Tomatosaurus Rex Prep...

I spaded the turf where my raised beds are going in (with a little luck, my friend with a truck should be helping me pick up a yard or two of compost this weekend with which to fill these puppies up). It's not really well broken up, I was working on a tight deadline Thursday evening knowing it'd rain all day today and running out of daylight.



I'd have taken the picture when I was finished but it was a few ticks past 'dusk' when I got to that point.

I'll be picking up my plants tomorrow after I get Em and her sleepover buddy to school at Oh My God It's Early tomorrow morning. She's getting on a bus at 6:00 a.m., which is normally the time I reserve for ignoring my alarm clock on a work day.

I gotta figure out my stakes/cages situation pretty quick it turns out. My original thought was I didn't need to worry until the plants get bigger, but Mr. Worley pointed out that it's not great to drive a stake down through the root structure of an establishing plant. The caging options I've found seem expensive (you can get 'cages' for a buck and a half at Ace, but they are four feet tall and made of coat-hanger gauge wire; they won't work for an eight foot high Mortgage Lifter vine). The 'Texas' cages Worley uses are great but they are something like $22 per four foot section and realistically, if it comes to that I'll have to let the vines lie on the ground.