This years garden is sad. None of the explosive growth from two summers ago. My plants are not doing great, and I am not sure why. I’ve had extreme pest issues, and in general a lot of yellowing leaves around the base of everything, and I have just not figures it out yet.
However, I’ll just keep at it.
Saddest tom’s and basil ever.
The most sad are the tomatoes and basil. I could not get any direct seeds to go, so I just bought some starts at the local place. It did get me to a nursery that I like, but I would have preferred to direct start the seeds myself.
When my shed project is done I am putting in a Spyder grow tent for early starts of my own. We will see if that does the trick, but for now, this is what I have.
Green onions are good, but nothing else is.
My nappa cabbage got consumed and is like two leaves total because the pest issue. I am not even sure what’s doing it. It’s not a bug I can see when I look, so it must be a night eater. No chives, but I had difficulties with those last time as well. I must be doing something wrong. My green onions are great though. They really are thriving.
You can see the potatoes are starting to grow out of the grow bags. I might add some extra soil and mound them to make sure we get a bunch of them come fall.
I have squares that are bare. My radishes did poorly, and an early heat patch caused them to bolt like woah! I never did get a beet to come up, and the turnips are weird and not doing anything but leaves when I check.
I ordered some more seeds from Epic Gardens for my summer planting. Although if you want fast, they are not it. I love the quality of their seeds, and the volume of info on the packaging. I ordered some zucchini summer squash, turnips, carrots, eggplant, and beets on 6/26/25, 6 days ago, and they do say 3-6 business days the shop out, but the 4th is this week, so we will see if it ships at all before next week. I was kind of anxious to get a move on, but we will see. My biggest gardening weakness is my lack of patience.
I still have lot’s of soil from spring, and the gravel to make my other two beds work better. I will probably make that work in winter when I have more time. The shed projects are taking up all my available healthy days for work.
So whatever happened to my garden this year, I am still undeterred. I will continue to try and research to see if I can find a solution.
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 missed gardening last year, but now that I know my wife is okay, I feel emotionally able to make an attempt at it this year.
My first year here in the house was really successful, but as we know, the squirrels really came in strong as garden raiders and soil destroyers. While kind of funny that they just ignored the chicken wire and crawled right through, it was aggravating.
Now that my hoop house is recovered in hardware cloth, with 1/2″ by 1/2″ squares, the squirrels have not been able to get in.
I, unfortunately discovered I have some pre-season work I have to do to finish all that up.
This is a picture of the invisible chicken wire the camera would not show, sandwiching weeds growing between that and the hardware cloth.
Between the layer of chicken wire and hardware cloth, weeds are growing. They are super hard to remove because of the chicken wire. I have to literally cut back the chicken wire and then pull the weeds. That’s hard for me to do. It requires bending over and my joints just don’t like it. I can do a section, maybe two at a time.
Add to that, that this is the Pacific Northwest, and it’s often pouring this time of year. That makes it super hard to get all this done. This week it’s been clear, but in the 20F temperature range, and I am just gonna have to wait until things clear up.
During my last work session, I pulled the good soil out of the other beds, and used it to top off the ones in my protected garden. I am going to concentrate on the beds that are protected in my hoop house first and work on the rest through out the year.
My protected covered hoop house, with two beds filled with soil to the top, and mulched with straw. One bed is still a work in progress.
I have decided to pull my other beds by the front and back of the house, and create kind of a gravel pad to put them on. I am just not into weeding, as it hurts a lot to do, so I would rather build it in that there is a reduced chance of weeds happening up front.
I’m going to create gravel beds along the back of the house, the front of the house, and in front of the deck. I’m making them good and wide, and putting my metal beds on top of that.
A side benefit is it will take more of the lawn out. I am not a fan of grass lawns, so that is a bonus.
My plan is to get some soil and gravel delivered, so I can work on this when the days come up that it’s decent enough to get something done. Then add in an irrigation system after the last freeze. I am putting a timer on this shit!
By fall I hope to have all the new bed areas set up and ready. That way next year I will have my wife’s requested flower beds, and less lawn to mow.
