Rain, rain, (go away) -- Gardening pros and cons, canoeing for litter

     It's been raining for days-- is this good for tomato plants, to be rained on every day? They have grown fairly fast in the last week and are now sprawled on the ground, probably not the best place now that they are producing green fruits. So we bought these supportive "sticks" at Lowe's (sp?) and could have put them next to the tomato plants but guess what? It's raining again!
     Certainly being in the garden and taking in the luxurious, pleasing scent of the tomato plants is better than dealing with sibling  rivalry or the lack thereof (don't ask -- just say my friends  have been better companions to me than my siblings have been in the last 30 years). Gardening and planning and watching over the tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini plants -- they're like your little green children you want to nurture along. Too bad you have to eat your children when they become big and tasty.
     The other day I "helped" nature by canoeing along the lake coastline at Claytor Lake State Park to do a summer litter pickup. I really worked out my shoulders, and yet, they didn't seem achy the next day, paddling against the currents of outboard motorboats passing by as the spouse and I used the end of the paddles to lift plastic, bottles and other refuse off the banks of the park's lake. The news said many others did this and came up with 100 bags of trash in all. My, but there are some big litterbugs out there!

Square Foot Gardening, Gardening healthy

     Well, we have endeavored to put a "square foot garden" into practice. I'm not certain how I heard about it, but it may have been my naturalist friend Carrie, who was pointing out several different "sections" of her property devoted to planting various vegetables, mainly. And she loaned me the "new square foot gardening" book by Bartholomew  and it provided a lot of helpful info in it , as well as a workshop/meeting I went to on it.
     So we needed to get together the 3 ingredients necessary: compost, peat moss, and vermiculite (perlite if you don't have the last, but it's not half as fine). I put off doing this till the first week in June because we didn't have much of a compost heap -- it was mostly sod (which Carrie told me was a no no but my husband wouldn't listen to this), which had not been turned much at all. With compost you are supposed to mash it AND turn it. But the spouse had put worms in it so I couldn't do much mashing and the  organic stuff I was putting in (cut grass, vegetable peelings, tea bags, coffee, egg shells) was taking a while to break down. So I thought we could get the other "ingredients" to put in this garden later.
    A "square foot" garden is "supposed" to be square or rectangular in shape, and easy to maintain. The three ingredients are mixed together and are "supposed" to be loose in a square structure,  6 to 12 inches high, and the plants planted in squares in the 4 by 4 cedar wood (we got 2 kits from Home Depot we put on top of each other). I don't think our inner squares were exact and the following day we put them in they were a bit wilty looking because they weren't watered much. In some ways a square foot garden is like a plant out on the porch or deck -- it seems to need a fair amount of water. But we've had rain the past few days and that  has been a good thing.
     We actually planted it below deck because we have a wooden fence in back and an oak tree, neighbors' maple tree, and our own house providing a lot of shade. But the deck has this "black stuff" on it and now we can't blast it off, because of the garden below. Fran(k) has suggested scrubbing it but I don't know with what!
     There is another little garden on the other side of the wood fencing (it only covers part of the yard -- that's what the house came with, not my idea) and it seems to be getting enough sunlight. It has tomatoes with green "fruit" on them, pepper plants, zucchini plants and onions. And they are all really growing. I suspect the square foot garden will be our second crop, maybe the end of July or August crop. I hope to attend a "old water" canning workshop to learn more about preserving tomatoes if we get a lot.
     So, if you don't have a lot of space or only sun in a certain spot, maybe you should consider a square foot garden. The initial investment was great ($200+) for the container and 2 of the 3 organic materials and plants (some of the plants being on sale we got them so late). We could have bought materials on sale maybe sooner in the season, but we bought them when we needed them, so that was that. We'll see if it was worth it.