Billy Mays and and my tomatoes

I was so excited about putting up my garden pictures I forgot I was supposed to show off the fruits of my Topsy-Turvy's labors. They are green, but despite the rain they are still very early. This plant is enormous! It seems to already be too heavy to twist itself back up toward the sun. Oh yeah, we haven't had any sun, so maybe that's the issue.

Here's a closeup of the problem spot. Maybe I should have hung it off the deck.






In other news, I'm really sad about Billy Mays dying. I just wrote 2 months ago about how much I was really liking his show Pitchmen. He seemed like a really decent person and good at his job. What a terrible thing. Ironically, i think the topsy turvy is one the only As Seen on TV product he hadn't pitched. I have a sudden need to by a box of Oxyclean...

Ladies and Gentlemen- we have a garden!

It's been a long time since I posted last! Nothing huge to report in all that time. Pretty much rained everyday since, so until today there hasn't been much summer activity. The topsy turvy is working, maybe a little too well, but I'll get to that in a bit. The Headline here is, thanks to a gorgeous sunny and bright day, Peter and I were able to get started a small herb garden! Here's how it went, in pictures.

First, we started with this rectangle of dirt that we dug out about 3 weeks ago (about the last time it wasn't cold and rainy), and dragged over one of the railroad ties left over from the old garden.


Next Peter digs down so we can secure the tie in as a retaining wall,



and shows good form with the grub axe! We pretty much did all the designing as we went along, because the site was at such a slant that all these problems arose as we worked. We weren't about to start sawing railroad ties, so we just had to make do with the sizes we had.



I think it worked out very nicely! Did I mention that it's very hot out here?



Okay, so I got excited when I saw that it was all working out and forgot that I was supposed to be taking pictures in stages. Here we built up the walkway and added flagstones, bulked up the beds with topsoil and built a little stone border with stones from the old garden.


Here's a picture of it from the lower bed looking up. You can see that the garden is in levels, which is how we dealt with the hill.



And, VOILA! Beautiful herbs finish off the upper level of the garden! It looks a bit like an episode of I Dream of Jeannie, I suppose. But, honest, it was a lot of work for one afternoon. Here's another picture of the finished top level:



We ran out of steam before getting to the bottom, but that will be easy compared to what we did today. Ahhh, summer is finally back! What a treat to finally get outside in the sun!