One of the advantages of living in a tower is being able to take pictures from the top of the tower! Today I took some pictures from directly above the container garden.

Click on the picture to see the full map.
This garden could be categorized as a high density garden. The radishes, lettuce, and spinach will all be done, and sometimes re-planted before the tomatoes hit even half size.

It rained .25 inches last night. The radishes are coming up after 5 days.

My parents are down for a visit, and after seeing the nice planters Katie and I made, and after feeling the warm weather, they decided to help me get them planted.

We purchased some cotton gin waste. It was a new medium for my father. As an expert in compost, manure, and topsoil, he approves of cotton gin waste, except for the chunks of gray clay we found in a little bit of hit.

He helped me spread the dirt in the rectangular planters, and fill the large barrel planters Tyrone gave me for Christmas. Once filled, he started leveling and packing the soil. As you can see from the pictures, we had a little bit of soil left over. It rained this morning, and we saw a little bit of settling, so it is good we have a little bit of fill.

We planted 10 tomatoes, 3 cabbages, and 5 hungarian wax peppers. I had a jalapeno and bell pepper from last year that are still producing, so we stuck them in the planter too. Mom thinks they will thrive and produce, Dad thinks they’ll die in 2 weeks. We also planted some pole beans, cucumber, a muskmelon, and some asparagus.

When I think about micro-management of people, I cringe. Micro-management of plants is much easier since they don’t really go anywhere. Ever since I have had a place of my own, there has been this urge to cast my will upon the soil. It started with a packet of morning glories, and soon I was attempting to grow my own food.

At the dome house, there were too many trees, weird drainage, and oddly shaped lots to have a real garden. I’m working on an Instructable for a planter Katie and I made while she was here. You will have to wait for me to unveil that.

In the mean time, I’ve got some kind friends that will let me express my obsessive-compulsive farming disorder. You ask, “Farming is a disorder?” If you must ask you have clearly not lived with a farmer. Though both of my parents had teaching jobs, they were both really farmers at heart. My dad farms vegetables as well as soy and corn on a business scale. One of his favorite past times is sitting there worrying about the rain, or lack of rain, or price of seed, or price of sale. How do you deal with these uncontrollable forces? The answer is that you compulsively control all of the other forces that you can possibly control.

With a good hoe, you can take out all of your frustrations, and control the ground that way. There is also a fine-tuned precision in cultivating the crops: knowing which seedlings are weeds, knowing how to steak a tomato, knowing when things are ripe, knowing when picking some fruit will encourage further growth. Really, farming is the original addictive facebook game, only you can get a tan and fed at the same time. I have inherited this mental illness from both sides of my family. This illness also comes with a twinge of, “When the apocalypse comes, at least we’ll have something to eat.”

This illness evolved because many years ago, only people with the illness had enough food to survive the winter. There also evolved only one type of woman that would put up with the intense displayed characteristics of men afflicted with the farming disease. Even today, the great great great granddaughters of these women may offer you a delicious jar of salsa or pickles from last year’s harvest. Unless you are a close family member, you should probably know that you are getting a jar from the batch that just turned out “OK”.

To this day, I believe casinos may have been invented for farmers’ entertainment. My farmer relatives love to go to casinos! After hearing one of my uncles talk about hail damage in a cornfield, and how he had a trip to Vegas scheduled right after that, he said something like, “In Vegas, you can only loose money, not an entire crop.” Sure, you could lose some money, but the fear of starving kept you well within your entertainment budget.

So, this weekend my enablers, ahem, friends rented a rototiller and we went to town on their back yard.

It was a dreary day, but it felt good to figure out what sort of plot David and Sasha wanted. After tilling, we were too tired to plant.

On Monday, the sun came out at noon, and I just couldn’t stay indoors anymore.

I planted what was left of my green beans, along with so many other things. I think I planted 6-7 12 foot rows, and got a sunburn in the meantime! The second picture shows the bunny proof garden next to the squash and cucumber mounds.

Still don’t believe farming/gardening is a mental illness? Check out these tomatoes:

I only planted 18 peat starters with tomatoes. In each starter, I put 2-3 seeds. As I started to thin out each starter, I noticed the tomato roots were still intact. This allowed me to almost double (almost triple) the number of tomatoes I started. (Note: this does not work with peppers.) Keep in mind, I really have nowhere to plant other than containers, and at the time, I didn’t have my 4×8′ planter yet either. I could have 16 tomatoes in there at the most. David and Sasha have started their own tomatoes, but mine are 1 ft tall and getting tempered on the back deck right now! YAY! I will have some to plant over there too.

Just counted. There are 46 tomato plants in equal portions: brandywine, cherry, and either roma or beefsteak. I forgot which one I planted at the end. Maybe I planted 4 rows of 6? I’m obviously at the early stages of farming mental illness, because none of the plants are labeled.