Back!

 

Sorry for the long haitus! At first I was busy with school, then I misplaced my camera. Now, I've got a new camcorder. You might be seeing some silly garden videos as I learn how to use it and editing software. 

Now onto the plants! Summer came in hard and strong. Besides the tornado storms, there really havn't been too many cool or rainy days. The garden stepped up its water intake to about two watering-cans a day. I've had to rearrange the plants because the Cherokee Tomato has shot up and out. I haven't counted the number fruits on it, but it's at least 8. One of the tomatoes already turned. It was super juicy and had more placenta than meat. Still delicious! 

 

The jalapeño has also been doing extraordinarily well. It's not nearly as bushy as the tomato plant. The pepper is about two and a half feet tall (not including pot) but just a foot wide. Quite lanky. But that's not the goal; it has over twelve peppers on it and I've harvested 3. They're extra hot. Yumyumyumyum!!!

The most successful of my plants is definitely the beans. My mom put about a cup of them in a vegetable soup. Glorious. There really isn't much better than fresh beans. I can harvest a few at a time and then keep them in the fridge for two weeks or so. I've got enough now to make just a pot-o-beans! Excitment!!!

These are the ones I picked today.

The strawberries started fruiting last week and should ripen in the next. I'm planning on making pound cake and buying whip cream. Be jealous.

In the same box as the strawberries is the most successful nasturtium. The flowers are edible; they have a pepper-citrusish taste. Tomorrow they will liven up my salad.

Leek and carrots are surviving. Herb pots going steady.

That's all for now friendlies! Ciao!

 

Starting summer plants

This is what happened: I walked into the Lowe's garden center and got excited. I want to thank my assistant, Nicholas for trying to keep my level headed and putting up with my need for immediate results.

I bought:

Cherokee Purple tomato
Jalapeno Pepper
Blue Lake Beans
Sweet Basil
and..... STEVIA oooooooh

I also got two june-bearing strawberry plants and mint (Kentucky variety) from the local garden center.
I have two or three sweet pea plants started from seed already. (They're suppose to be early spring/winter but, we'll see how that goes). And of course the rosemary/oregano/sage pot is still going strong.

The strawberries are in a window box by themselves. The pea and beans are planted together in one. The mint is in a one gallon pot. The tomato, pepper, and basil are in separate 7 gallon pots. And the stevia is in a 5 gallon.

I used two different soils- The pepper and tomato are in my 'compost' soil. Really, it's just where I dumped the soil from last year in the woods and added some twigs and arugula. The may create an unhealthy plant- disease from fungi, bacteria, etc may now transfer from the dirt to the plants. But this soil is actually more lively- I saw earthworms and roly-polies when I  was gathering it. There's also more sticks and twigs which may leave more room for air & water. We will see.

The second soil I used was a mixture of peat moss, vermiculite, and osmocote. Nicholas had the peat and vermiculite left over from his creature-container making, but they're still cheaper than a bag of soil. A 2 cubic foot bag of Jungle Growth potting soil is about $9.  A 3 cubic foot bag of PACKED Majestic Earth peat moss is about $10. According to Lowe's website - this amount of peat should cover 72 square feet. And that particular brand is kind of pricey for peat. Vermiculite is about five dollars for a quart, and you should already have osmocote if you are gardening. Books and  things also recommend adding perlite, but I'm stubborn and cheap and didn't buy any.

The mixing of the soil was really messy. I had to rehydrate the peat moss and mix in the other ingredients. It was in no way scientific. Roughly, for every gallon of peat I added 1/2 gallon water, half a quart of vermiculite, and a fourth of a cup of osmocote. My method of mixing:

 I lined the inside of a pot with a piece of plastic so that dirt/water wouldn't run out the bottom. I put a little bit (one dust pan scoop) of peat in. At this point the peat is like dust. I poured a good bit of water in to get started with. Then I added about 3 more scoots of peat and mixed by hand. The mixture was very soupy mud. More peat moss, some vermiculite mix. Water, peat. Peat water. Vermiculite. Osmocote. Peat. Water. . . . . soil!

