I don’t think I’ve ever posted a picture of the inside of the greenhouse, at least once it started making things green. Here you see the wraparound shelves made of office light fixtures; Emma and I completed the shelves on the right after I wrote about them, but Jess found to my consternation that not enough light penetrates to the lower shelves to grown anything there. So we use them for storage.

If you were to see the greenhouse in person you would see why I say it looks like it was built by Robinson Crusoe. Bent nails, irregular angles, used lumber–kind of a mess. I did much better building the bike shed. But the greenhouse hasn’t fallen down yet, and I bet the bank windows prefer being out here to being in pieces in a landfill somewhere. (You can still see the bank hours silkscreened on one of the windows at the top of this shot.) As for the rest of it, you see that we just wrapped the walls in plastic and that was fine. Maybe we’ll have the money to replace it someday, but not today. And plastic seems to do just fine, ‘cept in a high wind.

Way back when we started growing things in the greenhouse, ‘long ‘bout May, we had scores of little plants out here. Tomatoes, peppers, beans, celery, cantaloupe, watermelon, cucumbers, I don’t know what all. As the plants got bigger and the summer got warmer, Jess gradually moved them outside. Eventually all that was left in the greenhouse were the watermelon, cantaloupe, and peppers. Our cantaloupe did better this year: It managed to produce twice as many fruits as last year (for a total of two), one of which was twice as big as last year’s effort (baseball sized, instead of egg sized). The watermelon did about the same. The peppers look fabulous but there’s not a whole lot of pepperage on the plants. Lots of great leaves, not lots of great peppers. Well, we’ll try something different next year. That’s gardening’s theme: There’s always next year.

Interestingly, our celery did surprisingly well. We had five or six plants, and they flourished in the greenhouse until Jess took them outside, and then they flourished outside as well. They never got the big tall green stalks you see in the trucked-from-California variety, but their stalks were six or eight inches long and good eatin’. I just had some in my soup for lunch.

I’m sure the gardening books are right when they advise us to test the pH and plant this plant early and that plant later and rotate the crops and don’t put these plants together etc. etc. But I’m impatient. If I’m in charge of the garden I put the seeds in the ground on one spring Saturday and hope for the best in the fall. (Jessica is much more careful than I; she loves to play in the dirt, and last year’s yields show that it’s better to follow instructions.)

Into this miserable category falls the advice to plant your potatoes in a mound of soft dirt, and keep adding to the mound as the plant grows. That way, in the fall you can harvest a whole grundle of potatoes because they grow out from the stem or something like that. It’s too much work. Who wants to spend time throwing dirt on potato plants? My uncles farmed potatoes in southern Idaho, and they never had to mound the dirt up. (Of course, the planter thing they dragged behind the tractor would mound the dirt up as it went, making tall rows of soft deep earth the entire length of the field.)

Enter Backwoods Home Magazine. Last year I read an article suggesting that I grow potatoes inside old tires. The idea is that you start them out inside a single recycled tire, and as the plant grows you stack tires up around it and mound up the dirt. The potato will grow up out of the tires and sprout tubers in the soil you dumped around it. Then in the fall, you just unstack the tires to harvest the spuds.

I liked the idea, so I went to a couple of tire places in town and it turned out they were glad to get rid of them. I hauled home a couple of loads (I could fit 17 tires in the Jeep, with the back seat down) last summer, and let them sit since the growing season was already well advanced. I hoped the idea worked; otherwise I’d have to get rid of the tires and the dump charges $4 apiece to get rid of them.

So far, it’s working. Here’s how the spuds look as of this morning; we just added the latest tier of tires a couple of weeks ago, and the plants are already bursting out the top. Jess and I will have to go down early tomorrow and fill them up again. I’m about out of tires, so I hope they don’t grow too much more. But they seem to like it. We’ll see how they’ve produced in the fall.

2. The BTWR died this morning. We heard him squealing early on; when Jess went down to investigate, she found him crouched and unmoving by some rocks in the front yard. Apparently the poison was getting to him. She called me down and I put him out of his misery with a large rock. It’s sad, but we can’t have him eating our engine. It would have been better if he’d just stuck his nose in that trap. Bang! It’s all over. A note to all other BTWRs in the area: you are welcome in our area. Just stay out of our cars.

3. We got a bantam (smaller breed) rooster last night. Since all our poultry has come for free, we take what we can get. Even though he’s smaller than all the hens, he started his job first thing this morning. We’re hoping he can help perpetuate the flock. Maybe they’ll start laying smaller eggs. That’s life!