With all this hoopla about the shed installations, I haven’t been documenting my garden work.
Early morning garden.
This year I topped off my beds with soil, finally getting them up to level. I used my own compost for the first time. I was amazed that it worked. I will likely get another compost bin or build one at some point.
I then planned out my garden for planting. Every year I plan out my beds. Below is my plan with the date I planted them.
2025 Garden Plan
I jumped the gun on some of those, and mid April was way too early. I thought we were in the clear, but we still had some very cold frost dates.
When I get the back yard shed replaced with the bigger one, I am going to devote a small bit of space to one of those Spyder branded grow tents. If anyone can grow plants in a shed, it’s a pot grow tent. I imagine they are built to be plant friendly in the weirdest environments because you know, pot.
I did have to do a bit of replanting. My dill and basil were like a total no go. Even now? After replanting the basil on 5/7/25, I am not seeing even the slightest leave. I had such good luck with the basil last time, but I just can’t get them to come up. I might consider going to the nursery and getting six little starts and just doing it that way.
Green onions.
My grocery store green onions are exploding, but I also planted some Tokyo Long White’s and Italian Red’s from Botanical Interests. Most of my seeds are from there, as I have had pretty good luck with that.
I have several cabbages planted, and they started to come up but the cabbage moths are already out in force. In like a day the tiny leaves were almost eaten up, so I pulled out some BT spray and that seems to be helping. I have been spraying them twice a week to help, and they seem to be popping back up. My enemy this year is the cabbage moth.
Patty Pans.
Another big win is the patty pans are going to town. I wish the tomatoes next to them would take off, but it’s been slow going for them. I love my tom’s and I am a bit worried for them.
Potatoes in bags.
I am also doing 4 bags of potatoes. They are coming up really well too. I’ve never grown potatoes before so I am hopeful.
My rhubarb has blown up. I just cut down the flowering seed stalk part that was taller than me yesterday. Next to it is an empty bed. With the entire shed ordeal being ongoing, I am just not up to digging it all out, laying down gravel and replacing the beds on this wall of the house right now. Instead I will let my rhubarb and mint go wild and see how I feel about setting that up this winter, after all the sheds are in place and done.
Rhubarb.
Mint.
Ignore the Kia Soul over there. It’s one of the theft-bate versions, so it lives in my back yard behind a fence unless we have an emergency and need it. It’s getting traded in as soon as my Subaru is paid off.
The real star of the garden this year, as you may have noticed from the pictures, was the irrigation set up.
Irrigation timer.
I tried it a bit last time, but I went to Drip Depot and followed the directions on their YouTube video on how to set it up this year and it was so damn easy. I am a convert.
This was way easier to set up than the kit I got off Amazon. I had it all done fast. It’s reliable, and I set it up to water twice a day for an hour. My beds look great and I feel like when you are playing Minecraft and your base levels up.
This is single handedly the most useful upgrade I could have done. Now if it’s a bad day for me and I am in bed, my garden is still getting watered. I am ecstatic.
Now if I could just get my basil to start up, I’d be perfect.
I’ve gotten to the point where I can review what I did with my garden this year. What seeds I used, how they grew, how much I liked the flavor, etc.
Overall Observations
This overall was a great first year. I didn’t expect it to work out so well, so I am very happily surprised. It was definitely hard on my body to get the garden set up but I think going forward it will be much easier because the beds are in, and everything is built.
To say this was satisfying is an understatement. I had so many meals with my own garden vegetables. I can’t even quantify how amazing that feels.
Squirrels
The squirrel interdiction cage worked until it didn’t. I am pretty sure they are coming in the under back wall. I plan to get some hardware cloth and bricks in winter and see if I can deter them. To be honest they are tearing up my entire lawn too, but I am just not that bothered by grass issues. I hate grass lawns and we keep reseeding with clover anyways. If they would stick to the lawn I’d be happy.
Once I am done with my tomato plants I will redo the area, but I can’t get to it yet.