Last month my wife had a pretty credible cancer scare, and an emergency surgery. It was enough that 3 doctors told us to prepare for the worst. Luckily, it turned out to be a gallbladder issue and the inflammation was so bad they thought it was shelf sign, which is a metastasized set of cancer cells, and no cancer was actually in evidence.
It did mean she spent a week in the hospital, and when they removed her gallbladder it took them three different attempts to get it out, as it was one of the worst the surgeon had seen. This surgery resolved 2 decades of issues she’s had, and we are very grateful it’s finally fixed and she’s on the mend.
This means, I really have gotten nothing much done. My own surgery, disability, and then worrying about my wife? Yeah, I spent a lot of time reading monster romance novels, and laying in bed hoping for the best.
I did get some green onions planted though, and my rhubarb is going wild. My strawberries survived and seem to be thriving.
This morning I found a little friend in my strawberry patch.
Large preying mantis.
I wonder if she got in when she was small, and then got trapped. Not that she doesn’t have ample food, but the wire cage is too small for her to get out. She seemed happy though.
My wife was thrilled as she hadn’t realized they exist around here.
I am starting my planning for next spring. I need some soil, but I have compost ready from last year, and all I have to do is plant.
I will also be putting in a timer based irrigation system, so I don’t have to worry so much about getting everything watered. That’s particularly on my mind since I am watering some green onions I planted last week by hand.
I am very grateful my wife is fine, recovering, and healthy. I can now look towards my future garden plans.
This was actually really hard on me, unexpectedly. Reaching up and over is not a movement my bad collarbone does well, but little by little, I got it done.
Wife helping me!
My wife helped me, but she’s not much better off than I am. However, with the two of us, we got it done.
Close up of the half inch hardware cloth.
The hardware cloth was also a bit tricky. It will cut you easily, and I shredded my work gloves working with it. Each session of wrapping the garden cage left me with a lot of cuts and scratches.
Front gate.
I repaired the front door with a gate repair kit to it so it didn’t sag anymore. I left about a foot free on the top of the gate in hopes that pollinators would go in there. If the squirrels find it, it will be a simple matter of covering it too.
I also used a brick border where the hardware cloth came down to the ground. The bricks sit on top of a bit of hardware cloth that is tucked under them to keep the squirrels from digging under.
I used some wire to literally sew the panels on, and that worked really well. I have been keeping watch on the beds and not a single new hole has been dug since I did this.
I feel bad because most of the season is gone, but I figure that is one of the things that is cool with owning your own house. I will prep the beds, and fill them with more dirt, and be ready for next spring.
I might even have enough time to build a cage for a new external, strawberry bed by then.
The only things that survived from last year are the parsley and the strawberries. I was pleased I at least get the strawberries. Oh, and the mint and rhubarb outside the cage. They did remarkably well.
I feel really good about this because if this works, then it’s a one and done. I can then concentrate on planting my plants.
Although exhausting, it was nice to get this done. Here’s hoping I have stopped the squirrel incursion.
Well, not much is getting done. I might miss this season for gardening. After surgery I had a lot of recovery time, then I had to work on getting my garden cage squirrel-proofed, and that is a lot to do.
I haven’t even tried to plant without these protections in place because the squirrels are literally digging up my beds constantly. It’s never ending.
My garden plan is to finish the hoop house, and see if I can put some late crops in. Then slowly turn to my other beds. I have a new strawberry bed I need to cage up, as well as a sunflower, flower bed and herb beds that needs caged.
I have about 3/4 of my hoop house covered but it’s slow going. I just take a long time to heal, and my recovery from general anesthetic along with my work obligations have been a lot.
I am wrapping 1/2″ hardware cloth over the entire thing. I am using bricks to weigh down the ends of it, so squirrels can’t get in. You can literally see the squirrel holes in this picture.
My wife has been helping me because her 6’2″ height and long arms are very helpful compared to my 5’6″ stature. I am hoping this weekend to get more done. I am out of bricks so maybe I will pick some up on Wednesday afternoon.
I do like that in the picture you can see all the clover coming in. I’ve had a lot of it grow in from last year. I’ve been mowing it just like grass. I love it. I am going to seed the bald spots again and see if that helps. Clover is so nice! I don’t know why folks do grass yards.
