In My Garden

 Most of my plants went into the ground a little late this year so I am just now getting a lot of blooms and growing food. I thought I would show you some pictures of what I have growing.

Welcome to my garden!

My sunflower is just starting to open up. This is the first year that I have grown a lot of flowers and most of them are mixed into my garden area.

I have four raised beds in my yard,the large one has a fence on the back of it so that my climbing and vining things have a place to go. My peas were growing there, I have pulled them out and have planted lima beans in their place, I also have some morning glories growing along the fence.

My first pumpkin! I have never tried to grow pumpkins before, so I was excited to see this one.

Ahhh, tomatoes, the number one reason for gardening. Nothing in this world beats a home grown tomato. I can't wait until these start ripening.

I also have some beans! 

Lots and lots of blooms.

As I mentioned, this is my first year to try and grow a lot of flowers. I have quite a few that are mixed in with my food bearing plants. I did this hoping to attract lots of pollinators to the garden. I also decided to add a flower bed to the side of the house. I started out with an 8-foot section, but it was kind of lost on that huge fence so I decided to add two more sections for a 24-foot flower bed. The Nicodemus plants in the middle have been blooming for a couple of weeks now and I am finally starting to see some other blooms too. I know now that I need to start my flowering seeds a little earlier than I did this year. I have lots of green in that flower bed, but not a lot of color yet.

Future Food

I have had so much fun getting ready for gardening season. Starting with looking at all the seed catalogs, deciding what to plant and ordering seeds. As soon as they arrived, I started many of the seeds so I would have healthy seedlings to plant. Then I built my two new raised beds and a new flower bed. Babying all those little seeds as they became seedlings made waiting for warmer weather a little more bearable. Finally the time came to transfer all those little seedlings and to plant the things that grow from seed.

I decided to expand my planting this year. In addition to the extra space, I am growing many things that I have never grown before. In the past I have grown mostly tomatoes, some herbs, cucumbers, carrots, peas and beans. 

This year's planting also included corn:

Melons, pumpkins, squash, zucchini, and a wider variety of herbs.

I bought the greenhouse a couple of months ago. So far it is still standing! It really gave me a lot more room to work with all the seed starters.

I order most all of my seeds from the following places:

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

My Patriot Supply

Mountain Rose Herbs

One Box, Two Boxes, Three Boxes!

I decided I needed to add another couple of raised beds for this year's gardening. I want to add an herb garden and have room from some flowers to attract bees. 

These are very simple boxes, I bought two 8' cedar boards and had Lowe's cut them in half. When I got them home, I just screwed them together.

At first I was only going to add one, but I decided I really needed two, because I like symmetry. Another box means that I will be growing even more of our food and hopefully reducing the grocery bill even more.

Both of these boxes are 4' x 4', I took the photo at a weird angle so one looks smaller than the other, but they are the same. You can also see my new manual mower there, I wanted to make sure that the mower could get between them.

And here you can see how the boxes are placed in the yard. We have a patio right outside the door, then there is a small strip before you get to the big box. Kip built the big box for my birthday last year and then my Dad added the fence that I use as a trellis for my beans, peas and cucumbers.

In the back along the fence you can see my compost bin, To the left of this area I have raspberry bushes and blueberry bushes.

I have to say, I am really happy with the way my back yard is coming along. I have a places to grow food to eat, and flowers for beauty, I have bird feeders because I find them so relaxing, I have a grill to cook on and a table to sit at. I love to sit out there in the mornings with a cup of coffee. The only things missing are a chicken coop and a bee hive!

CSA Basket and an Update on the Raised Bed

This week's CSA basket included a kohlrabi, a head of purple cabbage, squash, zucchini, some beets, onion, tomatoes, green beans, cucumbers, red potatoes and regular potatoes.

I am loving all of the tomatoes and cucumbers that I have been getting. Everything has been very good, but I tomatoes and cucumbers are some of my favorite things to eat in the summer. I eat them plain, or love to slice them together and add just a bit of ranch dressing and some pepper.

The kohlrabi is new to me, I have never used it or eaten it before. Getting new things has been one of my favorite things about being a part of a CSA. Anytime I have gotten something that I wasn't familiar with or had never cooked before, all I have to do is ask and can get some suggestions. I love it that the person bringing us our shares always has ideas, but if there are other people there art the pickup time, they are usually quick to offer additional ideas too.

Last week I blogged about how we built and set up my new raised bed garden. This past weekend, my Dad came up for a visit and added this fencing to use as a trellis to the back of the bed. I have green beans and cucumbers planted on the back row and this will allow them to grow up onto the fence instead of just growing out. This is how he grows his cucumbers in his garden and I wanted something similar. I can't wait until it is covered!

Here is my Dad attaching some zip ties for extra support:

And here is a shot of the growth so far:

Setting Up a Raised Bed Garden Plot

My birthday was last month and I told my husband that all I wanted was wood and dirt. Well, that and some sweat on his part! We have a nice sized backyard that is great for sitting and enjoying a book and a good cup of coffee or tea. It isn't however that great for planing a garden. The majority of the yard spends most of the day in the shade. The back patio and the area just past that get enough sun and I have had luck the past couple of years growing tomatoes, herbs and a couple of other things in pots on the patio. Just past the patio is a basketball goal that we don't use. I decided that area would make a good place for a raised bed. For my birthday, I wanted a raised bed garden built and then filled with dirt. Originally we had planned a cookout and my FIL and BIL were going to help Kip get the dirt and help him fill my garden bed. We were still able to have the cookout, but the dirt was going to have to wait until the following weekend. I was a little bummed at first, but decided that it was for the best because it would allow me to layer my bed.

Here is the box that Kip built for me:

I don't have a tiller, so I broke up the ground with a shovel and hoe. It took me a while, but I was so excited about getting it done so everything would be ready when the dirt arrived.

After tearing up all the grass and weeds and breaking up the dirt I covered that area with cardboard. For my reading, I saw this done on several sites and should help with weed control, help retain moisture and as is breaks down, adds some compost material.

On top of the cardboard went a layer of newsprint.

And on top of the newsprint, I added some kitchen scraps mixed with compost and manure. I do compost everything that I can so the compost came from my compost bin that is on the back part of our yard. Adding in the layer of kitchen scraps will allow the scraps to decompose and provide fertilizer for the plants. 

And finally on top of that is a load of garden soil.

Here is my finished birthday garden box, full of dirt and the first plants. Someone had told me a few years ago that they used pinwheels in their containers to help keep the birds away. I have these four that are a pretty good size that I bought at a Dollar Tree and then several more  that are smaller but made from a metallic material. Both of them spin freely and make a small amount of noise which supposedly helps scare away birds. I am not sure how well it works, since I still battle the birds for my berries, but I kind of like them.

When everything really starts growing I will update with new photos!

Future Food Update

I thought I would do a post to show my gardening progress. The photo above is my lettuce and some carrots that are growing in my community garden plot. I went and worked over there for a couple of hours yesterday and took a couple of pictures before I started weeding. The lettuce looks great and the samples that I ate tasted awesome. There is also some spinach to the lest of the lettuce that I didn't get in the frame. This is the first time I have grown any of of these things. The carrots are sprouting their green tops and growing pretty well.

These are my raspberry and blueberry bushes. I planted these last year and thought that they had died over the winter but they surprised me how quickly they leafed out and started blooming. This is also my first time growing blueberries and raspberries.

And a close up of the blueberries that I am so proud of!

Here are some of the strawberries I am growing too, they are also blooming and I am starting to see berries form on some of the plants. 

In the box that Kip built me, I have some more carrots and two different types of peas. First time growing peas too! 

I am so excited to be growing so many different things. Digging in the dirt really makes me happy. I love my plot at the community garden too, most times when I go there, someone else is either there or will stop by to chat. Last night after we finished working in one of the plots, one of the other gardeners and I sat around and talked for over an hour. We talked about gardening, canning, dehydrating, bees, organic heirloom seed companies and pretty much anything else we could think of to talk about. One of the reasons I was so happy to find a community garden to be a part of, of course, was the opportunity to grow more food, but I was hoping to make some new friends with some common interests. Both goals have been achieved!

Have a great weekend!

Future Food

Hopefully this summer the things you see in these pictures will be some of the food we will be eating in the coming year. I have struggled to go things in the past because my yard is so shaded that there is only a tiny portion of my yard that gets a lot of sun throughout the day. For the past couple of years I have be growing tomatoes, strawberries and herbs in pots on the patio. This year I was able to find a community garden and I was also able to get a plot in their garden for this coming year. My garden plot is 4' x 12'. I plan on using a lot of square foot  gardening resources to maximize what I can grow in this space. I was so excited to have a plot! The photo above shows what my area looked like before I did any work at all. 

If you aren't familiar with community gardens, they are a great idea. There is a gardening area set aside, in this case, on an empty lot on the property of a nearby church. People that live in the area can sign up to take care of individual plots. So far it has been a great way to meet new people who share a love of growing food. At the garden where I am at, there are some "community plots" that everyone helps take care of and everyone can participate in the harvesting. There is a community herb garden, one filled with strawberries, another with peas and one with flowers. We also have two plots that have been divided into thirds that are designated as children's plots and there are two more that are grown and donated to a nearby senior citizen's apartment complex. 

