Boulder photos!

Boulder photos are here! You all can see how many thousands of pounds of boulders we moved on Sunday morning now. Look how huge the loader we borrowed was. That greenhouse is NOT a small greenhouse, either. It was so huge that we were worried it might be illegal to drive it on the road. Luckily, we have a couple of CHP friends that got together and looked through their reference books to make sure we were okay "roading" it. They even called around to other people to confirm that it was legal. Thanks Josh and Byron!

We were so beat after finally getting the boulders in place that we didn't think to take a photo.

I'll try to remember to do that the next time I'm at the garden. This photo is of the largest boulder of the bunch, right before we rolled it out of the loader and into place. See those plants that are stuck underneath the boulder? Guess what those are. If you guessed poison oak, you are correct! Ding ding ding ding!!! We scrubbed ourselves down with a poison oak soap after handling that one. Luckily, it look like we all avoided getting a rash from it. I rinsed the boulder down yesterday, but I'm probably going to get some soap and a scrub brush on it too. Wouldn't be good to have kids climbing on it and then coming down with poison oak.

We have four raised beds for this year's spaghetti garden. The first bed Tiffany and her husband, Jonathan, filled with screened dirt and some sort of organic compost/soil from Phoenix Organics. The second bed they filled with half screened dirt, and half screened compost from the community garden. Some girl scouts planted tomatoes in the Phoenix bed, and basil, peppers and squash in the second. Since they were freshly transplanted from the greenhouse, and because it was still getting cold at night, we put row covers over them. Of course, the weather got hot (70 is hot compared to what we are used to) right after we did that. Tiffany watered the first couple of days, and I started on the third day. When I showed up on that 80 degree day, the poor tomatoes were roasting. Only one tomato hadn't wilted. The Phoenix soil had dried out like you wouldn't believe. The bed with the community garden compost was doing just fine. It is pretty interesting the difference between the two. I decided to leave off the row covers to keep them a little cooler, and just take the risk of them getting sunburned. By that evening all but two tomatoes had mostly recovered. So far the only plants that have gotten burned are the basil.

Yesterday, more girl scouts were supposed to show up to add soil and compost to the remaining two beds, and plant them. Unfortunately for Tiffany, they were a no-show. :( Instead of waiting another week for more kids to (maybe) show up, we're probably just going to go ahead and do it. Our growing season is too short to wait.

In other news, the sunflower seeds, for the sunflower house, are starting to sprout already! On Sunday while I was watering, I noticed that some of the seeds had floated up to the top of the soil. When I was poking them back down I saw that a couple had started to sprout. Yesterday even more of them were coming up.

The bean teepee had something sprouting, but as I am bad at plant identification, it could have been a weed for all I know. I think I'm going to get some gaillardia seeds and plant them around the teepee, too. There is extra space since the rototiller we used is 30" wide, and gaillardia are also very attractive to butterflies. They are also in the sunflower family, so it might help tie the different elements of the garden together.

That's all for today!

Rachel