about a third of the trays sprouted and the few that did were snipped of their del­i­cate leaves before I moved them to the gar­den. Once in the gar­den it took about two days before I noticed that the zuc­chini was being slowly anni­hi­lated every night. The next night I went out to inspect the gar­den and saw a fam­ily of ear­wigs tag-teaming the plants. Not hav­ing any spray or bug­dust handy I picked them off one-by-one and flicked them over the fence. Before I could stock up on repel­lents the gar­den was attacked again and the  gar­den was left look­ing like a bar­ren wasteland.

Sorry, Try Again

I wasn’t look­ing for­ward to replant­ing the entire gar­den from scratch. I eschewed the prop­a­ga­tion tray and just dropped the seeds into the gar­den to see what would hap­pen. The plants only took around half as long to sprout this time, which was great!

The gar­den is look­ing really healthy now. The ear­wigs and other insects moved on once the orig­i­nal plants had died, so every­thing there has been able to grow in peace. (I still haven’t bought any­thing to pro­tect the garden.)

Water­melon and egg­plant are com­ing along well and the pot­ted tomato plant is fir­ing off a lot of flowers.

Today I added Stephan’s ice­burg let­tuce, a small pot of chives I’d grown from a packet bought at Coles and a small cherry tomato plant from one of my cowork­ers (Who appar­ently can’t get rid of the damn things quick enough).  Pro­vided we don’t have any more scorch­ing days for the next week or so they should set­tle nicely.

Home stretch

With only one week to go I won’t be fin­ish­ing Project Pri­mav­era with any of my own veg­eta­bles (or fruit if you’re being picky).  Luck­ily Abbots­ford Con­vent is hold­ing a Farmer’s Mar­ket next Sat­ur­day the 28th. The same day the project is com­ing to a head.

The plan is to wake up crazy-early that morn­ing, head to Abbots­ford for sup­plies, cook the sauce and then head to Mike’s house with a steam­ing Tup­per­ware con­tainer and maybe even some beer. It won’t be a dish grown by me, but it’ll still be my primavera.

I was right. All the seeds needed was a lit­tle love from old Mis­ter Sun. I didn’t realise how lit­tle they needed.

After just one day of blue skies and sun­light the water­melon finally sprouted. Egg­plant fol­lowed a cou­ple of days later and now I even have some oregano and basil shoots showing.

Sat­ur­day was the big day. I raked out the excess pea straw from the gar­den and knocked down the few clumps of manure to smooth things out. Wet­ting the soil down proved to be a bit of a prob­lem. I dumped around 20 litres of water into the gar­den n prepa­ra­tion for the seedlings, but it only man­aged to soak down around 3cm or so. I ended up dig­ging holes for the seedlings with a trowel, then pour­ing another 10 litres of water into them just to pre­vent the roots from dry­ing out.

Some­thing else I didn’t do with last year’s gar­den was prop­erly space out the plants. The gar­den is now a uni­form 5x3 grid.  Five zuc­chini plants run along the entire right hand side, three egg­plants sit in the front left quad­rant and three water­melon plants are up the back.

The zuc­chini place­ment is an exper­i­ment. I still don’t know how much sun is too much when it comes to them, so each plant gets a dif­fer­ent level of sun­light depend­ing on place­ment. The one up the very back stops get­ting sun­light around 2pm each day, the rest fol­low as the sun dips below the fence line. The egg­plant thrived up the front of the gar­den in full sun last time so there was no ques­tion about where they’d be. The water­melon died off fairly quickly once the sum­mer heat started blaz­ing, so I’m hop­ing that keep­ing them shaded for half the day will keep them alive long enough to get some fruit this year.

I should note that the gar­den still smells ter­ri­ble. Three weeks on and it smells like a pet­ting zoo. My Dad says: “The worse it smells the more plants love it.”  If that’s true then this gar­den will be amaz­ing once it’s fully grown.

I have a problem.

Two weeks after set­ting it up, my prop­a­ga­tion tray isn’t doing as well as I’d hoped. In fact the only thing that’s grow­ing is the zuc­chini plants. Every other sec­tion is still bar­ren dirt.

The crappy weather we’ve been hav­ing cer­tainly hasn’t helped. With the first two weeks of Octo­ber being com­posed of alter­nat­ing rain, hail, thun­der and light­ning. So much for it being the mid­dle of Spring.

I was hop­ing to plant them all out this week­end just gone, but I’ll give them a few more days. The local weather ser­vice is sug­gest­ing we’re in for good weather, so maybe, just maybe the seedlings might see fit to make an appear­ance. Fin­gers crossed.