They knock on the windows to be fed, and I know that’s half the problem, but they make my wife so happy.
This is the victor of a vicious battle over the feeder. The loser is on the ground below.
Water
The watering system was something I should have done earlier. I am now really bad at remembering to turn the water off now, so I need to update it with a timer. I am still not sure exactly how I want my irrigation system to look. I found emitter tubing worked better than individual little drippers spouts. I might just get all emitter tubing. I still have a big kit from Rain Bird with all the bits and bobs so I can play with it.
The one thing I was not satisfied with was how I got the water to the garden. It works, but I think I should do some PVC lines underground to clean it up, and make it look less like an octopus made of garden hoses is sticking out all over. I am still considering my options, and what I want to do.
These are a 55 day bush tomato that were called a semi-determinate. These were insane. I planted the seeds directly in the bed a couple weeks after the last frost date in early May. I was very worried about them, but when they decided to do their thing, and they exploded in tomatoes. I had 10 plants, and I could not keep up. Even now, in October they are still trying. For a 2 person household this was way too many plants. They really were the star this year. I gave them to multiple neighbors and froze 15 16oz jars of tomato sauce.
While they aren’t the big beefsteaks everyone seems to want, they never stopped. I had tomatoes from July on. The taste was amazing too. I am going to plant some of these next year, but not so many.
Way too many tomato plants. They just never stopped all summer!
I direct sowed these seeds in early May, and they grew really well. However, once they got big, the cabbage moths came. I fought those cabbage moths hard so I could get a harvest out of them, and I managed to get enough to eat. I planted ten plants, and all but one did really well.
As for taste? They were really bitter. I don’t know if it was our uncharacteristic heat this year, or what, but they were too bitter to eat alone. I cooked them up in some stir fry dishes and they were amazing for that. Unlike grocery store broccoli, these were not as fragile and really did well in the stir fry dishes.
I am not really sure what happened here. I direct sowed three square feet of the planter to these, and they just did not grow well. I planted each square 2 weeks apart as kind of a succession planting scheme. I’d never grown green onions before, so maybe I did something wrong. Half of them never germinated at all. Half of what I sowed did not germinate at all.
They taste just fine like green onions, but are tiny and weedy, and didn’t come up well.
Grocery Store Green Onions
These were just ends from grocery store green onions I planted while I waited for my seeds from the Tokyo whites to come up, but man did they outgrow and out perform my fancy seeds. I planted 2 squares of my 12 x 12 inch squares for this, and they just took off.
This was amazing. I just went out and harvested green onions whenever I needed them. They tasted 1000X better from the garden than they did originally from the grocery store. I was surprised at that.
You can really see the difference between the grocer store green onions to the left and the much smaller Tokyo whites in the front right.
I planted these in place of the broccoli when it was done and bolting. I can’t say how well I’ve done because I don’t expect a harvest until the end of October.
The squirrels figured out a way under one of the walls of my squirrel interdiction garden cage and went absolutely crazy on them. I have a few still valiantly trying. Initially it was beautiful, and the entire bed was coming up germinated after I planted them in early August, and now it’s hit and miss. I have to say I am impressed with how hard they are trying to come up after all that destruction.
I am hoping to get a few if possible, but we will see if the squirrels destroy the rest before I get them.
They are still trying, so I am still hoping I get some.
I planted these seeds in May and they came up like gangbusters. I had 8 of them, and only lost one to cabbage moths. I heard the moths don’t like red, so they primarily went for the broccoli. I have to say I didn’t do much with them but water them and leave them and they were strong.
Flavor-wise, they were perfect. I have made coleslaw, fish tacos, burritos, and added it in to just about everything and we have loved it.
This red cabbage is going to be made into sauerkraut.
These were a great deal. I ordered ten, and got 2 extra. I planted them right away, and all but one did well. They were a little thin at first, but damn in August did they explode. Like they have covered half a planter and are invading their neighbors.