I decided not to reduce soil usage with the plastic bottles or anything this year. It was such a pain to try and keep them watered last year- I hope that more soil will translate to more water retention. I've also added a few more tactics to keep them cool.

My book suggested something that sounds far fetched, but easy. Use aluminum foil as 'mulching'. The foil is suppose to reflect light away from the dirt so that 1) the soil doesn't absorb as much heat (reducing evaporation) 2) increases light for the plant 3) deters leaf sucking creatures like lacewing flies, aphids, and vegetarian vampires. It also covers the soil. I didn't want to use new aluminum foil  so I decided to use stuff from my recycling. (ghetto, but I don't care). I had a sheet of clean foil, throw-away casserole dish, and some cans. The foil went onto the basil with some holes poked into it for aeration and water to get in. Casserole dish got cut up and placed around the stevia. Aluminum can got cut up and put around the pepper- which also provides the advantage of sharp edges that will cut up anything that wants to crawl on the soil around it. We'll see how it works out.

I've also arranged some white panels around the 7 gallon pots so that their black exterior won't absorb so much heat. If that doesn't seem to work I might wrap them with aluminum foil . 

The growth so far has been pretty good. Everything pretty much took off once I transplanted them, despite a bout of cooler weather. The mint has been the happiest so far, nearly doubling in size already. I also looked again at the beans- their bush beans not pole beans. They probably won't like the window boxes.

I planted marigolds in with a few of them to keep pests away, as well as some nasturtium seeds. The strawberries have already started to fruit, and I look forward to eating those as they ripen.

All this blogging has worn me out. I should update more frequently so I don't have to do so many posts at once :P

Winter Harvest

Winter was a great success.

This was my last harvest from winter. I had a boat load of greens, which the pictures don't really portray. Two whole window boxes were bursting with them. One had a mix of bitter greens (arugula) and the other had a mix of spicy micro greens (raddish-ish). Not my favorite. Most of them actually ended up in the compost heap. I had a few salads with them mixed into store-bought lettuce I had to pull them all up at once because they were attracting aphids.

This leaf of greens had a weird mutation where mini-leaves were coming out of it. Just wanted to show you all.


 
When I cleared out the micro-green box I found this one miniature radish. It tasted like a radish.

 I had started a box of Leek and Carrots awhile ago, and it's doing just fine. However, I thought that I would have full, luscious, delicious, ready to make soup leeks by now. No. They just look like green onion. :( I'm going to keep them going for a good while now so they hearty up. They do look good though.  

 

I  harvested several carrots from the leek box. It's weird, but the carrots I planted in other places haven't fleshed out. These definitely did. I hadn't been checking them very regularly so when I saw a quarter sized orange head peeking through the dirt I nearly split in half. Like this carrot.

 The variety is a true baby carrot (little finger I think, go check the post) so these are full grown. I ate them with my salad. Nothing extra-ordinary in taste, but they did have a strong flavoring of satisfaction.

Oooh! Springtime!

Actually, springtime is almost gone here in Auburn. Ever since February the weather has bounced between 40*F to 80*F. Humidity has yet to rear it's ugly head.

So I've been slacking (just a bit) in my art and spending time  outside. It's what I'm doing right now. And if I hadn't I would not have just seen a beautiful anole scuttle across the railing and flash his dewlap at me. There's also two new bird's nests on my balcony. One of nests is just low enough to look inside if I stand on a chair. This first one was taken about a week ago when I started my garden.

  The nest is about five inches wide, and very neatly put together.There is a piece of plastic bag or some thin plastic on the outside.
You can see the mud(?) packed around the inside in this photo.