We also had our HVAC system changed out a few months back to a heat pump. This is the single best adult purchase in my entire life. Our house is from 1935 and has thin exterior walls, so being able to control the heat and cold in the house to be comfy is a god send.
We spent $26,000 to do have the work done, and some of it was electrical to prep for this. We will see about getting some of that back at tax time, but honestly? I’d rather pay the small low interest home loan we got for it, and be comfortable.
It’s been a few months and we’ve had a few hot days, and it’s amazing. This, combined with the roof vents, and crawl space insulation means that no matter what, our home is the perfect temperature. This is the first time in a year and a half that it’s not over hot or over cold.
I decided I didn’t want to mow around the heat pump unit, so I dug up the grass around it, and laid down landscaping cloth, and put some gravel over that.
This is so tiny, but literally took me two hours, and I was physically wrecked for days!
I wanted to make sure the mowers or weed eaters didn’t come in contact with the important bits below:
Ignore the landscaping cloth peeking through, I am getting another bag of gravel this weekend to cover it.
Now we don’t have to worry about accidentally breaking anything. Honestly, I’d do the whole side of the house that way, because I hate grass lawns.
The other project I have been doing, a window or two at the time, is reflective UV film. I have been putting it on all the windows. it’s just like a giant vinyl sticker you install on the inside of your windows, that keeps out the heat, and is reflective enough you can’t see in.
You can hardly see in at all, and it sure does keep the heat of the sun out.
I was just impressed with how much heat this window film keeps out. It is also damn near impossible to see. In the picture above you can kind of see the back window, but that’s at 2 feet from the window. On the street, you see literally nothing. It’s 10/10 on blocking heat, and 10/10 on blocking folks from seeing in.
I am just trying to get all this infrastructure projects done. I don’t feel it’s the fun projects, but the basic ones to make everything livable. I am more into the decorating and planting, not the insulating and making the house livable.
I think next spring I will have all the garden beds protected with cages. I will have all the big livable projects done, and can start planting and maybe doing cool artsy decorating projects. I look forward to that.
Mostly, I am trying to give myself the grace that I would extend to anyone else. I am partially disabled. I can’t lift, or move the way healthy young folks can, so I am doing a lot. It’s just on my terms. I like to remind myself of that when I feel I am missing my own self imposed deadlines.
It is amazing though, that I have a house, and I can work on projects at my own pace because I will live here next year, and next year and so on. I sometimes forget I get to live here forever because I am so used to renting.
My garden is not going to be up to snuff this year. Between having surgery, and finding out the squirrels destroyed every bed I had, I am going to have to reset my expectations.
My big plan is to get the original garden space covered in hardware cloth. I did the back wall last weekend and I’ll be damned if the squirrels will get into that side now. The end walls are the hardest and most fiddly to do, so now I have to do the 20 feet overtop wall and roof, and then the last end with the door.
Hardware cloth is a way better option. I had no idea they could get through chicken wire.
Once I get that done, I will top up my soil, and do some late planting. Then move my attention to building squirrel cages for all the new beds I invested in last fall.
Somewhere in there I have this gazebo on the front deck to build too.
It’s going to be slow, but I own the house, so it’s okay. By next spring I will be on a roll.
I had this incredible panic about failing to meet my self imposed spring deadline. Then I realized it’s because I am not used to owning a home. If I didn’t get it done immediately, I might have to move, and never get to do it.
Home ownership is such a kindness. I can do as much are as little as I can realistically do, and there is no rush. I can do it all year and my garden will eventually be up and running.
I’ve never composted before, so this last year is the first time for me. What really worked for me was these black plastic bins from Amazon. (None of these are affiliate links. I get paid nothing if you buy anything. I just like ’em. ) I just wait until they are under $80 on sale. I hate paying full price!
Black compost bin from Amazon.
They provide that green compost turner hanging on the back wall, but it’s not good. It took too much yanking on my bad collarbone joint to work well.
