Upside Down Tomato Gardening

One of the challenges we have for our garden is lack of space. We have no in ground space to garden. So a little googling and we found out about upside down gardening. In our first attempt at it in 2007 I recycled some pallets left lying around by our good corporate citizens :)

When using pallets, I figured I could utilize everything but not use anything in touch with our soil except fresh clean wood. The following is a pictorial of our first year gardening upside down.


First couple pics show the upside down box without soil, ready to go.



























Next couple show soil in with some nice healthy tomato plants :) The other plants on the top are parsley and some thyme which seem to coexist nicely.




























One thing I underestimated in this adventure was the amount of soil required. If you think you have enough, double it :) We added some sides and a lot more soil towards the end of the season as the roots ate it all up. Added a couple of strings to keep the ends off the ground, and voila, we had 'matoes. :)
















I also did one tomatoe plant in a bag, seen below, it did very well, but wasn't as big as the other we believe because of a limited amount of soil.














And then we had fruit.....














Lets see how we do, and what we do in 2008.......
cheers
JJ

Gardening 2006 Contest

So there we were, our first year trying to do any gardening, and so TS says, enter this contest for greenest garden with our local green community organization. I'm like "ya right, like we have a chance with all the English gardens and stuff around." So I entered, and we won an honorable mention, now we have no choice but to continue :)

Contest Page

cheers
JJ

Mars Landing

It was a blast on Sunday watching the phoenix lander land on Mars. It has always been a contention of mine that if we are to survive as a species, we must get off this planet. :) Anyways, what made Sunday even more special for me was the fact that my name was on a DVD containing a message from the human race to any other intelligence in the Universe. "The Phoenix DVD – that landed on Mars on May 25 – contains one of many Messages from Earth that have been sent on missions throughout our solar system." The Planetary Society started the messages from earth program a few years ago and I joined up, sorta like running SETI@HOME stuff on my computers since they started that program out of Berkeley.

The Planetary Society is continuing their messages from earth program with a lunar reconnaissance (phew, tough spelling that one :) ) that you can join here. Hopefully your name will join mine in space as I'm a lil old to be hoping to get off the old rock myself. :)

cheers
JJ

Garden 2006

Ok, so this is what we accomplished our first year attempting to garden.











We planted the sunflowers from seed, most of the others were acquired as plants and we managed to keep them alive.










The best we did our first year was getting the blackberry bush shaped around our parking spot. It supplied us with berries for a month or so.











The snowy one is from December I think and thats about the most snow we see here in a year.








Cheers
JJ


ps. yes thats me in front of the sunflowers :)


if you look very closely, you can see blackbeards pirate ship sailing the airwaves above our deck.....

Gardening and Me

As those of you who frequented the previous site already know, I recently took up gardening. As I am limited in my movement and we live in a rental with no actual yard, we have had to become a bit creative.

The first picture shows 2006 with a couple of hanging baskets and the deck we built from wood left over after a friend built their house. The skeeter netting was to keep the junk off that's always falling out of the trees round here.

That is the love of my life, TS, on our completed deck in 2006, you can see our first attempts at gardening starting to take shape :)










More to come soon.
cheers
JJ

new site, new layout, new host

All new and coming soon. Keep an eye out as I'll repost from the previous site and have lots of new stuff to come.

cheers
JJ