This photo I just took. The birdies lined the mud with another layer of that grass/straw stuff. And laid two eggs. :) In my brief google search I've guessed that it's a robin's nest. Or a bluebird, but they usually live in boxes or holes. I don't know if it's the best idea to be hanging out on the porch right now with them- I havn't seen the mama or papa. Google said that the parents don't actually start nesting til they have laid all the eggs- so maybe she's out stuffing her face or something. I'll consult some experts later.

Now, onto the garden. (New Posts)

Random Update

 Salad that I made from my garden! I added sunflower seeds, croutons, carrots, celery, ranch, and Parmesan. Delicious.

Shot of my lettuce, almost full grown. It's all eaten now.

Goodbye Summer, Hello Winter!

Just as the calander changed, the weather changed. The last weekend of October the high was 77F. The first weekend of November the high was 55F. Dramatic no?

I decided to pull up most of the summer plants since most of them weren't doing too well.

This is the last of the summer harvest. A few green peppers that never turned red, some overripe lemon cucumbers and that small green thing - it's my one and only tomato. Not the most successful harvest, but whatever. That tomato plant was defective.

My basil plant is hanging in there. I brought it inside for the weekend. There are SO MANY LEAVES on it. I'm planning on making a batch of pesto to freeze today. But it's Thai basil so it's a bit mellower and peppery (?) than traditional Italian basil. I've already dried half the limb because it was taking in way too much water. The plant has bloomed several times, and despite my best I think I didn't pinch them off soon enough. The next wave I'll let go to seed and keep them for next year. 


The winter plants seem to be doing well so far, especially the lettuce.

Blogspot is estupid and won't let me re- rotate the image that they incorrectly rotated, so this image is side ways. The top/left bunch is the Marvel of Four Seasons butter head, middle is the Tom Thumb butterhead, and the bottom/right is the Cimmaron Romaine. Tom Thumb is doing best, I'll be harvest some of this soon to make room.

This is the leek & carrot box. As you can see the leek doesn't look much different from onion grass. I was expecting it to grow faster, especially since the lettuce shot out overnight. The carrot are those little frond things. No sign of root yet.

Herbs have taken off! Left to Right: Sage, Oregano, Rosemary. I need to start cooking more!!! We made dressing/stuffing the other day with the sage. Barely made a dent in the plant but tasted wonderful!!


Backside of the pot is filled with pansies.
You can see the not as vivacious rosemary too.

And so say so long for now, a photo of the front door flower pot!

Taste of Success

I harvested my first cucumbers yesterday and they were extra delicious. I thought they'd be weird tasting because they look and feel a lot different than grocery store cukes. There really wasn't a flavor difference, but the freshness was quite noticeable- especially in the texture. They had the same texture has a regular cucumber, but ya know, more crunchy I guess. Fresher. 

The cucumber plant isn't doing too well though; I think I'll only get a few more off the plants. They just soak up sooo much water, I can't keep up. Plus I have an infestation of white-flies in all my plants. The flies are tiny and suck the juices out of the plant, restricting nutrient flow etc. Combining the drought and flies has caused half the leaves to wilt & die. We'll see how long they last though.

I also harvested some oregano (which is going wild in the strawberry pot) and basil (which continues to go wild) and let Nicholas make a delicious meal with them. He combined my herbs with some fresh garlic in home grown & canned tomato sauce and put that on a slice of Italian bread with sausage and cheese. The sauce was absolutely amazing and incredibly flavorful for the amount of herb put in. I meant to take a photo, but it was just too good.

My other plants are doing alright. The peppers havn't grown much later and I think they might have a disease; the pepper gets a soft pink spot on them when they are about 3in in diameter. I have yet to try one of the green peppers. The plant looks alright though. We have had cooler weather for a few weeks so I think it stopped going to fruit for awhile. Luckily, its back up to the 80*s and I might get a few more.

The tomato is lame with silly flowers and no fruit.

The carrots, lettuce, pea, and leek have all sprouted! The lettuce were out a few days after I put the seeds in. The leek followed and the carrot just appeared on Sunday. I'll be eating salad in no time!!



Sorry of the lack of pics- my memory card is full.