Footstep 42: Painting the Square Foot Gardens: Primer 102

At last!  The second coat of primer is on!  Yay!  Actually, once one starts, it actually goes quite quickly.  It is the idea of starting that makes it slow.  This time round I had to open a new tin of 5 litres of the bitumen.  This took forever.  Pharmacies need to get lessons from hardware stores on the concept of childproof lids.  This one had a plastic circle all round the lid with the lid tucked firmly below the plastic circle.  It sounds simple, but it took my biggest weeder and ages of twisting to get it open.  

This coat needs to dry, then one further coat needs to go on the base.  The then final coat needs to dry for seven days before I flip the boxes over and start inside.  Flip sounds so flippant.  Those boxes are jolly heavy.  I am hoping that I am going to manage on my own.  Otherwise, I'll have to weep behind my fence until some kind person stops and asks if they can help :).  No picture today, as they look exactly the same as they did last time.

I continue to traipse buckets of sand and garden waste to the dump.  Today it was the scurvy weed, well rotted, but after two months hidden in a sealed black bucket, there was still evidence of green, which means that wherever it lands, it has the ability to start growing again.  Initially, it was targeted for the compost heap.  When I saw the green, I decided against it.  The last thing I need is a more widespread distribution of the pretty but pesky plant.  The municipal dump has so much garden waste, and when it is turned so much steam rises off it, that I have absolutely no doubt that the scurvy weed will not survive the process.  This means that the buckets are now free for accumulating more kelp.

I had two buckets of kelp.  The one went into the compost heap when I first built it.  The second has been rotting down in a sealed black bucket.  I opened it this morning to find a rather smelly liquid, which I simply know is going to be lapped up very happily by my plants.

Unfortunately, the return trip of the dump is quite hazardous.  It includes my favourite bakery which has a shop with lovely specials on muffins.  This morning it was strawberry muffins.  Yum!  Just further on from my favourite bakery is my favourite nursery.  I always pop in to see if there is something interesting.  I saw the most beautiful lacy pansies - really the prettiest I have ever seen.  I managed somehow not to buy them, but a very pretty punnet of very pretty ground cover snuck into my hand and stuck there, so I had to pay for it and bring it home.  It will make a lovely addition to my baskets and pots of pretties.

I also learnt that Thursday / Friday is veggie punnet delivery day.  I am going to do my very best to grow from seed.  It is just that all of those luscious punnets of greens look spectacular when they first arrive, and one does find some very tempting plants to buy, like the Giant red mustard that I bought when I was last there.  It is not possible to get these plants in seed packets.  So the only way to get them is to buy the punnets.  And actually, it is cheaper these days to buy a punnet of say, lettuce, and pop it in the ground and let it grow and pick leaves off it over time, than to buy pre-washed lettuce in the veggie section of a supermarket.  I see loads of people are now doing that.  They also buy their mint that way, although, mint is so easy to grow that it doesn't really make sense to keep buying it and using it from the punnet, which many people seem to do.