Category: garden

A Garden for 2013!

A tiny garden for San Diego!
A tiny garden for San Diego!

Diana saw this project on a blog she followed where the person made a raised bed garden from discarded pallets. She shared it with me and I thought it was a clever idea. Unbeknownst to me she then started hunting for a pallet and contacted the manager of our cottage and asked him about putting in one of our own. Eventually, he approved the project and she found the pallet… The end result is above!

It was all very easy to do and everything cost us less than $30. If you’ve been thinking about gardening but don’t have a yard, or you rent this might be the solution you’ve been looking for. More pictures below!

The ingredients
The ingredients

One pallet, a 2×4 cut into 40″ pieces, three bags of garden soil (we only used 2 1/5.) I hammered the 2×4 pieces onto the ends of the pallet so that the soil doesn’t just spill out of the sides, then we filled the pallet with the garden soil.

We used Miracle-gro soil because it was right by the check-out counter and we were both really cold and didn't want to spend more time looking around
We used Miracle-gro soil because it was right by the check-out counter and we were both really cold and didn’t want to spend more time looking around

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After putting the soil in we watered it down to help it settle and then filled any any low spots or gaps, next came the transplanting and then more watering:

If you couldn't tell, D is super excited and happy about this project!
If you couldn’t tell, D is super excited and happy about this project!

The spot we picked was bar of grass and doesn’t get a lot of light so we decided to put plants in that like that sort of thing. We planted lettuce, cabbage, chard and kale. I’m knocking on wood that this new little garden is as successful as our old one in Davis. If not as big.

 

Spring Garden 2012: All Done

Bye, bye garden!

Last week we said goodbye to our garden. We didn’t pull it all out as the tenants moving in wanted to have a garden and they’ll be lucky enough to harvest even more cucumbers, tomatoes, and basil if the weather stays nice and they water and tend to it. Sadly, the beans were over run by the cucumbers. Our lone heirloom tomato plant has also started growing fruit, though all of it is still green. The last few weeks have been tough with packing and getting ready for the big move; they weren’t easy on the garden either an aphid and white fly infestation choked out our zucchini plants:

The looked worse when they were in the ground!

Luckily, the aphids and white flies restricted themselves to the zucchini; the tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, cucumbers, and basil are all doing fine:

Cucumbers climb up the eggplant cage

In fact, three to four times a week we’re harvesting four or five lemon cucumbers, an english cucumber, and a handful of cherry tomatoes

What are last few harvests looked like. In the end we were giving lemon cucumbers away to everyone we knew!

We’re going to miss gardening while we’re here in San Diego but it gives us something to look forward to once D’s work is done here and we move on!

2012 Harvest:

Zucchini: 20
Tomatoes: 70+
Bush Beans: 12
Cucumbers: 30+
Eggplant: 3
Basil: 60+ leaves

Spring Garden 2012: Wrapping Up?

Zucchini has peaked and now the tomatoes are on the rise!

As you can see one of the zucchini plants has grown too far outside of the box and has fallen over. This happened last year as well but when it did I had to pull the plant up as the fall destroyed most of it. That didn’t happen this time and the zucchini plant still has blooms on it. I’ll keep watering it as long as it keeps producing.  The other big change you can see in this picture is the tomato plants. They keep getting bigger and bigger. I thought about cutting them back or weaning them off of water in the hopes that they’d spend more energy making fruit and less energy growing. But D says we have plenty of tomatoes as it is, if we had more we wouldn’t know what to do with them!

Lemon cucumber grows up the plant guard
The lemon cucumbers seem happy

The cucumbers are doing really well. We’ve harvested fifteen of them so far, thirteen of those have been lemon cucumbers! The English cukes are just starting to come in I seen three or four tiny ones on the vine right now.

This is about 1/3 of what we are getting out of the garden every week.

D and I only have another month at this location, which means we’ll be giving up our tiny garden box. I’ve learned a lot from the whole experiment and had a lot of fun. I’m going to miss it, but here it to hoping that once everything is settled in our new home, and I find a job, we can start up a new garden!

2012 Harvest to date:

Zucchini: 18
Tomatoes: 53
Bush Beans:
Cucumbers: 15
Eggplant: 3
Basil: 40+ leaves

Spring Garden 2012 Harvest Update

Mario wishes he was a farmer!

2012 Harvest to date:

Zucchini: 14
Tomatoes: 17 (There would be more but Jake ate a handful or so)
Bush Beans: 19
Cucumbers: 3
Eggplant: 1 (2 more on the way)
Basil: 20+ leaves

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