Garden Update

People have asked me to add more pictures to the blog and people keep asking about the garden, so I decided to do a follow up post about how our plants did this year with mostly pictures of vertical gardening.

 Here are the beans in front of the front window.  They cast a nice shade on the front of the house.  This system made them very easy to pick.

The beans grew all the way to the top of the strings and started looking for a place to keep growing

The pumpkins completely took over the pergola providing shade for the house and the hammock.  Check out how the pumpkins just hang there.  They didn't have any problems growing like that.  We didn't even have to support them.

 Another hanging pumpkin.  A couple of our pumpkins ripened really early.







The pumpkin seeds came from a pumpkin we had last year.  We planted 11 plants and grew 11 pumpkins.  Next year we will probably buy seeds to see if we can get more out of each plant.








Pumpkins on the roof.  Look at all that shade.  The vines didn't like growing on the black asphalt shingles.  They kept turning back towards the pergola and hanging down in the middle of the walkway.  I had to keep putting them back up on the pergola.

Here you can see the beans in front of the window, the pumpkin covered pergola with zucchini in the front as well as the salvaged countertop pavers.  The beans are sparse in the middle because a large rain storm came just after we planted washing away the seeds so many of the beans didn't germinate.








A view of the front yard from the street.  The tomatoes ended up growing well over the top of the t-frames.  We canned enough spaghetti sauce and ketchup for the entire year.

Bottle Bottom Boxes

The first Bottom Bottle Box

Made from a couple of Whole Foods spice jars

I received a case of empty Bombay Sapphire Gin sample bottles. Probably the kind you might find in hotels and airlines. They are tiny. They are too small to melt for stained glass, so I decided to slice them up into little square rings to be melted for jewelry. After slicing several bottles up, I had a stack of left-over bottle bottoms. I took them inside and told my wife that we should try and come up with something to do with them. I left the stack of bottle bottoms on the table and went back out to the shop for a minute. When I got back, guess what, the kids had found them and started to play with them (doesn’t that always happen?) What they were doing was making little boxes out of them by placing one on top of another upside down. With a little experimentation, the Bottle Bottom Box was born.



Frosted glass adds a nice touch



I am still having a hard time with the hinges. There are no hinges in the stores small enough to work on the boxes, so I am making my own with old copper wire that was pulled out of a remodel job. They work fine, but I’m still experimenting with them. Right now I am trying several different bottle sizes and styles to see what people like. I have already given away a couple as birthday presents. I’m sure I’ll be making many more of these in the future.

Multiple sizes are available