Week Two Update.

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It's been two weeks since we planted our seeds in our square foot gardens and transplanted the plants that we started indoors.

Here are what things look like right now.

The English peas (I over planted these and will probably have to thin.)

Spinach:

Here is some spinach starting to show it's true leaves:

Carrots  (Purple Dragon):

Pickling Cucumbers (Calypso):

Here's one of the Brussels Sprouts (Royal Marvel) transplants:

Carrots (Imperator):

Pole Beans (Blue Lake):

Lots of true leaves on these radishes (Champion variety):

Sugar snap peas:

Carrots (Scarlet Nantes):

The lettuce is getting bigger:

My "fields" of corn (Kandy Korn):

The strawberry patch.  The large bunches are strawberries that were planted last year.  The other smaller plants were just planted two weeks ago.  We're pulling the flowers from all of the newly planted strawberries to give them a chance to establish their roots and, hopefully, to prepare for a fantastic crop next year.

The blackberry bush is really starting to grow.

Lots of buds!  As long as we can protect them from the birds, we should have a great blackberry crop.

Flower Garden Update

The flower (and blueberry) garden is doing great.  The tulips and daffodils have lived their lives and I cut the dead heads off this week.

We bought some mulch to add but it started raining today and I didn't get to it.

Here are some current pictures of the flower garden (you can seen the spent tulips in the background).

Apple blossoms:

One of our new blueberry plants:

Red climbing roses:

Yellow climbing roses:

We have a white rose bush that is flowering as well.  When we bought it, it was labeled as a climber, but it's not.  It's pretty so we don't want to take it out, but we have a blank space in our flower garden wall as a result.  We'll probably plant another climber near it and try to train it to grow over the other bush.

They're not in the flower garden, technically, but here's a picture of one of our hanging tomato plants.  This is the 444 variety.

One week in.

The seeds in several more squares have sprouted.

I know, they all look the same, but I'm still excited to see them.  Sorry that a few of these are a little blurry.

English Peas (Wando):

Spinach:

Arugula:

Kale:

Green Onions:

Radicchio:

Lettuce (Salad Bowl):

Pole Beans:

Lettuce (Buttercrunch):

Lettuce (Romaine):

Lettuce (Red Sails):

Radish (Champion):

Sugar Snap Peas:

Corn:

Sprouts!

Some of the seeds planted outside on Saturday are up today.

Without looking too closely, the radishes, spinach and some of the lettuces are sprouting.

Here's what the radish sprouts look like.

Fruit blossoms

Our blackberries, strawberries and blueberries are starting to bloom!

Finally, everything's planted for "spring."

I'm about 3 weeks behind schedule, but everything is now planted.  I worked in the garden the entire day - sun-up to sun-down on Saturday.

The drip system isn't quite working as desired.  There doesn't seem to be enough pressure to get the emitters to spray sufficiently to cover each entire square.  This is really only necessary for those squares that have seeds covering the entire square (like the carrots, radishes, lettuce, etc.).  I'm not sure if the cause is a lack of pressure in the entire system, or if I just have too many emitters running off the smaller 1/4 in. tube.  I'm going to first try making direct connections between the 1/2 tubes and the emitters (rather than the 4 emitters I currently have running off a single 1/4 in. tube).  We'll see what works, but that's a project for later in the week.

For now, here are the results of my plantings.

Here are the herbs in our herb container garden.

The rosemary (far right), thyme (far left pot on the left), sage (far left pot on the right) and two of the parsley plants are survivors from last year.  I planted two additional parsley plants (we decided that we could use more for cooking, especially if we keep attracting cool black swallowtail caterpillars - see the earlier post).  In the front are newly planted cilantro (on the sides) and tarragon (in the middle).  The sweet basil is in the second picture below.

Here's a picture of the whole garden after planting:

Here are each of the planted gardens, with descriptions in succession:

Garden 1:

Here's the garden layout for Garden 1:

 

English Peas (Little Marvel)	English Peas (Wando)	Watermelon (Charleston Jr.)	Pickles (Calypso)_
Artichoke (Imperial Star)	Sweet Peppers (Sweet Banana)	Bell Pepper (Big Bertha)	Bell Pepper (Big Bertha)
Broccoli (Packman)	Spinach (Melody)	Spinach (Melody)	Brussels Sprouts (Royal Marvel)
Carrots (Purple Dragon)	Radish (Snow Stix)	Arugula (Rocket)	Carrots (Imperator)

Garden 2:

Here's the garden layout for Garden 2:

Tomatoes (Celebrity)	Tomatoes (Cherry, Super Sweet 100)	Tomatoes (Cherry, Super Sweet 100)	Tomatoes (Cherry, Super Sweet 100)
Brussels Sprouts (Royal Marvel)	Sweet Peppers (Gypsy)	Lettuce (Salad Bowl)	Pole Beans (Blue Lake)
Artichoke (Imperial Star)	Kale (Blue Curled Vates)	Cauliflower (Snow Crown)	Pole Beans (Blue Lake)
Green Onions (Evergreen White)	Lettuce (Red Salad Bowl)	Radicchio (Indigo Hybrid)	Cucumbers (Sweet Slice)

