Latrobe said:

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Three solid days of work and this is where I am……

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If you don't mind me asking, what was the cost? This is exactly what the Wife is wanting me to put in.

With Corpus water worries and nematode issues, I'm pretty limited this year, but I do have a few serranos, some lettuce, onions, and cucumbers.

My serranos are really great looking, but tasteless. I used the usual amount in some salsa and wondered if I'd made some sort of bad ketchup.

B-1 83 said:

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My serranos are really great looking, but tasteless. I used the usual amount in some salsa and wondered if I'd made some sort of bad ketchup.

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Same with my jalapeños so far. Plant looks great, and there is plenty of fruit, but they're milder than a bell pepper. Quick googling said maybe I've been watering a bit too much, and a little stress will help increase the capsaicin.

This brief cold snap put the brakes on my squash. I'm guessing as it warms up next week, they'll pick back up.

Anyone have any experience with getting cucumbers to put on female flowers? They're blooming like crazy, but it's almost all male flowers.

I'm jealous. I have a small back yard that's mostly taken up by a pool. And the yard is surrounded by trees and the house is to the south... so the whole thing is heavily shaded.

I built a small cage of 2x2s and chicken wire to keep the squirrels out. It fits 2 tomato plants. It's in the sunniest spot in the yard, but it still only gets a couple hours of sun a day. Really not enough. The chicken wire is a pretty strong deterrent to pollinators (and I haven't seen any honeybees yet, this whole year, in or out of the cage) so I've taken to manually pollinating the tomato blooms with a paint brush. Still, I've gotten 2 tomatoes so far and have about 5 green ones slowly growing.

My next yard will have room for at least a small garden. This house had to have a pool (for the grandsons) but the next one we'll choose a yard for me.

Astroag said:

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Latrobe said:

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Three solid days of work and this is where I am……

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Why so slow? Lol…I keed I keed. Looks awesome! What's going in there?

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Thanks! The first layer is hardware cloth (1 in). Covers the grass and secured to the sides to keep any burrowing animals out of the garden.

The sides are covered with a landscape fabric. Just wanted to prevent any soil leakage from in between the cedar planks. The landscape fabric is only on the sides, and not on the bottom, to maintain good drainage.

Then I started my bottom layers. First was a layer of cardboard boxes over the hardware cloth, followed by dead leaves and branches from all over the yard. Just a general filler. Waiting on the arrival of 12 cubic yards of fill dirt for the middle layer, and then I'll finish it off with good gardening soil on top.

I ended up adding some braces to prevent the whole thing from collapsing once the dirt was placed.

S.A. Aggie said:

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Latrobe said:

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Three solid days of work and this is where I am……

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If you don't mind me asking, what was the cost? This is exactly what the Wife is wanting me to put in.

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The back wall is 16 feet long, and outer side walls coming back to the front are 8 feet. So 56 ft perimeter and 30 inches tall. I used cedar planks all around. Lowe's actually worked with me and gave me a great rate on the wood (signing me up for a contractor account) which knocked the priced down by 30%. All in, I think I am somewhere around $1100, but now I need the dirt. That is a job I do not want to do myself since this is in the back of the yard, and you can't drive to it (so wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow)….