Instead I got an overpriced spiral version on Amazon. I guess I am getting old because I resent spending $50 on basically a chunk of spiral metal. It works though. Really well, so I guess it’s worth the money.
Spiral compost turner.
This is far easier on my bad joints. I can twist it in, and yank it back out easily, turning the compost. Now I can do it when I want, not when my joints are good enough to do it. That’s a nice change.
I literally only turn it about once a week, when I take my table scraps out. I’m just not that dedicated. I do use my big paper shredder to shred Amazon boxes to mix in. I just don’t have browns at all if I don’t use paper and amazon boxes. The shredder was about $250, and says it won’t do cardboard, but I have been doing great with it. I am pretty impressed that I can compost like 75% of all my own cardboard. I still get overwhelmed with it, but it feels good to not dispose of so much.
I didn’t do any fancy compost calculations. I just tossed in about roughly 50% browns and 50% greens. I didn’t expect it to work so well due to my laziness, but I was wrong.
Today was the best part. I turned my compost, and it was filled with happy worms.
Worms in my compost!
I am super excited about that. When spring comes I think it will be ready to spread on my beds. I won’t have to pay for Lowe’s compost!
I have also learned that what I think will be a lot, really isn’t. The bin was filled to the very tip top in October, and now it’s broken down to so little. I had dumped some of my greens into the yard waste bin for the city to pick up, but now that I know how much it breaks down, I am not doing that again. I need that for my garden!
I bought a second one, and placed it in the corner of the yard. When the first one is done, I will move it over next to the corner one. I think I need a third now that I know what I am doing. I need enough room to fill like two of them, and let one of them just age. I think they will look nice there all in a row.
My corner compost bin.
As an aside, you can also see the clover coming in around the grass clumps. The entire yard is like that. It started as a garbage dump of trash dirt and clumps of dying scrub grass, but the clover seems very hardy. I hope by year two, it will have spread all over.
My next plan is the garden cage. I need to cover it with squirrel proof hardware cloth. My Squirrel Interdiction Cage failed spectacularly. None of my overwinter ideas are going to happen because the squirrels dug up literally everything. Including the rhubarb! Lesson learned! Squirrels can fit through chicken wire!
I am going to see about starting that process in February, when I have a little more light to work by. It’s getting dark before 5pm, and after work I just don’t have enough. When I do have a day off, it’s full of rain and I am not doing it in the rain.
When I start I will keep posting about my progress, though.
It turns out I have quite a few seed packets in my possession and I needed some seed storage. I first tried a little tin box but that turned out to be annoying to file my seed packets in. Apparently I have too many, and not all of them are in the same size packet. (I don’t get paid for any of the links, this is just what I used.)
It was a cute little box if I didn’t have such a large pile of seeds it would have worked.
I also wanted to be able to clearly see them so I got myself a 3″ binder and seed insert pockets. This worked way better.
The problem was the binder was seriously weak. It is so weird because I have two other 3″ Avery binders. One is from 20 years ago. It’s still going strong, and sturdy and protects my art work. This one, though? The sides were so bendy it just annoyed the crap out of me.
I decided to make my own binder using the hardware. I bought some bookbinders hardboard off Amazon, and some paper off Etsy and followed some simple Youtube tutorials.
I drilled out the rivets holding the 3″ binder rings in the old binder so I could just use some Chicago Screws to screw it to the new binder. I really like Chicago Screws as they are internally threaded. I have used them on random book related projects before.
Internally threaded Chicago Screws.
I then measured and laid out the book boards, and covered the whole thing in butcher paper. Which, immediately bubbled up with the glue, and took a lot of work to smooth out. I used some random rust colored linen backed with interfacing as a book cloth for the spine so it would last longer.
I had already cut out the binder boards and glued them to the butcher paper and fabric and cut holes for the binder hardware.
I glued the whole thing up, and drilled holes big enough for my Chicago Screws to put the binding rings back in, and covered the interior with paper.
External cover paper glued on. Just waiting for it to dry so I can put on the internal paper.
I added a pocket, which I am not really sure I like, to the front cover, and screwed the binder hardware in, and added my seeds and an alphabetizing rainbow divider in.