 This is the first year that I am starting my plants from seed. Normally I buy seedlings or in the case of my tomatoes, I get them from my Dad. All of my seeds are heirloom seeds purchased from either Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds or My Patriot Supply. I have one of those little greenhouse things that you can buy just about anywhere this time of year and I use it with a seed germinating mat and a grow light. Here you can see one of my plants about a day after it broke through the soil.

Here is my greenhouse starter minus the lid. At this point the cucumbers were starting to get too tall for me to use the lid. 

After they outgrew the greenhouse, I transferred them into these degradable cups. They are just waiting until it gets warm enough to go in the ground! They get several hours of light a day using the grow light. ***My markers were made with a cut up mini blind. We had one that the cats had broken and when we replaced it, I forgot to take it out on trash day then I saw this suggestion somewhere online. Great idea and one mini blind will last a long time!

This is the raised bed, rolling planter that Kip made for me last year. Since I have had multiple back surgeries, some days bending over can be difficult so he came up with this idea for me. I can sit on a stool and do whatever and not really have to bend over at all. This is in my back yard in the sunny spot of the yard. This picture is from last year where I grew some cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes. Even with the community garden plot, I will still be growing herbs, some tomatoes and a few other things her at home.

Thursdays with Samantha

Samantha has been wanting to learn how to make key lime pie for a while now. I kept forgetting to get the key limes though. I finally remembered this week. She was surprised to see how small the key limes are compared to regular limes. She loves to juice fruit and it took her a little while to get enough juice to make our pie. Lemon and key lime pies are my all time favorite desserts so I was very happy to comply with this wish!

Here she is checking out the strawberries. I have several little berries and a couple of them are starting to turn red already. She has really enjoyed my gardening efforts so far. Her favorite thing is to watch the progress of the plants as they have grown and especially as they are starting to bud. She also really enjoys looking at my compost bin. I mean I know I am a dirt nerd, and I always loved being in the dirt gardening with my Dad, but I have been surprised at her interest in the composting process and the worms.

While we were on the back patio we spotted a bird's nest. Actually I saw the bird on the corner of the house (in the photo below) and the nest and Samantha realized that there was a bird in the nest. I have no idea what kind of birds these are. The one bird stayed perched on the gutter and the other stayed on the nest.

Gardening Attempts

In the attempt to learn more and more about the foods I eat, I have decided to try and grow more things myself. I grew up in a gardening family and know the fundamentals of both growing and preserving foods. Living in apartments most of my adult life left me with almost no room to grow outside or a very limited space. So I have been limited to some tomatoes in pots. I would also rely on visits to the Farmer's Market or kindness of friends and family to get a few vegetables to can. Plus my Dad is very kind to share his canned tomatoes with me.

After getting married I moved into the house that Kip already owned but our backyard is very shady and doesn't lend itself to gardening very much. Moles are also a problem in our yard. I didn't grow anything for the first four years I lived here but I missed it. Last year I got some cherry tomato plants from my Dad. Almost all of his plants are started from seeds that he has harvested from the previous year's crop. Some of his seeds have been in his family for generations. I grew six tomato plants in posts on my back porch. 

Oh how I had missed eating tomatoes, just picked and still warm from the sun! 

I also joined a CSA last year so that we had fresh, organic vegetables throughout the summer and fall. I love my CSA and will continue being a member this year. But my quest for growing my own vegetables has continued. Kip and I had discussed a while back about building some above ground planters. He has very little interest in gardening so he was concerned that because of my back issues that he would end up doing a lot of the work. We came up with the idea of building a very large planter so that if I needed to, I could sit at and still tend to my plants.

Here is what Kip ended up building for me:

I love it. It is on wheels and has a handle so in the off season, the dirt can be emptied into the compost bin and it can be stored. Since it is mobile, I was able to watch the sun pattern for several weeks to determine the sunniest spots of the yard. I have this planter and the pots in the first picture full of plants that will hopefully provide some more of our produce needs this year. 

I also decided to not do very many flowers this year. Almost everything that I have in any of my planters is something I can eat. Here are some hanging baskets in the front of the house that has herbs in it. I have a couple of small pots inside growing in the kitchen window that also have herbs, but I decided I needed more than I could get from my small pots. 

I am still pretty happy with my compost bin. This is the first year that I have used the compost in my planters. Samantha love to go and look for worms in the compost. She is loving the fact that I have so many plants now. In fact, she sent me a text on Wednesday telling me she could't wait to see me--and my plants--on Thursday.

Let's see what I have planted so far:

German Pink tomatoes

Another tomato from my dad that I can't remember the name of

Green Peppers

Broccoli

Jalapeno peppers

Cayenne Peppers

Pickling cucumbers

Straight Eight cucumbers

Blueberries

Raspberries

Strawberries

Rosemary

Dill

Thyme

Cilantro

Basil

Mint

Oregano