Garden 3:

Here's the garden layout for Garden 3

 

Cantaloupe (Ambrosia)	Cantaloupe (Ambrosia)	Pickles (Calypso)	Pickles (Calypso)
Mild Jalapenos (Fooled You)	Lettuce (Buttercrunch)	Carrots (Scarlet Nantes)	Snap Peas (Super Sugar)
Green Onions (Evergreen White)	Leeks (American Flag)	Broccoli (Packman)	Snap Peas (Super Sugar)
Lettuce (Paris - Romaine)	Lettuce (Red Sails)	Radish (Champion)	Pickles (Calypso)

Garden 4:

Here's the garden layout for Garden 4:

 

Corn (Kandy Korn)	Corn (Kandy Korn)	Corn (Kandy Korn)	Corn (Kandy Korn)
Corn (Kandy Korn)	Corn (Kandy Korn)	Corn (Kandy Korn)	Corn (Kandy Korn)
Corn (Kandy Korn)	Corn (Kandy Korn)	Corn (Kandy Korn)	Corn (Kandy Korn)
Lettuce (Buttercrunch)	Lettuce (Salad Bowl)	Lettuce (Red Salad)	Spinach (Melody)

Here's the blackberry and strawberry garden:

I also planted five tomatoes plants in upside-down buckets.  This worked really well last year.  I have planted all determinate plants (i.e., non-vining) in the buckets.  There are three Roma and two sandwich types (444s).

My tomatoes were starting to get a little sad indoors.  They weren't getting enough light.

Here's one of the tomato buckets.  You just drill a hole in the bottom of the bucket, feed the plant through burlap and the hole, add your soil mix, hang with chains and voila!

My next project will be constructing something to protect the plants from the birds.

I finally got something in the ground.

I will be growing 9 tomato plants this year - three cherry, three Roma and three sandwich types (one Celebrity and two 444s).

As you saw in earlier posts, I sowed them indoors several weeks ago.  Four will be planted in the square foot garden and five will be planted upside down in hanging pots on the porch.  I constructed some hanging pots last year and it worked really well.  Few pests and better production.

I'm putting the inderterminate tomato plants (those that vine rather than bush, in my case the cherry tomatoes) in the square foot gardens along with the determinate Celebrity.   I found that the indeterminate plants grew too large and long for the hanging pots.  The rest of the bushing plants will be planted from the hanging pots.

My cherry tomatoes had grown too large to get enough light from my indoor florescent growing system and I really needed to get them in the ground. I did so tonight.  Hopefully, they'll survive.  I plan to get the hanging pots up this weekend along with the rest of the other planting.

I'm getting my cool season crops in several weeks later than I intended, but sometimes you just gotta go with the flow.

Ugh! Life keeps getting in the way of my gardening

I was going to plant this weekend.  Really.

My daughter had a birthday party.  We spent the morning getting ready for an invasion of 10 tweeners.  We finished cleaning up around 2:00.  I went out to the car to go to the hardware store to pick up a few last items I needed and the my wife's car wouldn't start.  Blah.

We called the mechanic and set up an appointment.  The car is 11 years old and owes us nothing.  We've been thinking about getting a replacement for a while, but have been putting it off because we generally drive our cars until their last dying breath.  After this breakdown, the latest in a series, we decided we should probably get serious about our car research and narrow down the field of what we're interested in.  So after I returned from the hardware store, we went to a couple of dealerships to check out a few models.

By the time we got back to the house, we needed to get the kids to bed and it was too late to garden.  I don't work in the yard on Sundays, so nothing got planted outside this weekend.

My indoor-sown tomatoes are getting too big for the lamps I have and I really need to get them in the ground soon.  I may try to plant them one of the evenings this week, after I get home from work.

I'll keep you informed.

No planting this weekend...

I had planned to do my spring outdoor planting and to transplant some of my indoor-grown plants to the outdoors this weekend.  But we had a freak weather pattern come into plans that ruined my plans.  We had freezing temperatures and rain on Saturday and then on Sunday we had about 5 inches of snow.  Yes, snow.  In Texas.   In March.  Blah.

Hopefully next weekend it will be nicer.

Update on indoor plantings.

Here's an update on our indoor plantings.

The tomatoes are doing great:



The cauliflower, brussels sprouts and broccoli are still leggy, although they haven't gotten any leggier.  I'll end up needing to stake them when they're transplanted.  The peppers are getting their true leaves.  The artichokes are doing pretty well.  The cantaloupe had a little problem where the initial true leaves withered, but they have all since grown new true leaves that look pretty healthy.

We've started taking the plants outside for an hour or two at a time to get them hardened up and used to the outdoors before transplanting them.