Magic Juice

Arrived...

This morning my order finally arrived. I had placed the order for Sea Magic and a Predalure on April 29 and April 30th they said the "order shipped" but there was no tracking number or estimated delivery date so I just kept checking for it everyday. I didn't check today because I really didn't expect it and, of course, it came. I immediately opened it and look through all the instructions. At first, I was extremely confused by the Sea Magic directions. It said to pour the contents of the package into a 1 gallon bucket or bottle and that was it. I said to Mike "what is going on? Burpee advertised 60 gallons." What I didn't realize was that after you dissolve the contents you use that as your concentrate and mix 3 tablespoons of concentrate with every quart of water. Obviously, they weren't going to expect people to have a 60 gallon container to mix the contents into. So I mix half of the contents into 2 liters and zip locked the rest. I didn't even have a gallon bucket/container. Then I put it in a cool spot, as recommended, and went outside to hang the predalure. It actually came with 2 so I hung them both. One in patch and one on the Shephard hook in Potagar. We have a major earwig infestation in one of the empty beds so I figured we'd need all the help we could get. 

Sea Magic...

A few hours later after Mike left for his weekend trip I went upstairs to mix up a bottle of Sea Magic. I put 1.5 tbsp into 1.5 cups of water in a spray bottle. I sprayed all the plants, liberally, and watered the ones that needed it. I am so excited to see if this stuff works. I had to make 3 spray bottles but I finally got everything sprayed and watered. To be honest, I thought the plants were responding pretty instantly to the spray. They looked perkier after there spray down. The last bottle had about 1/2 a cup left when I was done so I poured it into the Topsy Turvy. You can water the plants and spray them with sea magic. Its up to you. The product is 100% organic so it doesn't matter how you use it, it's supposed to work.

Thinning...

After I finished spraying everything down I thinned a few of the plots. I thinned the green beans down to about 30 plants. I know I still need to thin them down to 18 plants but I want to figure out the trellis issue before I do so I thin the ones that aren't in prime placement for the second twine trellis, we'll need 2. I moved on to thinning the spinach. It's 4 plants per plot and 4 plots. At the moment, even after thinning, we have about 30 plants so I need to thin a little more there too but they are still in early stages so I want to give them time to show me there strength. 

Fencing...

Mr. S. built the first furry pest barrier today and I helped him staple gun the netting on before heading inside. 

Green beans I thinned today.

Roots of the thinned beans. I thought it was pretty amazing that the root system was already so big.

Fencing, its pretty amazing that you can hardly see a double layer of black netting around the bed. All you can really see are the posts and the corners of the netting.

Container spinach in progress.

Lemon Balm in progress.

All the watermelon seedlings I have so far. The count is 7 and they were all planted at different times in different forms.

Video Patch

Video Update 3...

I promised you guys a video update of everything so here it is. How everything from the spinach container, to the radishes, to the melons in the greenhouse are doing! And how long they've been doing it! 

Madness Depot

Home Depot...

Today, I didn't do that much garden work period. The bulk of what I did was for Potagar Schoultz. I watered everything that needed watering in Patch Market. At around one this afternoon Mr. S. and I went to Home Depot to get the plants we needed for the garden. We got there and it was madness. There were tons of people buying up all the plants. Most of the vegetables were gone and it was hard to maneuver our way through the garden center. We ended up getting a lot of what we needed by luck. We found vegetables and fruits people and picked up and put back down in different places. Luckily, we were able to do self check-out because everything we were getting was small and had a bar code. Mr. S. pushed the cart ahead to self check out while I got 2 more bags of Perlite. I tried to catch up with him but this horrendous old lady thought I was trying to cut in front of her on the way to the line and kept blocking me off. Finally, I was able to step in front of her and she tried to smash into me on my way passed with her cart. Sunday is a horrible day to go to Home Depot but we got cantaloupe, lemon balm, summer squash, spinach, mesclun mix, zucchini, and a few others I can't remember. Mike's dad picked up some tomato cages because he couldn't find bamboo and of course the Perlite. 

Once we got home and unloaded I went to Ayers (the local hardware store) to pick up a few more plants. I got there and could immediately see that things were pretty sparse there too. Even though things were sparse I got a tomatoberry plant, patty pan squash, Chili peppers, and cucumbers in the plant section. I ended up grabbing a packet of bamboo for the trellis and a plant spray bottle. When I got home I unloaded and let Mr. S. know what I'd picked up. I told him that we should return all 6 of the cages he'd bought at Home Depot and use the bamboo. The bamboo was $4 a pack and each cage was $8.00. The savings is worth the return trip. 

Later...

I planted the remaining strawberry plants in another container and put them in Patch and built two tomato stakes out of bamboo and rubber bands. I entered the plants we'd gotten into Smart Gardener and made the actual final plan and noticed that the lemon balm seeds I'd planted had germinated. It took them eleven days. I guess I was able to get some seeds in and they germinated faster because they were soaked. Even though they were hard to handle and I wasn't completely sure I had gotten the seeds into the cups it was worth it. 

Tiny Lemon Balm seedling. (top right)

DIY bamboo stakes for the peas and tomatoes. 

Seascape strawberry container.