Planting, A New Fence, and Please No More Pizza on the Grill!

I rarely write about something kind of dumb that my husband has done…yet, when it comes to gardening, well, I just had to share this one.

When I’m busy (which is always), he offers to “help.” This could be something as simple as laundry, dinner, or gardening. In March, for reasons I don’t quite remember, I decided to attempt to start tomatoes inside our house on Long Island from seeds.  Now, I’ve never ever done this before but picked up a couple of those biodegradable fiber containers (with eight “pots”  per container), filled them with dirt, threw in some seeds and waited for them to grow.

Eventually a couple of thin green baby tomato plants emerged and this past week, I asked him to do some planting for me.  I (or so I thought) gently explained that since the composition of these containers disintegrates in the soil, he could just rip each one apart and put it in the dirt, so no need to try to transplant each and every one.

I, always being in a rush when planting, would have taken a knife or scissor to each box and dumped them in the ground.  This is what I found when I came home from work:

The Entire Cell Pack: Planted!

The entire container, as is, in the ground. I decided to just stand there in the garden and shake my head.  Who knows, maybe something will actually grow this way, but I doubt it. Furthermore, I didn’t even have a conversation with him about it.  I guess my silence was enough when he asked, “What?”

Meanwhile, back up at the Red House, it was Memorial Day weekend, traditionally, for me at least, the weekend I devote to planting.  Since I had a lot more “garden” than I’d had before, I bought a lot of plants.

I actually never had started anything from seed before (not counting the aforementioned doomed tomato plants) but since seed packets were oh so much cheaper than buying starter plants, I figured, what the hell I’d give it a shot. Therefore, the Red House now has green beans, acorn squash, pumpkins, zucchini, and sunflowers planted — all from seed.  What will and will not grow I’m assuming will eventually reveal itself.

Green Beans From Seeds

But I’m not an idiot, I also bought lots and lots of plants that were healthy and larger enough to start bearing fruit..shortly. This included celery and basil, beets and spinach, leaf lettuce, tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, brussel sprouts, two different kinds of peppers, and even more green beans.  I guess now reading the list, I went a little overboard.

Basil, Celery, Tomatoes, Peppers

While I started planting, the first priority, however, was to get some sort of fence in the ground to ward off the deer.  Last year when we planted, the deer and I had a field day (they won) leaving me with nearly nothing to eat!  This year I was determined it would be different.  If I was spending this much time and money planting, I was going to make sure that I got to savor everything I was growing.

Lynn had found some metal posts hidden in the back of the garage a few weeks ago.  They would come in handy.

Simple Metal Posts

I actually thought they were ok as is. But oh no, apparently they weren’t “good” enough and Lynn spent nearly a day spray painting them green!

The New "Green" Posts (In Color Only)

Sometimes you just have to grin and bear it, really.

Getting into Memorial Day mode, I did put out our “lanterns” signifying the unofficial beginning of summer.

Red House Lanterns

Since I had already planned to do hamburgers on the grill when my parents came up to visit, I thought it would be fun to try and do pizza on the grill the night before.  Apparently I had forgotten that last year’s pizza on the grill was a disaster because I blindly went ahead and tried it again anyway.

I brought up the dough and rolled it out and thought if I put the dough on a wooden paddle board, I could simple “flip” it onto the pizza stone that was supposed to be getting super hot on the grill.

Pizza Dough

What really happened was, apparently you need to be very tall in order to have the height you need (in addition to great wrists) to flip the dough so it lands on the stone looking like a pizza pie should — nice and round.  When I flipped my sorry  little dough however, it came out looking like a map of the United States!  I kid you not — look at it, the key states are there — like Florida, Maine and the West Coast!

Pizza USA

Lynn thought it was good, I thought it was pretty bad.  I mean really, the crust was too doughy, the cheese hadn’t properly melted and there was just too much sauce.  Please don’t let me try and make a pizza on a grill ever again!

Meanwhile, my parents came up the next day, and while Mom helped with the garden, Dad had the unenviable task of helping Lynn with the fence.  It was also really hot that day, and Dad, not used to much physical labor these days actually thought it was fun! (He even wrote a story about it.) The “boys” did manage to get most of the fence up though before the weekend was over and for that I thank them both profusely.

My New Fence

Next time we’re up, I want to try out my new “gardening” boots. And hopefully everything I’ve planted will grow.

I Love These Boots (Kohl's $10.99)

And not just more weeds.  Even if they look like flowers.

Even the weeds are pretty!