Wednesday, August 26, 2009

The great unveiling

Before you see the picture of what follows I want to share a little story. When I first tried to grow vegetables about 13.5 years ago Superman was not interested. This was in the first house we lived in after we had been married for 5 years. It was hard going then as I had a six month old babe who needed my time and a huge oak tree which cast shade. We call this the year of feeding snails!

Thereafter we moved to a smaller home but the back garden had a huge established granadila creeper, a massive guava tree and a lovely lemon tree. The soil here was oily sand and this was a time when our family leapt from 1 babe to 3! We will call this the desert years.

Then we headed to JHB for 2 years and bought a large property but it had an established garden that we didn't want to pull up as we were uncertain as to how long we would remain there. However outside the bedroom windows was a large concrete area where we built 4 large raised beds. We grew easy veggies here - herbs aswell. Just as we started to get a yield (small, but still something) we moved back to CT. We will call these years the seeding years. Superman was great and suported me in the endeavour, but didn't get his hands dirty.

And the rest is history. After 5 years of living in this home we pulled up the flower beds and grass and started growing veggies in all sincerity. With this Superman has been my champion, my hero and my inventor.

He has been looking at my hot box which I use to force germination for sometime...it is just a cardboard box with a light and lined with aliminium foil...but it works:



The negatives are that it can only take 6 seedling trays and the bottom is all soggy from watering.

Superman has been pondering this dilema and look what he has made for me over the last couple of days....



So this is like trading in the rusted old Fiat for a Mercedes...This seedling starter will hold up to 70 trays. They will drip from the top to the bottom and then out as the bottom is slatted. There is a permanent light source!

Isn't he wonderful?

3 comments:

Jill said...

Oh yes, Wendy - he IS wonderful. You are one very lucky woman - and your garden is so lucky as well!!

splashfish said...

Sounds marvellous, but I don't see a picture. I need to make something like this and would love to see how he architectured yours.

Wendy said...

OK, where did you get him? :)