Vegetable Garden 2012

It's actually 2013 but I just realized that I never posted about my vegetable garden last year. Dave delivered a huge gift to me for Mother's Day. After two years of whining about my sunless garden spot in the back corner of our lot he decided to build me a new one. I was so excited!!!

He first built four square gardens. I don't know if you can see but he even drilled holes in the boxes and laced twine back and forth through the garden to make them Square Foot Gardens. I first borrowed Mel Bartholemew's Square Foot Garden book from the library a couple of years ago and I'm definitely converted to his method of gardening. The idea is to produce a large variety of vegetables for a family in a small space. Instead of growing rows of vegetables you grow small blocks of vegetables. Each square garden contains 16 - 1x1' squares and each square can potentially hold a different type of vegetable.

In these pictures Dave already built the garden boxes. Together we mixed the soil and filled the boxes. It's a mixture of vermiculite, peat moss, homemade compost, and horse manure.

 You can barely see my little plants in the garden. They were all started from seeds indoors or sewn directly into the soil. The cardboard is covering the newly planted seeds to keep them from drying out.

In these four small gardens I grew: 5 types tomato, cucumber, tomatillo, ground cherries, basil, cilantro, parsley, catnip, oregano, nasturtium, dwarf sunflower, marigold, cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli, spinach, carrots, bell pepper, serrano pepper, radishes. All from seed. 

By July the garden had really taken off. Here you can see how he finished the frame of the fence, covered the grass with garden cover and pebbles, added a gate, and entry stones. It's a beautiful garden. 

We saw many firsts. First tiny tomato

First tiny cucumber

First harvest: lettuce and radishes. This was actually earlier. I'm thinking late May.

First flower

By the end of the growing season I was definitely appreciating Dave's hard work. And my hard work tending the garden was really paying off!


I grew tons of veggies. We'd never eaten fresh veggies in such large quantities. It felt good! Dave picked up this basket at a garage sale for $1 and this $1 basket worked hard. I can't even say how many times we filled it.

As we came closer to the fall the big tomatoes really started ripening. I par boiled, peeled, seeded, and froze lots. We're now well into January and still using frozen tomatoes in recipes. I've made tomato sauce, meat sauce, enchilada sauce, tomato/kale/barley soup, you name it. I also froze a huge stash of bell peppers and made a yummy bell pepper soup. It was sort of like goulash.

As the Spring approaches I anxiously await the start of gardening season. I save my unused seeds from the previous year and use them again. (I keep them in an airtight tin with plenty of those little dry packs that keep moisture out of foods.) I didn't buy any seeds last year. But I have bought a few new ones to add to the mix for this year. They arrived in the mail last week. I can't wait to get them started!

Butterflies!

We're enjoying a wonderfully sunny and warm week in the Dayton area. After at least a couple of weeks with highs in the 60's and a good amount of rain, everyone is heading outdoors to soak up some warmth and sun. Apparently, the butterflies in our pavilion sensed the warmth, too! They surprised us when three of them emerged Tuesday.

I contacted Solana's teacher, Mrs. Eckhart, and she invited us to release them behind the school, where she keeps a butterfly garden. This is where the class releases their class butterflies. I carefully gathered the butterflies into a safe container and we headed off to school.

Solana was so excited. She showed off her butterflies to all of her friends and they gathered around talking in their excited first grade way. Mrs. Eckhart thought it best to release them after lunch, after the sun chased away the morning cold.

With all the excitement of the morning (taking Solana to school and transferring the butterflies) I totally forgot to take pictures. I took a couple on my phone in the classroom but was disappointed with the quality.

I sent the picture to Mrs Eckhart and she replied, "Thanks! I'll show it to our class right after lunch!We will release them after they see the wonderful picture...Solana is so very proud...this means a lot to her!" Almost made me cry.

The next day we had another surprise! This time we decided to release it at home. And I got a good picture. Solana was really excited because it crawled on her finger before flying off. Isn't he beautiful? Solana said it's a male because of the blue. It's crazy to think that they were once chubby green caterpillars. Amazing!

Caterpillars

Solana's learning about caterpillars in school and they have two butterfly pavilions in their classroom right now. She often comes home with updates and interesting facts about their caterpillars/chrysalises/butterflies. They've released a couple of Monarchs and that's exciting.

A few weeks ago I started finding our own caterpillars in the vegetable garden. A couple were hanging out on the carrots and a few more on the parsley. We incorrectly identified them as monarchs to start but then realized they're black swallowtails. I initially plucked them off the parsley to save the parsley but then ended up feeding a ton of it to them anyway!

We have 7 total and they're all snug in their chrysalises now. I recently read online that, if they make their chrysalis in later summer, black swallowtails often overwinter in their chrysalis and emerge in the Spring. Looks like we may have some house guest staying all winter long!

Vegetable Garden

If you've ever been to our house in the Spring, Summer, or Fall, you know that I love vegetable gardening. And you would know because I dragged you outside to look at my garden. Now I will drag all my virtual friends. :-) I'm not particularly good at it. This is only my fourth year of gardening. But I do love it and I try really really hard to be good at it.

When we lived in Colorado Dave built an above ground garden for me and I bought a bunch of starter plants to put inside. Colorado has LOTS of sun and our automatic sprinkler system watered the garden almost every day. Plus, all the dirt in the garden was purchased and poured right in. The garden did great and I was hooked.

