Category: garden

Time to Get Planting! Spring Garden 2011

Down among the seedlings

It’s been a little iffy these past few weeks but I think it is safe to say Spring is finally here! Spring is the herald of many things (one of the best being Easter candy; I’m looking at you Cadbury egg) what it means in our household is spring cleaning and spring planting. The cleaning is all mostly done (I’ve just got to steam clean the carpets) so, that means it’s time to get our hands dirty in the garden.

Before we could plant we had to take everything else out. The winter garden still had celery, spinach, chard, arugula, and carrots in it; they all had to go:

After harvesting, all the greens had to be cleaned
Tiny carrots are yummy. I think we grew them too close to each other
Once cooked all this spinach will fit in a one measuring cup
Arugula is delicious. This was previously unknown to me

We kept the celery in the garden because it seemed so happy and I have no idea what to do with 4 heads of celery… Once the winter plants were out  all the ready compost out of our composter and went in, along with a bag of manure fertilizer, and soil to revitalize the plot. Then we laid out where we were going to put everything. Learning from last year we picked up fewer tomatoes and zucchini plants and got more cucumbers. We’re also attempting beans again this year to see if we can do better than the single green bean pod we got last year.

 

tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, eggplants, basil, parsley, peppers

 

Everything in its place.
I swear I helped put this garden in. It wasn't all D.

 

 

Beer traps in Sluggo spread. It begins!

I’m hoping that we do get a lot of produce this year. D and I are both looking forward to learning how to can and pickle vegetables! I’m still trying to figure out what to do with all the celery. As it is we’re putting it in absolutely everything.

Compost Woes: Fine-tuning My Compost Pile: The Search for Black Gold

 

Not a pretty picture

 

We’ve had our composter now for a year-and-half or two years I think. It is definitely its second winter. Unlike last winter though things aren’t going as well. Instead of things breaking down and turning into a nice mulch I can spread into the garden. They’re turning into a stinky sewage. I’d like to blame this on the cold and rain but I don’t think they are completely at fault.

Our household has recently (the past six months) started composting everything possible. This means a lot of “green” is going into the composter. According to what I’ve been able to find out about composting all this “green” needs to be balanced out with “brown,” if you want the ideal environment for composting to occur. I’ve been neglecting the brown and throwing in a lot of “green” recently and things have gone sour.

That is okay though because I’m getting a little help from the United States Government:

 

The 1040EZ also known as "brown"

 

The Post Office had stacks and stacks of these packets sitting there waiting for John Q. Citizen to pick them up if they needed some tax assistance. I grabbed 20 or so figuring that’d help. I cut off the glue binding to the packets and shredded them:

 

A stack of about half of the paper I shredded

 

After the paper was shredded into the bin it went:

 

In two weeks this better look like compost...

 

Composting hasn’t turned out to be the simple formula I thought it was: scraps in, soil out. It takes a lot more tweaking and guesswork. I’m still getting the hang of it. If adding paper doesn’t do the trick I might have to get some straw or move the composter so that it gets more sun.

I never thought I’d be experimenting with the “art” of composting.

P.S. Love that title up there don’t ya?

 

Winter Gardens: It grows, I do nothing

 

It has been months since I mentioned the winter garden hasn’t it?  That probably has something to do with the fact that, at least here, a winter garden is a hands-off process.  I don’t have to water the garden as it either rains or dew it sufficient to keep the plants happy, I don’t have to tend to the plants very often seeing as their not giant bushes overwhelming nearby plants (like zucchini and tomatoes.)  We planted it and promptly forgot about it until we need something like spinach, bok choy, or celery.

Oh, there was one pest… one that has somehow managed to survive the below freezing temperatures:

Beer traps don’t seem to work as well in the winter and either did nightly pick-ups.  We finally broke down and picked up some iron pellets which make them stop eating, but that doesn’t put an end to the breeding these pests do.  Who know slugs were so big on sex?  The only real victim of the slugs has been the lettuce and cauliflower.  Their leaves have been chewed all up and slug slime covers what is left, which means what cauliflower I have is tiny and, so far, inedible.

Appealing?
too small

So far we’ve eaten spinach, bok choy, celery, arugula, and some lettuce from the garden.  The carrots are still too small as are the onions.  Despite the lack of lettuce I’m still calling this season’s garden a success

How My Garden Grows: Winter 2010

It has been about a month since we put in the winter garden and things are finally starting to grow, as you can see.  The bok choy and lettuce are coming in the fastest but everything seems to be moving along nicely.  So far, the biggest problem has been slugs, much more so now than they were in the summer.  I’ll be putting in new, and perhaps additional, beer traps but am considering using coffee grounds as well.  The acidity of the grounds prevents the slugs from crawling over them, it can also burn your plants too though.  I suppose I could purchase a pesticide of some sort but we’re trying for an organic garden and I don’t want to see it come to that.

notice the holes in the leaves? slugs!

D thinks we can start harvesting lettuce from the garden now… I still think the heads are a little too small and Id like to give them a few more weeks.  The arugula and carrots both seem to be doing fine.  We didn’t lose much seed to birds or other granivores and it looks as if we’ll have plenty of both by harvest time:

arugula
carrots

I didn’t take any pictures of the celery or onions but they seem to be doing fine, especially because it appears the slugs are uninterested in them.  Not enough leafy greens I suppose.  The only other plant we have growing is cauliflower and while they seem to be doing fine they’re a long way off from harvesting.  Seeing as they have to flower first and then be germinated and then… Well, you (should) know how plant sex works.

In general, despite the pest problem, the winter garden seems to be progressing well.  As long as these plants don’t stall on us like the tomatoes and zucchini did in the summer garden and we don’t have a cold snap this season should be a success!

%d bloggers like this: