Not Enough Gardening Going On; Deck Building Update

It has been a bit frustrating that I haven't gotten to plant much in the vegetable garden. Every minute of spare time lately has gone to building the deck. Many of you have been encouraging to me by your nice comments and questions concerning the deck's progress. Well, here's a photo update:

It is all framed in now, and I'm beginning to put on the actual decking! I'm really about twice as far as that last picture because I worked on it again tonight until after dark. My camping lantern puts out pretty much light!

I do get frustrated with how much time it takes, but my wonderful wife keeps reminding me that I'm building it all by myself. She also reminds me of what it used to look like. Here is the first photo we took back in March when I had just begun removing the old deck boards, followed by a repeat current photo (for comparison):

The old deck was rotting and wasn't level because it had no support beams under it. The new deck will be level and much larger!

I can't wait to sit out on it with a nice glass of lemonade and a garden-fresh bacon lettuce and tomato sandwich! As for the tomato, my extra early Early Girls are planted outside now!

The first official thing that I'm doing with the new deck (even before it is finished) is placing my other 20 tomato varieties out on it to harden off. I don't think I'll be able to wait for the deck commpletion to plant them, but I'm sure the deck will be finished before I get to eat them!

Blueberries, Strawberries and Deck Building

I didn’t get enough accomplished this weekend in the garden or with my deck building project, so I took a vacation day today (Monday). It was a great day to work outside. I just have to finish this deck or I won't get to plant all of the vegetables on time! I made great progress today and my wife and I managed to create new blueberry and strawberry beds. See, If I didn't have to go to my job, I could get so much done! Have you ever found yourself saying that? Anyway,this is what my deck project looks like right now:

The idea was to finish it today (yeah right) but our new strawberry and blueberry plants couldn't wait any longer. Part of the day had to be spent creating new beds for them. This was much more fun and I got to garden with my lovely wife too. We both garden a lot, but because of our schedules, we usually work alone. We had to start from scratch with these beds.

We had to till a little and then rake the sod pieces out. Since these patches had never been gardened before, we had to add a lot of compost.

Look at the contrast between that wonderful black compost and the dull brown dirt. After raking in the compost, we added peat moss for the organic matter, to help with water retention and to lower the ph.

Blueberries need an even lower ph than strawberries, as low as 4.5. Peat alone is not enough for this so we added some organic garden sulfur.

We then planted a high bush Jersey blueberry plant and a high bush Eliot Blueberry plant. Our new strawberry variety is Cavendish. We also transplanted some of last year’s plants, but I can't remember what kind they are right now. After much work, here is the finished product:

Here's one of the Blueberry plants, followed by some of the strawberry plants:

Thinking of those sweet delicious berries just makes my mouth water. And how great it will be to enjoy them seated under the umbrella table on our new deck! But as for now, back to my real job. See you tomorrow for Wordless Wednesday!

What's Under Your Deck?

If you have a deck that is so low to the ground that you can't see under it, what do you think is under there? Especially if a previous owner built the deck.

Our deck was old and ugly, so we are building a new one. I recently began pulling off the existing floor boards, and was surprised how much junk was under there!

Our problem is that animals could get under there, but we couldn't. Once a cat died under there and I had to locate it "by smell" and tear off some of the floor boards to get it out. Now that I've taken all of the floor boards off, we've found lots of bones, toys and garbage under there. Several years ago, my wife washed her white canvas shoes and set them out on the deck to dry. The next morning they were gone! We now have found them under the deck. One was still in tact but the other was chewed up and eaten down to the sole. I guess the one still had too much soap on it.

The above pictures really don't show how much junk was drug under there. As disgusting as it was, my daughter enjoyed the treasure hunt. We did find a few keepers - a baseball, a golf ball and a tin Pepsi can from the 70's or 80's (which is an antique to her). Together with gloves on, we collected a sampling of the "junk" and made a sort of "still life" for you.

I was an Art Minor in college and had to draw or paint a lot of still lifes but none of them were quite like this one!

Needless to say, working on the deck has taken some time away from my blogging. I am trying to finish building the new deck before the main gardening season begins next month. I have managed to get some broccoli and lettuce hardened off and ready to plant. I also just built two new beds for my daughters to have their very own garden. I plan to post much about that as a "Kids Corner" of GardenDesk.

As for the deck, we will be fencing off the new one to try to keep out the raccoons, foxes, opossums dogs and cats - all the animals that we have seen going under there. If you have a low deck, you might want to investigate a little. You never know whats lurking under there!