It was only the first year, so we didn’t get many strawberries, but it was enough to go out in the morning and grab a few for yogurt parfaits weekly.
These were the best strawberries I have ever had. They were so red inside, and so perfectly tart and sweet.
I need to transplant them to the front bed this spring so they can be contained and stop invading everything around them.
I planted 4 of these in late May, and three took off. I had a hard time with these? They were slow to start and it seemed like they just didn’t want to go. It got much better when I got my water system in, and I think that was the problem.
I have never had fresh basil before so this was great. One of them flowered, and I just let it, but the other two were enough to give me a lot of basil for salads and meals. I could have used double the plants for pesto.
I had the same problems with this as I did with the basil. It was slow to start, and didn’t’ really take off. I planted four of them, and they were tiny. They tasted great, though. Then, in late august the squirrels got them. They are still limping along, and what little I got was very tasty.
Like the other herbs, this struggled, but did better when I got the water system in. I did not get to taste these as they fell to the squirrels digging. They looked so nice for pickles then they were trashed. My war on the squirrels is eternal.
These worked out amazing. They took off, they were huge, and brought so many pollinators in. I loved them. They were too tall for my garden cage and I had to thread them through the chicken wire. They will go in a dedicated bed elsewhere next year so they can be as tall as they want.
I was going to harvest the seeds but that was way too much work, and I gave up. It was just not worth my while. Maybe if I ever find myself not having to work for a living and have more time to spare I will try it again, but I’ll just keep them for the flowers next year.
I wanted to can some pickles, so I planted 12 plants. Then I panicked that this might be overkill. Turns out, not so much.
They struggled to get going, but did better when I got the watering system in. They didn’t produce a whole lot at the same time. I got like 2-3 cucumbers at a shot. I switched gears and did refrigerator pickles because I could make that a jar at a time.
I also just had no idea on if the plants were coming or going. They yellowed up, so I thought they were dying, then they just kept spitting out the odd cucumber here and there. Even now I have some cucumbers still trying.
Taste-wise, these were really good. I made cucumber sandwiches all summer, and they were great. If they got too big, they were a bit woody. For pickles, they hold up so well in the jar, and keep their crunch. I made them into Alton Brown’s Kinda Sorta Sours and they are still going strong.
This was the most bewildering plant I have ever worked with. They ninja’d out cucumbers out of nowhere, but only one or two at a time, then would go weeks with nothing. I will try them again next year with the watering system, and see.
Yeah, I know. Mint gets everywhere. I need it for mint jelly though. I planted them in thier own raised round bed, to keep them contained. The seeds were super slow to come up, and kind of died off. I don’t know if this is because of the random Amazon purchase or not.
Mint – Trader Joes
I bought a mint plant on impulse at Trader Joes that came in its own dirt and planter. I planted it, and it blew up. That plant was amazing because it survived the heat, and me forgetting to water it. It attracted tiny butterflies. I love it! I used a bit of it for drinks, and it was great. I think it will be with me forever as it’s taken the whole planter, and it’s now eyeballing my lawn to invade. I knew what I was getting into.
You can see where I just forgot to water it through the heat wave, and now it’s springing back.
This random Amazon seed pack really worked. I planted four, and three came up. I really only needed one, but was hedging my bets. You can’t harvest any in year one, but they look very promising.
Random Rhubarb
When Andrea, my real estate gal, heard I was trying to grow rhubarb she brought me some from her plants to jam up, and a split of her rhubarb plant. I planted this immediately, and it is slowly sending up leaves. I thought it was going to die, but it stubborning kept on.
It’s got much darker leaves and redder stalks than the Victoria seeds version, but I look forward to it next year because the jam I made was great tasting.
I am not sure why Andrea’s won’t throw those leaves up like the others, but we will see how it goes.
