Category Archives: garden

They may not look like much but I haven’t had a decent home-grown tomato crop in years. I’ve been planting the cherry tomatoes in the hopes of at least getting something to add to our salads.

I haven’t had a big tomato since I don’t know when.

This is from August 23, 2026 and doesn’t include a big orange one that I am currently eating.

I wasn’t even going to plant tomatoes this year but I was gifted a bunch of plants (thank you Michael and partner who I have never met!) and they are doing amazing. I have two of them extra-staked up because they are so heavy with big tomatoes.

One thing I did different was put the soaker hose on them so they get slow watered a couple of times a week. But otherwise, not sure why this year was better for us but I am pleased.

I like to keep some emergency drinking water in the house. I’ve never gotten carried away but usually kept about 10 gallons for two people. I just bought regular bottled water jugs from the grocery store and kept rotating them.

During the ongoing enshittification of everything, the plastic used for these bottles became crapified meaning if you looked at it for too long, it would crack and leak.

One day I walked into my laundry room and sloshed through a giant puddle. Panic ensued.

It was kind-of a relief to see the problem was just from the emergency water.

This all happened a while ago. I asked my AI expert, what to do about emergency water and it told me that the consumer plastic jugs were not reliable enough. It suggested a water storage product that is often used for camping and I found a place close by where I could pick some up.

Except that the store was across the river in a shopping area that has traffic patterns so terrible I think they should raze the whole thing and start over. So I never want to go over there and put it off for months and months.

Finally, I had a day off and made myself go over there and of course they didn’t have any in stock and suggested I could go to a store across town about 30 miles away.

“I didn’t even want to come to this store,” I told them.

When I got home I asked my new AI expert for ideas (I fired my first AI expert) and it said the other product was very popular but, actually, if you looked at the reviews they had a lot of unhappy customers. It suggested a different product.

I found myself at a prepper store site buying the 4-jugs-that-hold-5-gallons kit and I kept my cart open for another month or so before I got around to pressing the purchase button.

As an aside, I will say that I have lot more sympathy for people who don’t have their shit together because during the more intensive Dad-care times we did not have our shit together.

I goofed off for another couple weeks after they arrived and this weekend I finally got my emergency water system all set up. A full container is pretty heavy for me so they aren’t completely filled. I need to add daily water lifts to get stronger. They fit nicely in this little nook and fingers-crossed they don’t leak and we never need them for an emergency.

In case you can’t tell, I am still learning my new photo app. I had a set workflow before and now I’m doing something different every time. I’m trying to make the files smaller but clearly this is too small so next time I’ll move the slider up.

I had this great idea that I wanted to grow garlic. I’m not sure what my thought process was because while we are a garlic loving family, we don’t go through a crazy high volume. Maybe I thought once you grew it, it would keep forever? Maybe I imagined sharing with all my friends? Maybe I just didn’t understand how much I was buying?

Territorial Seed strikes again.

I bought one quantity of hard neck and one quantity of soft neck so I could see which I liked better.

It was a very large quantity of garlic. I felt a vague sense of unease as I started planting it.

Also: a friend had told me again and again about how amazing garlic scapes are. You can make pesto or just saute. So delicious. So many ways to eat them.

I did not find them delicious. I found the scapes to be woody and like eating lawn clippings. I made pesto and it didn’t grind up and was just oily chunks of lawn clippings.

The garlic itself was high maintenance, too. You had to very gently ease it out of the garden and shake all the dirt off and then tie it into bundles and hang in a cool, dark place so it can cure.

What a bunch of babies. And of course all this was happening when I was distracted with Dad stuff so I was running out there and performing this long list of procedures in a super half-assed way.

In one of the YouTube clips I watched, they hung the garlic outside so I put it in my shop which is not outside but not in the house. Also: it is only dark at night and only cool in winter.

Eventually I remembered it was out there and decided it was time to bring it in and there were about a million heads of garlic. Some were very tiny.

I wasn’t sure what to do with all this.

I have given some away. I have set some aside to plant because we can’t possibly eat all this and why not torture myself with the same problem next year? The rest is in a brown paper bag on the kitchen counter and we’re using it. I roasted a bunch with some potatoes and it was delicious.

I could tell something had been chewing up the strawberries but when I saw the hoof prints, everywhere!, I knew they’d been through. I only had time to watch a few clips and they chewed up both plum trees, the apple tree. The big one got INSIDE THE RAISED BED.

Last year I bookmarked a bunch of stuff to help discourage them but, if you are a regular reader you already know, I don’t have a whole lot of time or energy to deal with yard stuff. I’m glad they have a nice buffet here to enjoy.

I think squirrels are also into the strawberries because I keep finding them strewn about the yard.

The everbearing raspberries have popped awake and I’m picking ever growing bowls of those every day.

I should have a good update next weekend.

The yellow is roughly the edge of the garden bed. The left is the part I already did. You can hardly tell. Clover is tougher than advertised.

I borrowed a rototiller from a friend a couple of weekends ago and then it seemed like I either had time and no weather or weather and no time.

Or time and no energy.

But he needs the rototiller back which lit a fire under me to get this going.

The top picture is the main bed. I have been growing clover as a cover crop and I thought it was going to be a breeze but instead the stems are kinda ropey and they just get wound up in the blades like when you get hair or long strings of your disintegrating carpet wound around the vacuum floor brush roller.

After every row I would have to unplug it and then sit in the dirt and cut the stems off. Going more slowly or trying to break up the clover clumps in advance didn’t help.

I ran out of time because I had another situation to deal with so the main bed is only half done. I’m going to try to do it on Thursday after work.

This is the lower bed which did not have clover and was a breeze to do.

Using a rototiller is like wrestling a wild boar. It’s not like you smoothly drive it across the dirt. It’s bucking and pulling and jumping around.

Between prepping the beds for the rototiller and doing the job, I was exhausted. My arms were like noodles. But I slept like the dead.