Our renovation plans are officially official!  Props to our contractor  for dealing with City Hall, and working on our permit.  So far, we have a more permanent wall and plastic tarp and next week, we start demolition.  Yeah!

I’ve been really busy with my new garden, but I’ve been steadily harvesting cucumbers, tomatoes and peas.  I’ve also recently sowed beet, radish, carrot, lettuce and spinach seeds, and Jonathan bought me a couple of strawberry plants and a dry land taro plant from the Kaiser High School family fair.  I wasn’t successful with my zucchini (I didn’t thin the crop, then the wind blew it over, and the flowers fell off before any of the fruits developed), eggplants (eaten by pillbugs), or Chinese broccoli (grows too slow and I’m constantly fighting off aphids) , but Jonathan said it’s a learning process, and while I’ve definitely harvested a good bounty,  I shouldn’t expect all of my vegetables to be perfect after one season.   Looking back to January and February,  it’s pretty cool to see how much my garden has grown.

Happy 13th Birthday to Jalvin!  Here’s a picture of Jalvin with his birthday present from Jonathan and me: a cookie monster hat picked up on a recent shopping trip to Target.  Woot.

Our dryer vent hose got loose, so we had lint everywhere every laundry day.  After two trips to City Mill, and a hour of fiddling with the new connectors, here’s a picture of Jonathan sealing the vent.

Another big step in our house renovations:  We finally emptied out the pool! It was fairly green and gross, and rather than attempt to clean it again, we decided it was time to just be done with the disgusting water.  Since we haven’t added any chemicals into it for months (and it was already a habitat for many different life forms), we rented an industrial pump from Hawaii rent all,  drained the water directly into our rain drain, and watered down the extra algae growing on the walls.

I was so motivated by my initial landscape project, that I decided to extend the garden along the entire length of the house.  I found a how-to online article at Sunset magazine about edible garden paths.   Here’s a “before” picture:

If you look at the back of this photo, you can see the black cinder way in the back.  I had to clear all of the cinder, and because I didn’t have anywhere to put it, I made a trough to hold it all.  I’m sure that the cinder will be useful someday, but for now, it’s being held in a 7X7 foot bin.

After I cleared the rock and roots, I made a path with rocks from Mom and Julie’s yard.    Props to Jonathan for lugging all of the rocks out of mom’s yard and into my car.

Next, I installed a new sprinkler system and trellis with PVC pipe and the remnants of our old fence.  I made the trellis by attaching the fence material onto PVC pipe with regular screws and held the entire contraption upright with rebar.  The other trellis is made with just  twine running through eyelets in the PVC pipes.

I back filled in my new planting area with a good quality soil mix.

And now I plant!  I’m keeping the avocado in a container, because I don’t want the roots to invade our house, but I’m putting in grass on the path, and bananas, lilikoi, plumeria, stephanotis, lavender, beans, and other herbs and flowers to fill out the bed.  It doesn’t look like much now, but in a few months, I’m sure that it will fill in.  Exciting.

And the cucumber vines are taller than Jonathan (It doesn’t look that tall in the photo, but I’m training the the vine to curl down to the right, and back down the trellis, since we ran out of wall space)!

I’m not sure why everything is growing so well, since I’ve only had moderate success in the past.  Jonathan thinks it’s because of the super soil that I mixed into the existing top soil (Kellogg Amend mixed with Niu farms potting soil).  Also,  I’m pretty sure that all of the water, sun and better lawn location (I moved my garden from containers on the East side of the house to a raised bed on the North side), contributes to my overly exuberant plants.    But,  besides all of the other factors, I truly think it’s Dad’s green thumb helping out.   He was a really great gardener– anything he touched grew really well– and I think he is helping my little garden grow.

So, I woke up this morning, and found my BEAUTIFUL daikon covered in pillbug babies and eggs.  Literally, and totally covered.  It was super gross and very, very, very sad.

I sprayed the entire crop, and surrounding plants with Neem oil, and liberally applied slug bait around the entire patch.  It was a pillbug genocide today at the Ping household.  I probably should have been more diligent about the slug bait, especially since I already identified pillbugs as a problem child in my garden.  In any case, hindsight is twenty-twenty, and after realizing the ALL of my daikon were infested, and not wanting to spread the problem to my other plants, I decided to do an early harvest and to pull out the daikon a couple of weeks early.  Thankfully, the buggies didn’t infest the root itself, and after a good wash and scrub, they still look delicious.   Small, but enough for a homegrown tasty dinner– Jonathan’s making daikon soup tomorrow!