If that enticed you, read on to see all of our recent photos, or look at the whole, ongoing photo gallery.

We’ve set up a garden in a trash-can: The perfect means to grow and easily harvest potatoes!

… and here’s the newly planted tubers in the can.

Our snow peas are starting to climb up their trellis.

Teisha hard at work, thinning the corn (hidden behind our tomatoes and zucchini).

Speaking of Zucchini, look at this monster. It’s our pride and joy.

We moved another zucchini into a gopher basket to protect it, but the transplant was pretty hard of the poor thing. It’s mostly recovered though, and is producing again.

And here’s a ground-level shot of our monster zucchini, with big happy flowers.

Now, a closer look at Teisha thinning the corn. Also, you can really see that our drip-line keeps the area moist (we had just turned it on to test it for the day).

The driplines water everything in the garden, including our brand-new Strawberries.

The onion patch is a riot of happy growth.

To protect our lettuce from pests, we’re growing it in raised buckets– and it’s starting to look nice!

And another lettuce bucket, showing very lettucey goodness.

I thought I’d throw in a nice view of our burgeoning tomato plants. They haven’t had many flowers yet, and we’re wondering if we might have over-fertilized.

Unlike many of our vegetables, we’re growing our pickling cucumbers from seed, and we just recently moved them out of the greenhouse and into the garden. Here’s one of them.

And here’s a cucumber protected by a plastic jar to keep pests out and heat in.

We’ve also started applying the “jar method” to our honeydew melons that are growing from seed.

Our watermelon hasn’t been doing so great… pretty slow growth. Maybe we planted it when it was still too cold?

Our rose-bush, however, has been totally revitalized since Teisha trimmed it back and we gave it some rose-specific fertilizer.

The cactus nearby has been getting in on the flowering business, too.

Here’s all of our corn, thinned out into nice even rows. That’s sweet-enhanced white corn. Mmm.

Here’s another shot of the whole garden– which is finally looking like more than a patch of dirt. Huzzah!

Like I said, things are sprouting– and nowhere is that more evident than our onions, which are popping up all over the place.

Up close, you can see the happy and healthy onion growth.

Overall, the plot is finally starting to look like a garden.

Our zucchini are looking happy, with lots of fresh leaves.

The tomatoes are also getting settled and starting to grow.

We added some honeydew melons!

Lastly, a few images of our environment. First, our pruned apple tree is starting to bloom.

We’re the Garden of Rowham.

A nearby flower garden (just 15 feet from our plot).

Here’s the fig tree near us.

And Teisha standing proudly in front of the super-productive lemon tree.

This last image might not be for everyone. The garden hasn’t had many pests, save for a gopher or two. And gophers can kill a garden, so we’ve had to take it seriously. First, we added two ultasonic spikes in the garden, which you dig down until they’re in the thick clay, so sound transmits better– then they emit a pulse of annoying sound every 30 seconds, continuously. They helped some, but we next turned to sprinkling Fox Urine around the garden, to make the gophers think predators were nearby. Still, it wasn’t working. With some reluctance, we turned to gopher traps. A few days ago, we had our first dead gopher. Hopefully, the other gopher deterrents will work, and they’ll leave our little plot alone.

Thanks for following along on our gardening journey!

Followed by after planting.

Teisha did a great job planting our Tomatoes.

Teisha also trimmed back the Apple tree.

We ended up putting up trellises for the Tomatoes, and then I installed drip lines.

There’s also drip lines for the rest (like the onions and Cantaloupe shown here).

The Zucchini gets special treatment- drippers aimed right on the plant.

The drip irrigation system is all tied into an 8-line manifold, which will soon be on a timed cycle.

And lastly, we’re finally seeing our first sprouts! First, of onions…

and also of Cantaloupe!

So, what’s an air motor? Basically, you can hook it up to a compressed air line or a pump, and it converts that force into rotation. I couldn’t capture an image of it running, but it goes pretty fast. How useful is it? Not at all, really. But it gave me a chance to learn how to use Band Saws, Drill Presses, Lathes, Mills, and how to polish, measure, tap, and lots of other techniques on metal and plastics. Combined with my previous experience working with wood, I’m starting to feel fairly proficient at building things. Next, I need to find an electronics/circuits course!

Why am I interested in these classes? Several reasons, I guess. Firstly, it’s very satisfying to see a final product that you made with your own hands. I think that’s the biggest motivation. But it’s also a skill-set that I could always advertise that I have as an extra perk, and it will help in the case of a collapse of society, I guess. Lastly, I’m always a little jealous of engineers– with most engineering work, you can explain the benefit of what you’re doing in just a sentence or so. With my research (and believe me, I’ve tried), I can’t give an accurate impression of what I do in less than two paragraphs. And to add “why is this useful” adds another paragraph or two. So the accessibility factor is lacking. With a real product, at least you can point to it and say, “I did this.”

Anyway, does anyone else have any recent crafts handiwork to show off? (I know you do, shortspeedfreak– I’m sure of it)

Although I’ve never done a whole lot of knitting, I’ve done my share of easy knitting products that are all based on a rectangle-like shape of knitted material. However, there have been exceptions — recently I’ve tried knitting cute little animal-like creations, such as seen at Mochimochi Land. Specifically, I tried knitting a big version of her “snail” but mine turned out rather different (though still recognizable as a snail, I like to think), probably because I’ve never knitted in the round before. The main problems I saw were that the knitting was “twisted” (not like her neat rows), it was not hollow like it was supposed to be (so it was “flat”), and I probably should have used different colored yarn for the shell and body… so if any of you reading this are advanced knitters, I’d love to hear your advice!

So what crafty hobbies do you have? Anyone into pottery, sculpting, painting, crocheting, or making holiday cards? It can be really rewarding to have a physical piece of work after investing so much time in a project and probably because this is in contrast to a lot of the daily work I do, which is much more abstract and planning, crafts sometimes really appeal to me… and I know a lot of people feel similarly.