I like to put my seeds in a little seed envelop, paperclip the top, and keep the seed packet for directions. My irrigation plans are on the yellow legal paper in the pocket.
Inside of finished binder showing seed pockets, dividers, etc.
Finished external binder. (Notice the expensive Whynter ice cream maker int eh background. I have to talk about that eventually. Best purchase ever! )
It looks a little warped but further drying with the Modge Podge and it straighten out.
Struggles with this project:
I used butcher paper as a base layer on the hard boards. The second it touched the glue, it bubbled like crazy. I had a very difficult time getting it flat and smooth because using butcher paper like that is a terrible idea.
Precision. This has some minor measure issues because while I can measure and cut, when you add wet glue, and bubbling to the equation, it was a lot harder to get things to line up with precision for me. This might just be a me issue, but that was rough.
Hardware. Getting the hardware on was so easy, I did not initially test it with the binder closed. When I did, the spine angled out because I had placed the hardware too close to the spine, and had to move it in by a 1/4 inch. I should have checked this, but did not. I fixed it by filling the old holes I had drilled through the hard board with balls of cover paper and Modge Podge. Worked just fine as it was all under the green cover paper.
Glue choice. I had Modge Podge on hand and used that, but I am not sure it was the best choice. I will probably get an acid free bookbinding glue next time. I just felt this bled through the papers so much.
Book Cloth. I watched some YouTube videos on using iron on interfacing to make book cloth so I did that with the rust orange linen I had on hand for this. As soon as it hit the glue, the whole thing wanted to peal off, and I had bubbles, and it was stressful. I almost started over at that point. Whatever interfacing brand I had, which I have no idea, just didn’t want to work with this. It’s iron on, so I have no idea. I will probably get the actual Heat’n’Bond as recommended next time.
Outer cover paper. This was a hand made green leafy paper, and I think it was too porous. The Modge Podge bled through funny in some places. It’s alright, but I think I would look to treat it differently to prevent that in the next version.
However, all in all, I am happy. This is as sturdy, or more so, than my 20 year old version of a 3″ binder. Even better, it looks cool. I might try to Cricut cut some dividers that are all mine, but I haven’t decided yet.
I was working on my garden this last Saturday when as I stepped out on my back porch, a common brown roof rat shot out from under the stairs and across the yard. It had been eating dropped bird seed.
This is not the actual rat, as it was so fast I didn’t get more than a moment before it was gone.
It went in the direction of a neighbor’s yard that isn’t usually mowed, and has a lot of shrubbery and overgrowth. I was shocked because it was dead middle of the day. It was black and small, so I think it was a roof rat. It was not one of the bigger ones.
I do find this a little concerning, and this might be the inevitable outcome of bird feeders, and a garden.
I did some research and learned that you can add spicy pepper to your feed mixes and the birds can’t taste it, but mammals can. This actually might help with the squirrels which are literally digging up my entire yard and garden.
I tested it with the peanut tray, which the squirrels get into, and boy do they hate it! It’s 3TBSP to a pound of seed, and it works well. I added a little olive oil to make sure it stuck, and it worked. The crows still got the peanuts we feed them, and the squirrels are off elsewhere.
My wife is sad, but they are literally destroying the yard, digging up all the clover seeds, and every garden bed I have looks like this now below.
This bed was level and had leftover mulch, until the squirrels decided to go HAM on the beds. My Beet bed, and my tomato bed look the same.
As for my Squirrel Interdiction efforts? The reason they got into the area was that I used chicken wire. Chicken wire has too big a holes to use. I just ordered $300 in hardware cloth with 1/2 by 1/2 squares, and not I have to redo the entire structure this winter.
Sigh. Squirrels 1, me 0.
My New Plan
I am going to wrap the structure in hardware cloth. I am just going to do it over the chicken wire. I can’t see how that would matter at all. It will just create a double layer of fuck you to the squirrels.
I am going to cayenne pepper the bird seed and peanuts. That will give them less incentive to destroy my yard and my garden, and my wife will still have all the birds. The hawk that sits on the fence and looks for rodents might have to look elsewhere, but I am fine with that.
Garden Rat 