Time Elapsed: 10:00-12:20 PM
Ah you can just smell the nature all around you..and the hickory smoke. After a quick orientation on the place, we were finally released into the wild of the Botanical Garden to begin a important task of vegetable gardening. I would personally like to thank our members Scott and Gabriel for braving the swarm of bees in order to retrieve the new good compost for our land while me and Daniel disposed of the old 'undesirable' top soil (which Scott and Gabriel went back in to dispose of).
Yes I have to admit, at first I feared the measurements and calculations would be our biggest challenge of the day, despite already graphing up a model of the planting layout earlier this week in class. But it turns out an aggravated swarm of bees would be the ones that would make the precision-demanding task into a game of dodging lasers and maintaining composure. The bees seemed to especially like Gabriel's beard. Thankfully it wasn't a total catastrophe for everyone involved and that's all there pretty much is to say on the matter.
Moving back onto the crops themselves, we first moved to transplant the tomato plant from its default pot into a hole in the newly-watered compost so that a good 1/3 of the plant was below ground. Hopefully I dug up a big enough hole for the girl as the lowest leaf on the plant (after a bit of trimming) was barely surfacing the ground. While that hole was watering, Daniel brought our predetermined grid into reality and planted the rest of the seeds into their proper positions. The basil would sit a good few feet from the tomato plant in the back row, as it serves as a good companion to tomatoes as we were told. The cucumber seed was planted in a mound a bit in front of the basil seed in order to avoid competition with the equally potentially tall tomato plant. I fear that further down the line that cucumber plant will block out a portion of the sun for the basil plant, but I'll just have to have faith in the calculations for now.
The front rows would thus be occupied by our smaller plants, with little to no competition between each other. With proper maintenance for those two rows of crops, I have little doubt in my mind that those will thus be the easiest to grow and harvest. By the time all of those seeds were planted, we were finally about ready to transplant the tomato plant into the soil and then surround it with a support base that Scott constructed for the occasion. We adjusted the plant's branches a bit so that they would grow around the support instead of colliding with it later on. Unfortunately I wasn't around for the final process of the seeding as I was put in the time-out corner by the bees, but I was able to come back just in time to water the soil again for a needed boost in moisture to end the day.
Of course this is only the start of our journey towards harvest as well as the plants. Hopefully the weather stays just as nice as it was today for the duration of the project, or at the very least remain consistent.
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