Where do turtles come from?

Where do turtles come from?

A few days ago there was a commotion in the backyard. The dogs were barking and the boys ran out and immediately spotted something out of place.

It was a rather large striped turtle.

I was of course concerned that it might be a man eating turtle so I called my friend who is a turtle expert,  The Lizard King, primarily because he can do anything. He said that it was a harmless slider turtle probably looking for a quiet place to lay some eggs.  Indeed he was correct. The turtle did not eat us but instead shuffled over to a hole next to the raised beds and slept for a while.

I disturbed Mrs. Turtle only briefly to snap this photo.  She was there all day and I expected to wake up and find the turtle lumbering around the backyard.

But when I woke up the turtle was gone without a trace. So, this leads to my first question: Where do turtles come from and where do they go? I have a 6 ft tall fence around my yard. This turtle would have to travel across the street, through the yard and somehow crawl under my fence. The gates are locked so I am sure he wouldn't have unlocked the gate. The turtle's whereabouts are a mystery to this day.

In light of the turtle incident I decided to dedicate this post to the various animals around the garden.

Here are two nice dragon flies:

A bumble bee:

My wife does an excellent job keeping bees. Here are some of her hives:

I may write a post dedicated to the bees in the future. The bees are great for the garden as some plants, including squash, require cross pollination to produce fruit and the bees are perfect for the job.

There are also some bugs that are quite bad for the garden. I am having trouble with cabbage moths. Here is my cabbage and a moth:

If anyone has any ideas for getting rid of these cabbage pests I am looking for suggestions.

Regardless of these pests the garden is going well. 

Here are some Beans

The tomatoes and cucumbers are quite large

Here is the new garden. I have planted new squash and lettuce here.

And here is the exciting lettuce

Here are my cantaloupe. I am experimenting with ways to prevent them from rotting. I turn the regularly and have propped them up on boards to keep them off of the ground. 

Thank you for visiting.

Overall the garden is doing quite well but one issue I am having is with my sunflowers. I cannot get them to germinate.

Here is a sunflower seed after a few weeks:

There is nothing there.

So I talked to a friend who is a sunflower-ologist this weekend and she suggested soaking the seeds prior to planting them and then putting them in the ground. After my success with the seeds in the paper towel, which I highly recommend, I decided that this was a good idea.

Here they are:

This is a standard bowl. I have also added some other seeds to see what happens. I have spinach seeds, sunflower seeds and some new been seeds. We will see how they do.

Here are some updated pictures of the garden:

These are the beens that were previously in the paper towel.  I am excited to see how they do.

Here are some new trellises I am trying for the tomatoes. I put up some 2x4's vertically and the connected them with horizontal 2x4's at various elevations. I may buy some 1x1 square wood pieces to replace these down the road. I expect to be able to use these year after year and have better tomatoe access. I have standard wire trellises in another garden for comparison. 

Here is a nice looking cucumber:

And a row of carrots:

The carrots were started from seed so I am particularly proud of those. Here is a beet. You can see the little red top right under the soil (it may be a radish).

In this plot I have strawberries and cantaloupe. I always have issues with the melon varieties as they rot or never ripen. 

I asked R2 to take an aerial photo of the garden as well. This picture is dated May 23rd.

Here is a picture from April 27th for comparison.

Stay tuned for more pictures of the seed bowl and the exciting conclusion of the worm compost series of posts.

Wookie Compost

I now fully understand why Jabba the Hut chose to feed his enemies to the Sarlacc Pit. He surely used the Sarlacc compost in his vegetable gardens.

For those who are unaware, the Sarlacc is a plant like omnivore that embeds itself in the ground with only its mouth protruding. It preys on victims that are caught with its tentacles and digests them for thousands of years.

While normal composted material is great for a garden, a digested Chewbacca or Boba Fett must have provided excellent garden nutrients.

I now have much smaller versions of the Sarlacc living at my house and while they do not digest things for thousands of years, the things they do digest and provide as waste are solid gold for the garden.

Here is their home:

These little Sarlaccs are known as Eisenia fetida and they produce vermi compost. I received these little worms from an expert gardener that I know well.










Essentially I have a small Sarlacc pit in my garage and I feed it vegetables and newspaper. The worms digest it for many months and then produce compost that I can feed to the plants. I am very new to the world of worm compost but it doesn't sound too difficult.

Here is a close up picture of a worm:

He's a nice looking worm. And the dark matter is the compost ready to be harvested. I checked the worms today and they needed to be fed.

This is a bit of old salad and my worm stick.

I choose to use a stick to move the paper around instead of my hand because, well, essentially this is a large bucket of poo.

Here is the bin with the salad mixed in. I moved the paper to one side, put the salad underneath and then did the same to the other side.

In my last post I showed the burrito of seeds I was testing to see if they were still viable. Here are the seeds after a week. They ended up being pretty smelly.

I opened them up and here is the result:

A few of the bean seeds sprouted in the paper towel and a few didn't. The spinach seeds didn't sprout at all. At least I know which I should plant.

I have planted the seeds that germinated so hopefully they will continue to grow.

Please stay tuned for part 2 in the exciting worm composting series: harvesting the compost.

Gardening on Tatooine

I'm sure it must have been difficult farming on the planet of Tatooine. Those two suns beating down on the crops all day drying everything out. Farming for moisture would have been especially difficult for Uncle Owen in that hot sun even with the several moisture vaporators maintained on the farm.

But i'm sure one thing that farming on Tatooine and farming on Earth have in common is the importance of soil. I am convinced that good soil is essential to a successful garden and healthy plants.

When I first started as the Jedi Gardener I very excitedly tilled up my grass and planted my seeds in the normal gray yard dirt.

Here is a picture:

That yard dirt struggled to support my budding garden and the plants did not do well.

That cucumber plant is not happy.

This year I decided to get some more nutritious dirt for the vegetables. After a bit of research I bought 4 cubic yards of 50/50 Mushroom compost and topsoil.

There is some very serious controversy over the supposed benefits of mushroom compost. Some say it is too salty, others say it has no nutritional value because it is high heated after use to kill weeds. I will report throughout the growing season on my experience. So far it is noticeably better than the yard dirt I had been using. 

I have direct seeded a few things. Here are some beets, radishes and onions:

One thing is for certain, if I could eat maple trees I would be all set. All of the maple tree helicopters have seeded little maple trees and are causing trouble. Here are some now:

But thats ok. They are easy to weed.

Below is a carrot that is growing. The seeds for carrots are very small and seem to take a long time to germinate.

Here is a bean. For some reason only one bean sprouted out of 10 seeds that I planted. For this reason I have decided I need to test to see if my seeds are germinatable. 

I have placed a line of seeds, beens of different types and some spinach, in a line on a damp paper towel. I have then placed the paper towel in a plastic ziplock bag to keep the moisture in.

These look like burritos but they are not. After a week or so I will open these up and see if they have germinated. I can then plant them if they are viable.

Stay tuned for a very exciting post on Verma Worm Compost.

The R2 Copter Awakens

This is the fourth and final post in the quadcopter series on the Jedi Gardener blog. I'm sure by now you have ordered your parts and have begun to put together a quadcopter of your own.

Like any good Padawan I have learned many things in my first month of flying.

My first day out I was very excited. I had tuned everything, made sure the motors were spinning the correct direction and entered some initial parameters into the flight controller. I started taking off, attempting to hover close to the ground and each time I would take off one of the propellers would spin off. I hand tightened it back on and kept flying. Off it would pop again. This happened a few times.

I decided to take it up a little higher. At around 15 feet off the ground the propeller popped off and the copter flipped over and crashed to the ground.

Unfortunately the crash broke the motor mount off of the frame and I lost one of the collets that attach the propeller. I was very sad. The gunk on the arm is where I tried to jb weld the parts together. It didn't work.

This leads to lesson number one. Always have extra parts on hand. Luckily I had ordered a spare frame just in case I broke a part and it came in handy. I haven't broken anything else besides propellers but I think its good to have a spare motor and esc on hand especially when shipping things from overseas.

So lesson number two is make sure your propellers are very tight. Now I use a screw driver through the collet to make sure they are super tight and I haven't had a propeller pop off again.

It is also very important to balance your propellers to ensure that there is little vibration during flight. I built a wooden prop balancer with magnets and a sewing needle. If one blade is heaver I just do a little sanding on the inside of the blade until it balances. It seems to work pretty well.

After the copter flipped over I realized that I needed to protect the flight controller on the top and this led to the R2Copter dome. It also gives it a bit of a friendly personality. I made the dome with an upside down bowl and some paint

I plan to post a video of the copter flying around but need to go out to an open field sometime.

I have also started to take some aerial pictures of the new garden. Here are some examples. As you can see this will be a lot of fun and I'm sure very useful for evaluating irrigation patterns.

Here are some normal garden pictures:

This is the start of the new gardening season and it is going to be a sunny one.