My upside down Lemon boy tomato was sheared off in one of the thunder storms earlier in the week. I plopped the 18" that broke off (more than half the plant) into some wet soil and I'm waiting to see if it takes off. I left the 10 inches or so left in the pail growing. Maybe we get something, maybe we don't. Time will tell.

An update...

On Monday the storm broke one in half as I stated above. Sad but true. On Saturday morning my cell phone was beeping, my weather update warned me at 4am high wind warning. OK, whatever. I get up, do my day, and yesterday evening looked at the tomato next to the one that was half there, all wilted. It had been broken completely off during that wind storm. GONE!! I broke it off the rest of the way and buried the end in some wet potting soil hoping for some magic roots, but wow, 2 broken off in a week. Not a good year for me in the tomato world.

I tried to ignore the obvious, and it was working for a while. It is starting to catch up with me. The place I have my pails hanging is too shaded for tomatoes. They are growing but I have large spindly plants now and no blossoms yet. It is what it is at this point. I have no where else to go with them. I think I will rig something up on the back of my new fence for next year and I want to cut down some of the 'weed' trees that grow wild in my yard. They have grown from the wind or from bird droppings and I don't know what they are anyway. They are messy and grow like weeks, get rotten, and drop branches on the house. It's just time to make them gone, at least the one clump by the road.

Looking at the positive side, I got some pictures of what we have now. Like I said, the tomatoes are spindly like they are searching for light. The cucumbers and squash out of the top are progressing, about to look for something to climb on.

Speaking of running, I decided that the climbers need something to climb on. In one of my previous incarnations, I had some commercial display grid 2 foot by 5 foot. I bought a few strong lag screws and hung them up. This will give the plants a place to run until they can safely reach the ground (should they need to run more).

Then, I briefly mentioned the new fence. I thought you would like some pictures of that. I am especially proud of the gate closing mechanism which on the benefit of geometry and an old door spring in the right place, closes automatically or if opened past perpendicular to the fence, stays open. It worked out much better than I expected.

Since I am drifting way off subject, I had some entries earlier this year about putting in a lilac bed. How about a couple of status pictures on that? Sure, why not.

That's my status and I'm sticking to it. Continue to enjoy your growing season.

_|I/V\ C.

Well, when I heard to expect a few mushrooms growing on the bales, I did not expect this...

This is a close up of the current batch of mushrooms. There have been 2 other crops of 2 other different species, and a couple of patches of a mold type thing that changed the color of the soil. That washed off with the watering.

Now I know that everyone says ignore the shrooms, it is a good sign the bale is converting properly. Fine, I get it. But 4 different 'crops', all of different variety? Whatever.

On the bad side, and possibly contributing to the shroom explosion, the spot I picked to put the bales is a but shady, maybe too shady. The carrots and beets are not going to get anywhere. A couple of Tomatoes look good, others not so much. The potatoes are starting good and strong, those will be interesting to see how they work out. I'll have to add potting soil in order to 'Hill' them I guess.

Well that's the update for now. Good luck and water that straw bale!

_+I/V\.

This is my photo of my second attempt at rooting some nice dwarf white lilacs to add to my screening fence. Approx 2 weeks, misting twice a day, used new growth after bloom, cut about an inch below the last leaves on the cutting, using rooting powder.

It is not lost hope, but it is not looking good.

On Todd's message board (http://bit.ly/aCsdbS) a person with the login 1stTimer gave me permission to re-post his stuff. He has some really good ideas so I'm going to be as faithful as possible and copy them in a format very similar to how he posted them. Here they are:

Thanks for sharing your information about building and growing the upside down tomato plants. This is a first attempt for me and I thought I would share some photos. I live in a apartment so I don't have space to grow in a conventional method. At first I thought I would hang the tomatoes from the patio over top of my ground floor concrete porch, I decided against that concerned about adding a 80-100 pound load to my neighbors patio. So I built a pressure treated lumber hanging stand next to my porch. It only required one attachment to the building. Concerned about watering, I also ran some 3/8 plastic tubing up the structure to water the plants from a garden hose using a hose cut off from WalMart to control the flow. I'm thinking about adding a five gallon bucket with a submerged fountain pump to water and fertilize the plants and eliminate the garden hose.

After reading a bit more, I believe in an article by Jim at another site. He had mentioned that the metal handles on my plastic buckets would more than likely fail after the plastic bucket cooked in the sun for a while. I needed a back up plan. Sure enough after examining the bucket, the holes where the metal handle attached to the bucket seemed to be stressed. To set my mind at ease, and avoid seeing my tomatoes hit the dirt when I was watering one day with the plants heavy with fruit. I came up with this solution. I have included some construction drawings and tips for anybody that may have similar concerns. My buckets have a rim around them about 3 inches from the top of the bucket. The rim seemed to be pretty substantial so I made the rig shown in the attached image to hold the bucket. My bucket fit snugly in a 11 1/2 inch hole. If your bucket has such a rim you can cut your hole for the bucket to rest in. You can measure the size your cut-out hole needs to be by measuring the circumference below the rim with a cloth or plastic measuring tape like those used for sewing or do like I did and wrap a non stretching wire or something around the bucket below the rim then measure the length of the wire, divide the length of the wire or the length measured with the tape by 3.14, that will give you the diameter your hole needs to be. (I recall that from school about a century ago.) I painted the bucket holders I made with plywood so the weather would not effect them. I adjusted the cords by spreading them out and using a nail-in romex staple this relieved about half the weight of the planter from the metal bucket handles.

Jim C feel to post my pics and post on your site, I look at you guys as the people that are promoting the free enlightenment of what you can do when you put your mind into it. So here is my Proposed water and plant feeding system. I may add this later. If it works I'm going to set up a system for my Mom next year for Mothers Day. She's 86, doesn't have a hose hook up, but does have a electric outlet on her patio. She's capable of filling up the water bucket with a 1/2 gallon pitcher which she could fill up from her kitchen sink.

Pretty cool stuff, huh? There's lots more cool stuff on Todd's message board and website (http://bit.ly/aCsdbS) and on my blog here about similar feats of engineering. Check them out!

_|I/V\ C.