Since the family is away for a few days I’ll be able to spend some time in the garage and finish up construction of the cabinet. This evening I worked on the drawer. It ended up being a bit deeper than I thought, which is a good thing. I was afraid it was going to end up too shallow and unusable.

Assembly was pretty straightforward. I think the trickiest part was figuring out how to create a set of guide rails so that it 1) had something to rest on and 2) wouldn’t tip when you pulled it out. And here’s what I came up with:

Here are the garlic bulbs I picked out of the garden tonight:

I stumbled across this tonight… http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/

I use the Google image search function almost every single day. If spending a few minutes of my time will help make it better, then count me in.

…the Japanese Beetles. Every year they plague our yard and devour the Nishiki Willow tree we have in our backyard and the weeping Cherry in the front. This evening while sitting outside I started to notice them already. And they’ve already discovered our new trees! I went ahead and sprayed some of the Ortho stuff that I use every year (that I’m not sure why I use anyway because it doesn’t seem to work) around the grass and those two trees in particular. I found some info tonight that suggested using soapy water to deter them and to try to kill off as many of the first ones you see, as they’re the scouts that end up attracting more to your yard. I also put out a single trap along the one edge of our backyard and will probably put one out front too once I find the bait that I bought a few weeks ago.

The garden is doing well… we got off to a rocky start when everything got killed by a late frost between April and May so I replanted from seed and some nursery grown plants. So far, the crop of the year award goes to the strawberries. I planted them last summer and they were successful in surviving the winter. We’ve been picking a few ripe ones here and there, but last night I got all these:

In the first box we have the strawberries, cabbage, cucumbers, and some romaine lettuce.

In the rear box are garlic (planted last year), pumpkin, squash, a bunch of different tomato varieties, hot peppers, and some herbs.

When I re-seeded after the frost had killed everything I was very generous with my tomato seeds. A lot more of them have sprouted up than there is room in the individual squares so in the next few days I plan on transplanting a few of them to other squares and seperate containers.

And finally a shot of one of the first tomatoes: