Harvest Monday

Woohoo! I can finally do a harvest Monday. Here's some of the salad we've pulled from the garden in recent days. There's a radish under there as well.
It's so nice to see green out there in the garden and actually be able to harvest some of it. I forgot how exciting it all is.


Stop by Daphne's to see what everyone else is harvesting this week!

Garden Film - April Edition

Things are really starting to pick up around here and I figured to do a monthly tour around the garden to see how things progress through the season. Filming never does work out properly, does it? First, the camera only had 35 seconds of film, then the batteries died and then, when I finally thought I had it all completed, I just played it back and realized I must have had Thomas on the brain. Thomas sent me the bok choy seeds and they're doing great! But I also said multiple times that Thomas had sent me the Cherokee purple and black cherry seeds, but he didn't. Dan did.

I'm so sorry, Dan. I didn't mean to slight you. Your seeds have grown into plants that are outpacing everything around them. They're magnificent and I'm truly grateful that you were kind enough to share.

Here's the film. Try not to judge me too harshly.

Growing Potatoes in Containers

This year I gave in to the peer pressure to grow potatoes. Everyone's potatoes always look so beautiful in their posts and the taste reviews were fantastic. Apparently, just like a tomato, there's nothing like a home grown potato.

I didn't have room in the SFG to put the potatoes and I kept finding links to growing potatoes in containers, so I decided to give it a try. I put a little soil at the bottom of each pot along with a part of a seed potato and tilted the pots to get the sun way down in there. It seemed to take forever for anything to happen, but once it did, there was no holding those plants back! Once they got about six inches high, it was time to hill them.

I actually did this one plant two days ago and had to hill it and the others again today. I'm in awe of how fast they're growing. They're almost to where I can stand the pots upright and not have to lean them.

Now, grow me them taters!

The morning comes early. Sweet gardening dreams.

Onions - Foiled Again

Seems like I'm running par for the course when it comes to onions. I've had hollow onions and onions that never grew past pencil thickness. This year, the onions actually got pretty large around and were looking rather impressive until Tuesday morning when I realized that many of them were sending up a seed stalk.

Whereas normal for garlic, apparently, sending up seed stalks for onions is bad. I've read it's caused by extreme temperature fluctuations, which we sure have had this past week. I read you could cut off the stem, but it really wouldn't matter because the onions wouldn't be good for storage, so I decided just to cut my losses and allow more room for the non bolting ones to bulb up.

So. What do you do with onions that are bulbing and sending up a flower stalk? Yes, I used some in dinner tonight and I chopped some up to freeze and use later, but I just have something against frozen onions since they never work just right. I weighed my options for the rest and chose this:

There was only one taker all day, but hey, it was worth a shot. I'm planning on setting out the tomato transplants later this week. Hopefully those will fare better.

The morning comes early. Sweet gardening dreams.

Always Expanding

I can safely say that the only thing that expands faster than my waist line around here is the garden. I've been drooling over additional beds since last summer when the man built the other corner yard for me, but I've logistically had to wait for the trees to fill in to get an adequate idea of where the shadows would fall. The trees are just about filled in enough, so last night, he built these for me.

Ta Da!

Both boxes are 6x4 and will have trellises moved a foot up from the back so I can plant on both sides. I learned from last time!

Here's how the boxes sit in relation to the original corner yard.

In about an hour, I'll start seeing where the shadow of the trellis falls and position the boxes first according to that. Then, as the day goes on, I'll judge the rest until the sun moves behind the tree line which is right there where the grass ends behind the beds. I'm really hopeful that we'll get a good amount of sun. I've got my fingers crossed.

Technically, our first frost free date should be April 25 or thereabouts, but the temps have been so nice recently and there's nothing under 45 in the long range forecast. I saw EG was planting out some cucumbers and I sighed. My broccoli in the corner yard is where I had slated for my cucumbers to go, but they show no signs of being done soon. Once again, EG made me look outside the box. Actually, outside one and into another. I'll move the cucumbers to one of my new beds and swap out the lima beans to the broccoli bed which will go in later, anyway.

Hopefully I can get these beds filled and planted by the end of the week!

Visual for Yesterday's Post

Spring is a season developed and sponsored by tissue companies. I'm convinced of it.

Gardening Through the Haze

The weather has just been beautiful lately. Friday afternoon, my neighbor and I had the children running around outside as we sat watching and trying to find out who was burning brush in the neighborhood. We were convinced it was smoke. It was everywhere, making everything hazy, but it lacked that smokey smell.

It was pollen.
Seriously.

They mentioned on the news that since we had such a late cold snap that the trees and flowers were all blooming at the same time instead of a few weeks apart like they should. I've never seen pollen so thick in the air like that.

This will be a great week for gardening! I'm on spring break, so I can hopefully get a lot done. Tomorrow, many of the potato plants need hilling. After weeks of nothing, they grow inches each day. Then, we're building the last two beds, so I'll need to fetch the materials to fill those.

Finally, I'm having problems with some of my tomato seedlings. The ones I transplanted into the old flower pot containers from transplants last year are growing by leaps and bounds. The ones in the large peat pots hardly look a day larger than when they were transplanted. I wonder why they're stunted. They're the same varieties, planted and transplanted at the same time with the same mixture. The problem is obviously with the large peat pots. Come to think of it, my cucumbers and squash didn't grow well in them last year, either....any idea why?

The morning comes early. Sweet gardening dreams.