errantember

You may recall the Angry Remake of Forward Zone Alpha.

God knows I do.

I've had about 14 plants staring at me balefully from on top of the mailbox for about three weeks or more now. Evidently they're getting tired of their tiny 4" pots, and are ready for dirt. Every day, as I walked outside, they would say "Hey pigfucker! Where's the dirt?"

They actually used the word "pigfucker," which is a first for me.

Well today, *finally*, they got some dirt.

The wall you see is one I've been painfully laying over the course of the past month. Every foundation stone has been hand-leveled, and it currently has no mortar. The section shown here is less than 1/4 of the final result, but I wanted to get *some* plants into the ground as soon as possible, so once I had 3 fully built walls to contain the soil, I put the fuckers in.

Some people may be wondering what the hell the little terra cotta things sticking up out of the soil are. This is what they look like *before* the addition of dirt.

These are the Pod People I promised to talk about earlier. They're called ollas, and they are very effective, low-tech way of irrigating plants. The water seeps slowly out of the terra cotta, and the plants grow their roots hugging the walls. Most of the the water goes just to the plants you want, and not to nearby weeds.

Figuring out the placement was total guesswork, since I've never used them before and don't know how much the water will soak out sideways in my custom mix of my compost, the fairly good topsoil that I dug up laying the wall, and the Natural Gardener's Hill Country Garden Soil. Considering they're made out of two 6" flower pots, the ollas hold a shitload of water, probably 3/4 of a gallon each. I have several upgrades planned, including funnels and or plugs and/or bobbers that tell me how full they are. In their current state, they cost about $5 each.

This has been a much bigger project than I first envisioned, and I haven't even started on the constructed wetland yet. So far I've zorched the existing bushes, hand dug-out all 200 sq. ft. of grass and weeds one root at a time, hand-laid about 1/3 of the wall, purchased and moved 1400 lbs of soil, hand-built the ollas, and put together the section you see here and a little more. I'm getting better at everything, but I'll be lucky if I get the bed fully populated before fall.

I went with my friend