I started a bunch of vegetable seeds two weeks ago, and I seem to have gone a bit overboard with the lettuce. So sometime starting in late April-early May I’m going to be harvesting bunches of lettuce.
Also expect there to be tons of lettuce drawings. Otherwise, what a waste. I mean, it’s so much lettuce. What am I supposed to do with it all? Eat it?
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I ordered a copy of “Drawing and Painting Beautiful Faces with Jane Davenport” from Amazon. I really like it so far, though I’m still a bit away from making anything that looks good-good versus “looks like people”-ish amateur sketchery. Still, I’m going to keep trying.
I spent two hours today cutting down blackberries. I feel like I really made a difference, as we can now see the chainlink fence.
The plan is to transplant a bunch of lilac saplings along the fence. They should grow up tall and look very pretty by next spring. *fingers crossed* hopefully.
There’s a ton of other things that still need to be done around the yard, including setting up the greenhouse my brother bought. Honestly, that greenhouse should have already been assembled months ago, but the yard was a bit overrun and my dad insists we can only put it in one, out of the way area.
Though if the greenhouse was smack dab in the sunniest part of the yard, I think we wouldn’t have such an issue with people parking by the side of the yard and mutilating our flowering bushes. I still have no idea what that lady was thinking–seriously, who rolls up on someone’s property and starts hacking away all the flowers to drag home? I don’t know, that seems like stealing to me. At the very least, it’s incredibly rude not to ask first.
Okay, so I spent a ridiculous amount of time watching videos on aquaponics and I am simply amazed by the whole concept.
WIKIPEDIA: Aquaponics, or pisciponics, is a sustainable food production system that combines conventional aquaculture, (raising aquatic animals such as snails, fish, crayfish or prawns in tanks), with hydroponics (cultivating plants in water) in a symbiotic environment. In aquaculture, effluents accumulate in the water, increasing toxicity for the fish. This water is led to a hydroponic system where the by-products from the aquaculture are broken down by nitrogen-fixing bacteria, then filtered out by the plants as nutrients, after which the cleaned water is recirculated back to the Fish.
Basically, you can have tower gardens or trays with gravel or chunks of granite in them. You set up some seed trays, then once they’re sprouted into tiny plants, you move some of the rock away and pop the plants in there. Then you flood the whole thing with water, which drains out into an overflow tub that then drains into a tub containing edible fish like tilapia or trout (depending on water temperature. Some people do tilapia in warm months and trout in cold.)
People are growing all kinds of vegetables – lettuce, spinach, cucumbers, zucchini, broccoli – and there seems to be a fondness for beautiful strawberries grown in tower gardens (50 plants in less than five feet of space depending on tower height.)
