I’m pretty sure we got them from the Chocolate Mint herb that we bought at an outdoor nursery. I probably didn’t pay close enough attention when I transplanted them and likely brought over a bunch of aphids. So the solution ended up being spraying down the infested plants with soapy water. That wasn’t such a big deal except that I left the soap on too long and burned a lot of the leaves on some of the plants. I really should have rinsed the soap off earlier. On the bright side, the result was a great big pile of dead aphids. They were still stuck to the stalks, but where they had been a bright green colour before, they were now brown. They scraped off easily with a toothpick and a bowl of water (to clean off the toothpick easily).

I’ve taken some preventative measures now, adding some glue traps. So far they’re all gone and are staying away. So after a lot of thinning of dead leaves, I’ve now learned a new lesson about a new hobby.

My wife and I cut it in half and split it. It was a little tart but just full of flavour. It was a very satisfying moment and we’ve slowly been harvesting more as we go along. We now have a few cherry tomatoes and have picked and eaten a couple more strawberries. We won’t get very many strawberries this year because we pinched off a lot of the flowers. They say that it’s a good idea to do that the first year and that will force the plant to use more energy growing. Then you’ll have very hardy strawberry plants the next year that should produce lots of fruit.

I also wanted to see how the garlic was coming along. Since it’s an underground bulb, it’s pretty difficult to tell how things are going from up above. So we decided to dig it up and see. This is what we found:

TONS of roots, but no bulb just yet. We re-potted the plant and are now just going to exercise more patience. The thing overwhelmingly smelled like garlic when we had it out of the ground, so there’s no doubt in my mind that we’re getting somewhere with it. Being underground just makes it difficult for someone with no experience to figure out just what’s going on.

Here it is with two of the four pots stacked up.

Now three of the four.

Now we have a finished pot.

And again, from the top this time.

My wife and I are having some disagreements as to exactly what should be planted in the bigger pot at the bottom. you see while it does have a lot of soil and provides lots of room for roots to take hold, it doesn’t have a whole lot of surface area available for a plant. That means that we have to choose something that’s fairly narrow at the base that would enjoy having lots of deep roots. I’m cheering for a bell pepper plant that we have growing. We’ll have to wait and see I suppose.

It’s a rather clever idea, nice and simple with a dramatic appearance. I didn’t want to go full scale for the first try though. The author, jholland, used a 12 inch pot as a base with 8 inch stackers. I went with an 8 inch pot and 4 inch stackers. It was way more cost effective because the pots I purchased were a little on the pricey side. Come to find out they were about double the cost of those at Walmart (though the Walmart ones aren’t quite as nice a shape).

So I went and assembled the materials I needed

Then I added the bracing

A shot from the side with the rod of bamboo I used as the pole. The soil’s in the background on top of the tires.

Now with a bit of soil

More pictures to come. I’ve already done a sample stacking so I can gauge what I want these to look like. I’ve also set a bunch of seeds to grow in a bit before I transplant them into the pot. So it’s all coming together. I’ll probably have the pot itself set to go this evening, but it will likely be a couple of weeks before I can get anything green in there.

The flowers aren’t doing too bad, but certainly aren’t thriving. Same with the grasses. I’m taking a Darwinian approach with most of this stuff. If it survives, great, if not, time to move on. The strawberries are looking strong right now, but I don’t think I have enough real space for them. I’ll wait and see.

Being the kind of guy who can’t leave well enough alone though, I have to say that the Garduino setup looks pretty awesome and I think I’m going to have to at least give it some consideration.

Lately the house has been in some pretty significant disarray. We’ve had some events in our lives recently that have sort of re-aligned our priorities. Not that we kept the house in perfect order before, but it’s just gotten that much harder. One of the things that really makes a difference though is when we vacuum. We don’t do it as much as we should though because we have a big old vacuum that’s a bit of a pain to lug around. It’s a fantastic vacuum, built to last and works great but it’s just a little cumbersome to pull out for every little thing.

Every little thing now has a name. It’s Sam, one of our cats. He’s a little clumsy and likes to share the same window sill as our fresh herbs. That means that every few days he’ll knock one of them over, leaving a bit of dirt on the carpet. Unfortunately it stays there for a while because of the clunkiness of our vacuum.

That’s where a little Dirt Devil can come into play. These little suckers have been around for some time, but anyone who owned one knows that they weren’t that great ten to twenty years ago. Well Dirt Devil’s been working on that and I’ve heard that they’re a pretty good little unit. One of the major developments they’ve made recently is to include an intelligent charging system called AccuCharge. It’s so good that it’s made the Dirt Devil AccuCharge Energy Star compliant. That’s a big deal today more than ever. I mean most of us have been converting from filament light bulbs to compact fluorescents, we make sure to turn off lights when we leave a room, but we don’t often consider the drain from the things we keep plugged in all day long, like a Dirt Devil.

The little handheld version goes for $45 USD which is pretty good. Combine that with the fact that you’re not going to have to spend much on power to keep it at the ready and it makes it a pretty useful small appliance to have kicking around. All you need to do is find a spot to put it… Hmmm… maybe under the pile of flyers…