Overall Satisfaction
I have always wanted a garden, and there was no way I could or would do this in a rental. Home ownership was the only way I could do this. I am still so grateful I am in such a safe space, and have access to these possibilities. It still doesn’t feel real.
I don’t like using disposable products so I thought I would buy myself some wool dryer balls.
5 Wool Dryer balls stacked on the washing machine.
I read the directions, and then looked online and read all those directions, and just tossed 3 of them in with a load of laundry. It was nothing special, just some of my microfiber towels, and clothing. Like just about every load of laundry I have. We don’t sort it, because it’s survival of the fittest in our household. If it can’t survive the wash, it deserves to die!
My first impression was the noise. I am glad I am in a house now, because my old downstairs neighbors sure as hell would have complained about the bouncing sound. I could live with that though, if they reduced static. I don’t care about drying time so I didn’t check that at all.
I was a bit excited to see how it turned out when I pulled a towel out of the dryer. It cracked so loudly with static it startled the cat, and my microfiber towel then suctioned itself against my body, and when I pulled it off, it then suctioned itself to the wash machine.
I thought, okay, maybe I didn’t know how to use them, so I went back to the drawing board. I read the directions, went back online, where everyone assured me they take away static.
My second test was no better than the first. STATIC, in big capital letters. I had to put it all back in the dryer with a dryer sheet to get it to stop.
I feel a bit taken in. In all honesty, I have no idea what a ball of wool or plastic would have as a working mechanism to reduce static cling, but I was hoping.
It’s okay, though, because now the cat has some new cat toys. She loves them.
Dryer rate: 0
Cat rating: 10
Tally attacking a wool ball. She lost her damn mind on them, and it was so hard to get a picture because she kept murdering them.
I don’t really drink caffeine much at all. I used to drink coffee when I was young, but then I switched to tea when the caffeine was getting to me. When that was a lot I stopped that too, and now I like a hot beverage in the morning, but not the caffeine. I drink cocoa instead, and yes it has a smidge of caffeine, but not enough to trip me up.
I also don’t have much of a sweet tooth, so most commercial mixes are way too sweet for me. I do it when I eat out for breakfast, but on the day to day breakfast? I prefer less sugar. I feel like everyone is competing for the sweetest hot cocoa mix.
I also like a bit of heat in my cocoa, so I make mine with cayenne pepper. Just a tiny smidge.
This started as an Alton Brown recipe, but it’s since been tinkered with to fit my needs.
I like to lay out all the ingredients out before I start in case I miss one. Ignore the batch of tomatoes. They just keep growing, so I need to make more tomato sauce. Also ignore I have four tins of cocoa powder. We kept buying it and opening it, and now I have like three half tins and a full one.
Ingredients:
5 Cups whole Dry ilk. (No Nonfat! It won’t work right!)
4 Cups Powdered Sugar
1 Cup White Sugar
2 Cups Cocoa Powder
4 Tsp Cornstarch
2 Tsp Salt
1 Tsp Cayenne Pepper
Directions:
Toss it all in a bowl, and mix with a whisk.
To use, put 1.5 TBSP, or one heaping spoon full in your mug, and fill with hot water.
Adjust everything to taste.
Whisk a lot to make sure it’s incorporated, but carefully so you don’t toss powder all over the kitchen.
I was worried about calories because that is a lot of whole milk, but I put it in MyFitnessPal.com, which isn’t 110%, but it turns out it comes to approximately 46 calories for 1.5 TBSP of the stuff, so go wild. The lowest calorie packet I could find was a generic Winco packet for 110 calories so this beats the pants off of that.
I converted everything into tablespoons for the recipe and at 1.5 TBSP for each serving it comes to about 130 servings, in case you were wondering. I make this up every few months.
This is a screen shot from MyFitnessPal’s recipe calories screen.
Lastly, be prepared for storage. It makes a lot.
Finished mix in containers and one cup of cocoa, and a thumb in the lower right corner because I have fat fumbling fingers. I keep the ball canning jar on the counter, and the rest in the cupboard out of sight.
