Cucumbers are Coming Along

July 18th, 2009

Cucumber resting on the mulch

I snapped a few pictures of my raised beds this morning. The cucumbers are finally starting to look a little better. I have read that the slow growing is likely due to the amount of rain that we’ve received this spring. It’s been a very wet year so far. This being our first year gardening I’ve also been watering, and likely over-watered, my seedlings while they were still inside. It’s a learning experience :)

The cucumber plants are still smaller than I’d expected them to be by this time, but there are blossoms and cucumbers popping up in several places.

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June Garden Update

June 17th, 2009

This will just be a short post to give an update on our SFG for June.

Most of the plants are gaining in size, but with our late seed starting I think we are still a little behind where we should be. I think the broccoli and lettuce should have been harvest-able by this point had we gotten things started at the recommended time. Hopefully we will see heads form and grow before it gets too warm.
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Rebuilding With Zend Framework

June 7th, 2009

I’d mentioned a while back that I had built an intranet application with PHP. While I was able to spit out accessible and validating pages, I was not a very advanced programmer so the entire application was written using procedural code. I was contacted by my former manager to do some reworking of the site so that it can be extended, so I have decided to use Zend Framework as a base for a complete rebuild of the project using Object Oriented programming.

I’ve been reading a bit the last few months on Object Oriented PHP development and I think that using the framework will give me a head start as there are a lot of standard things to handle in most applications that don’t need to be re-invented. Quite a bit of the security and database connectivity issues are already handled by the framework and this also gives me a place to begin to really understand the structure and theory of OO programming by following an already established structure.

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Mushrooms in my Square Foot Garden

May 23rd, 2009
There are a number of mushrooms growing around the tomatoes and lettuce.

Mushrooms in my SFG

I have mushrooms growing in my SFG.

I’m not very sure what’s going on here. I’ve pulled up a few mushrooms over the last couple of weeks, but we seem to have gotten an explosion. I am assuming that the beds are too wet and spores have blown in somehow. Though this bed did have some leaf mold as part of the compost mix where the other two beds didn’t. I’ve seen one or two in the other beds, bu nothing like what we have going on in this one.

If anyone has advice please feel free to leave a comment.

Square foot Garden Update

May 8th, 2009

I snapped a few pictures this morning of the new greenery in our SFG.

We have green things :)

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Starting a Square Foot Garden

April 19th, 2009
All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew

All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew

While cleaning up the debris from a tree that was blown over in a windstorm last September (2008) we found that the yard was pretty torn up so we decided to start a compost pile and think about turning that area into a small garden. After a bit of research we opted to try the Square Foot Gardening(SFG) method as its not a large space and we wanted to make the most of what we had.

The largest selling point to SFG is that you can grow more, in less space, with much less work. My family had a garden when I was growing up and, though I didn’t have to do a lot of work, the bits that I remember weren’t all that much fun. I do love tomatoes fresh from the garden, and if I can get them while not weeding constantly and having to till and turn every spring so much the better.

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Whetstone Makeover Launched

March 1st, 2009

Whetstone Fly Fishing Outfitters has received a much needed makeover. The store has grown considerably in the last couple of years, and we needed a larger portal to have room for all the great products.

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Primalmightguild.com Launched

December 20th, 2007

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft off and on for about a year, and I recently joined up with a great group of people who I’ve been playing with for some time to form a new guild called Primal Might (after one of the in-game transmutations).

I have volunteered to do the website and it is now ready for its official launch. The site is powered by WordPress and phpBB which I have integrated and themed for continuity.
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New Intranet Project

February 1st, 2007

It’s been some time since I’ve made an entry. I’ve been working for a small Steel Manufacturer for a couple of months now, and I’ve been working on one of my largest projects to date.

I’ve been working on an internal website to track blueprints and communications. I’ve done a small bit of PHP programming in the past, but this is a ground up project where all design decisions are my own. I’ve been working 12-14 hour days for almost two months and I am feeling great about it. I won’t have to work around design flaws and force accessibility and web standards, I can build them in from the get-go making sure everything passes validation.

I may do a public facing website for them at some point, but for now this is a great experience!

Moving to WordPress

October 12th, 2006

So, MovableType was a fun CMS to play with. I learned a lot about the set up and really enjoyed using it, but it is time to try something else out.

I should make the transition to WordPress sometime over the weekend.