Garden Update

Well. The last couple of days have been a bit helter-skelter, but the good news is that I have a photographic update from last weekend. On Saturday, I rode over to the farmer's market to pick up a few plants, and came home with a squash seedling, six pepper seedlings, one radish seedling, and a zucchini plant. They have been added to the menagerie. I tried to take a picture of the pepper plants, but my camera decided that focusing on the object at hand was optional and I haven't gone back out to try again. The peppers are called Apache peppers and came from AZ Tomatoes A-Z, a guy who specializes in heirloom plants and was excited by the prospect of another person doing some seed-saving. Frankly, I'm excited about the prospect of eating peppers. I hope they work out--they're heat-loving plants, so not too much of a gamble there.

On Sunday, trifold_flame convinced me to go on a "fertilizer"-collection mission, after her father convinced her that manure would be crucial to our gardening success. So I called up my advisor, who has horses, and we made arrangements to pick up some fresh horse manure. Delicious. E did a tremendously excellent job in the face of the requisite manual labor and was gracious enough to provide a manure transportation method. We brought back a trunk-full and added it to half of the compost heap so it could sit and mellow for a month or so.

I'm starting to get a bit concerned about tomato-planting. The tomato season in AZ is an interesting thing. There are two seasons for starting tomato plants that correspond to the regular two growing seasons for other things. Instead of doing battle against the cold, the biggest battle is against the heat. I'm hoping my tomato seedlings will grow fast enough to produce tomatoes before the weather gets too hot and the tomato flowers aren't able to be pollinated anymore, but I'm not sure if they're big enough. There's also the challenge of the tomatoes themselves not ripening properly when the temperature gets too high. But at this point, there isn't much to do except to get the tomato plants in the ground.

If things don't work out for this tomato season, I'll have to try the fall season. If things get started well and there aren't too many freezing-cold days, one can have tomatoes all the way through the winter.

	Collecting, um, fertilizer
	Collected fertilizer Note the stylish pink gardening gloves (they were the only ones available in my size)
	Poop in the trunk!
	Poop in the compost pile!
	My newest addition, Raven the Zucchini