I’ve been doing this for years now, and honestly I even take it with me when I travel. Trying to get a non caffeinated option at a hotel is stupid hard for some reason. I just pack it up in little bags and add water.
With the current level of hatred and politics being forced on anyone that is trans, my wife and I feel very under siege.
I’m a transgender man, so I fly under the radar, but my wife is a gorgeous 6’2″ and visibly trans. She’s 51, but looks 20 years younger than that. She can’t pass or hide being transgender, nor does she really want to. She’s happy with herself, and that really should be all that matters.
Yet, at IKEA last Saturday, my wife used the bathroom, and some boomer aged Karen sidled up to my wife at the sinks, and literally stared at my wife’s crotch until boomer Karen realized my wife was paused in her hand washing and staring right back at her.
In the car, some dude in a truck was staring at her boobs, and kept moving his truck forward to star at her with his jaw wide open.
On the way home from work today, she stopped by her favorite pot shop. There is a gender nonconforming clerk there that has great clothing and nail polish. I don’t know if the clerk is a transgender woman or just gender nonconforming. We politely smile and focus on business because you know how it is.
My wife was being rung up out by the clerk, when some dude holding a toddler entered the pot shop and literally stared at my wife.
He turned to the employee, got flustered, and asked “Is there another staff on duty?!” when the employee helping my wife said yes, he said, “Send him out to my car!” and aggressively stalked off.
I guess bringing a toddler to a pot shop is okay, you know, as long as none of us trans folks are in there.
It’s just so insane. My wife can literally go nowhere without these things happening now, and we live in Western Washington! Bluer than blue politically, and filled with a lot of generally fantastic people.
The people attacking transgender people also appear to be the kind of people that “aren’t racist”, heavy on the quotation marks, and have issues with gender rolls and probably women. The Venn diagram seems to skew into a circle on those topics.
I have always maintained that these folks have some sort of hopped up in-group out-group psychology, and genuinely like attacking others that are not a part of their in-group. It’s a hobby, a pastime, and they just don’t care. If it wasn’t us, it would be someone else. They are an attack looking for a target.
It’s just a little scary that right now me and my loved ones are that target.
I have a long history of night terrors and incredibly life-like PTSD dreams. I’d like to thank my family when I was a kid in the 80s and having to survive on my own as a teen, sometimes homeless. Nobody is on their own as a 16 year old if your family is a good one.
I am in my 50s now. The super clear nightmares are very rare these days, but when I go through stressful events, I have night terrors and I wake up screaming.
This unsettles my wife and my cat, and I am left with a hazy feeling of fear and unease. I don’t don’t remember dreams for this these days. That’s probably for the best, really.
I suspect the stress of the contractor mess, combined with my history means last night my anxiety was like, “Go get him!”
This morning, I came out and looked at my kitchen sink, which is perfectly sealed (by me), my counters sanded and oiled (by me), my dishwasher properly installed (by me), and the under sink plumbing perfectly done (By plumber Jimmy) and sighed in relief. The nightmare is over, and my house is not ruined.
It’s funny how I never thought I’d own a home. I accidentally lucked into buying this one. I feel at any minute, someone could take it all away. That overhead anxiety about the move and all this is not easy.
Adding this contractor disaster? That was just too much.
It’s causing all my minor concerns to be an anxious mess. I talked to my therapist about it. I finally have a good one, and he was reassuring me that with my background (homeless queer kid in the 80s) it’s normal to have anxieties and reactions like this to high stress.
I guess I never thought of it that way. We talked about how if you have PTSD and anxiety that it’s okay to take measures to reduce that, even if others might not understand. Like I am going to have electricity run to my shed next year (was going to be this year until I had to pay to fix the contractor’s shit) because I am unaccountably terrorized by the dark in the shed at night. I know why. It’s related to my childhood, but I am 51. I wish it still didn’t affect me, and the spector of my father didn’t still haunt me.
