Moving right along

My grow beds are happily growing but I think I overfed my gold fish.  I still have a couple of hardy survivors but the rest turned belly up.  My main activity this week has been harvesting and dehydrating golden plums from the tree that grows next to the greenhouse where I have my hydroponics setup.  I was just getting prepared to go back and pick fruit when a number of my grandkids showed up.  The older children, 7, 6, and 5, really like picking plums.  I gave each of them a small plastic bucket and provided a table they could stand on.  They got busy and harvested a peck of nice plums which I have turned into dehydrated fruit.  I used a steel tube apple corer to remove the pits, taking more of the meat than I liked, but far more efficient than any other method I tried.  Plums really hang on to their pits and most of the fruit directly around the  pit is somewhat more sour than I like. 

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Tricking my Brown Thumb

I carefully planted seeds in vermiculite and waited for seedlings to show.  The few seedlings I saw were quickly identified as products of a fall of elm seed disks from a huge elm tree in a neighbors yard, but no sign of the carrots, beets, parsnips, or tomatoes that I planted.  Finally I went ahead and purchased some weedy looking tomato plants for a deep discount along with dill and parsley that was similarly low in cost.  They began to thrive in the grow beds.  A week ago I tossed some year-old beets seeds in the beds, with a fatalistic feeling that since they werent getting any fresher, they were just as well off adding organic matter to the grow bed.  Surprise!  The beet seedlings are showing up as pretty little green leaves on red stalks.

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