My therapist said you’d be gentle with others if it was them, but you have no patience for yourself. I guess we all do that. We don’t give ourselves space to exist in our own heads.
So I guess if I am 51 and can forget, here’s a reminder to others.
This was originally posted on 1/14/23 on Tumblr, after I had to do some clean up work after a contractor I hired messed up my home to a shocking degree. I had hired the contractor because I have a degenerative condition and can’t really do it easily anymore due to this.
I got the sink seated on my counters and sealed with silicone despite the contractor’s assurances that nobody seals their kitchen sink anymore. Each job was one panic attack at a time. Then I realized the plumbing under the sink was insane. Like the Three Stooges image above, every time I tried to tighten something, another part leaked or fell apart.
So my wife hired Beacon Plumbing and TL/DR, $722 later, we are good.
The longer version is my wife called and set it up, and the plumber, Jimmy, was here within 1.5 hours, but I didn’t actually correct him when he assumed I was my wife. She has a masculine voice and a gender-neutral name. She is also visibly transgender and hid in the back room because she was in her PJs and had no makeup on and didn’t want to shave and look cis presentable to a stranger.
While I was happy to roll the dice with the plumber and hope he wasn’t a bigot, my wife was just not up to it after dealing with the contractor. This is what happens when you are visibly trans. You just don’t know how someone will react to you and if it’s something super important? You might opt to obscure the fact that you are trans.
Jimmy was a conservative, but “Not like those crazy bastards!” per our conversations, but my wife just didn’t want to chance it. After the contractor and the issue with him? She was exhausted. I just don’t blame her, so I put on my cis-passing mannerisms, and acted as straight as I could. I think Jimmy would have been fine, but we were exhausted.
Jimmy was a plumbing fucking hero, though. I will definitely call him for anything else. I can’t believe how great he was.
Of note, he took pictures of the plumbing and posted them to a boomer-aged FB group for plumbing fails. In the 1.5 hours he was here fixing things, it kept binging on his phone with snarky boomer-aged plumbers just taking the piss out of how bad it was. Apparently, it was quite popular.
I have a picture diagram:
Basically, it was so bad it never would have drained properly and probably fallen apart with use. Jimmy tightened everything up and fixed things so they would work. As a bonus, my drains now actually drain instead of slowly swirling forever like the contractor left them. Nice.
I paid the man $722 to fix this. I already paid the nightmare contractor $5000ish. This is so far over our budget that it’s insane. Thank god we have a VISA. Otherwise, this would have been critically fucked for our house.
Another side effect of all this is I am sore as fuck. The reason I hired someone was that I am not physically able to do this shit anymore. I have a disability. Yet, there I was, panic-fixing the sink, reinstalling the dishwasher, and sanding and fixing the counter joins as best as could be done. It’s just nuts. I think I still have to shim the counter where the sink is, so there is no flex. Like WTF?! This contractor was a moron and I can’t believe he thinks this is okay.
I can’t help but wonder if my contractor felt fucking us over was permissible becuase we are trans and queer? I mean, he’s a grifter, that is for sure, but we presented as a trans couple, and while not actively an issue, he was shocked to find out I was trans. I think he screws everyone over, but again, in this political climate? It’s hard not to wonder.
He also would not acknowledge or speak to my wife, and we could not tell if he was a sexist jackass or if it was because she was trans. Being visibly transgender means that it is always a question for her.
My wife heard of a local contractor company that was run by lesbians. First, lesbians get shit done in the world on an epic level, and second, we’d feel more comfortable working with someone from our own LGBTQ community. It would feel safer.
We will look into that in the future so my wife doesn’t feel like she will have to hide in a back room while I pretend to be her.
Still, Jimmy was a goddammed hero.
I don’t think we will ever even find this asshole to recoup losses, but since I found him on Angi’s List, I will call them and let them know what happened. I can at least put an effort into preventing him from fleecing someone else off there.
Garden Rat 