Then we moved to Ohio. While house hunting we had two requirements for the yard. 1. It had to be big (or at least big enough for a vegetable garden). 2. It had to have lots of trees (Dave and I love trees!). We were thrilled with our house. The yard is HUGE with tons of trees and there was already a vegetable garden tucked away in the back of the property. SOLD!

Being a novice gardener I didn't bother to look up and notice that the area immediately surrounding the garden is forest. I think it gets about 5 hours of sunlight a day. Last year the garden didn't do too well and I was sorely disappointed. I battled cabbage worms and, I believe, insufficient nutrition for the plants. Not to mention the whole sunlight issue. But I decided to give it another go this year.

I borrowed Square Foot Gardening, by Mel Bartholemew, from the library. He believes that many gardens fail because people are overly excited at the beginning of the season planting tons of stuff and overestimating what they'll actually need and also because they give up trying to tend the gardens halfway through the season. Solution: Only plant the amount you want to harvest and put plants close together using his square foot method. I liked it.

I bought tons of seeds this year and started indoors early in the Spring. Being my first year starting seeds I was moderately successful. I was able to set out some good cabbages, lettuce, peppers, and flowers. I killed all but one tomato plant and incorrectly labeled broccoli and cauliflower so they never made it into the garden. Dave made two 4x4 grids for me and I filled them with Mel's mix (equal parts vermiculite, compost [my homemade], and peat moss) and started planting. Seeds planted directly outdoors included: Snap Peas (first round got eaten by maggots), onions (all died), cilantro, sunflowers (eaten), catnip (didn't make it), and spinach (never flourished). I had a difficult Spring and was feeling pretty down in the dumps after all the effort I'd put into the garden already.

Then we went on vacation. We came back and everything had grown like crazy! Maybe the garden just wanted me to stop fussing over it... Here's a picture from the outside of the garden. The flowers are nasturtiums and are supposed to attract helpful insects. You can see my tomato and cucumber trellised in the background.

This is the view as you enter the garden. Nasturtiums on the right. Two rows of purple potatoes straight up the center. Pumpkin plant along the left. Funny story about the pumpkin. It's a volunteer. That means I didn't plant it. It just popped up on its own and I decided to keep it. I thought it was a zucchini at first and then when we saw the first fruit we thought it was a watermelon. On this particular day I realized it's actually a pumpkin. The seed must have come from last year's jack-o-lantern that I tossed into the compost! When I decided to let it grow I had no idea how huge it would get. This is only a third of it.

Garden 1: Cabbage on the left. I was surprised to see how huge those got! Parsley and serrano up front. Carrots and sage in the back left. More carrots right center. Cucumber growing up the trellis back right. I've already harvested three squares of cabbage. The four wet-looking squares are newly planted for fall harvest: broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage. Plus, I just started some new carrots and spinach in the top left squares.

Garden 2: On the left you can see the tomato plant climbing up my trellis. The white box is protecting my newly planted carrot seeds (the soil can't dry out while they're germinating), cabbage next to the box, and the huge leaves are part of that pumpkin plant. There are also two pepper plants and basil amongst the pumpkin leaves but they're difficult to see. There's also one fall cauliflower square next to the box.

Sweet Potatoes and more of that pumpkin :-)

Purple potatoes won't really be ready until Fall but I just had to dig some up to make sure they were actually there. I think a vole has been visiting our garden so I'm a little nervous about how much he's eaten. The cool thing about purple potatoes is that the flesh is actually purple. I rubbed off some of the dirt to show their color. Isn't that cool?

Serranos

Tomatoes. We've only eaten one so far. One of these is starting to turn red. Yay!

I didn't plant the cucumbers until right before we left for Mexico and we've already eaten three. it's doing really well. See this one hiding?

The infamous pumpkin volunteer.


I definitely don't think this is the best garden we'll ever see. I'm still learning for sure. And the lack of sun doesn't help matters much. But unless I convince Dave to dig up a section right in the middle of our yard where there aren't any trees (unlikely) this is the best I get. If there was more sun we'd have had a better Spring and probably more tomatoes by now. Otherwise I think we're doing ok.

Harvested thus far: 2 large bowl-fulls of lettuce, cilantro, basil, parsley, 3 serranos, 1 tomato, 3 cucumbers, handful of spinach, 2 carrots, 3 heads of cabbage, 4 small onions, several handfuls of sugar snap peas (most didn't make it across the yard before crossing Solana's lips).

Here's hoping for a productive rest of Summer and Fall!

Back From Vacation!!

The girls and I just spent two weeks away from home!!! It was wonderful but felt like an eternity! We spent a whole week with my parents, sisters, niece, and nephews in Houston. Then my parents flew with us to Cancun, where Dave met us at the airport. We spent 7 luxurious days and nights at our favorite vacation spot, Aventura Cove Palace Resort. I have tons of pictures and stories to write about our vacation but for now just wanted to say, "We're HOME!"

Solana and I celebrated by running out to the vegetable garden to see how it fared. Thanks to Dave, who set up a sprinkler and timer, we were welcomed by huge healthy plants and even some harvesting opportunities. We plucked our first sugar snap peas and only about half of them made it inside (they were sooo good we couldn't help but eating them off the vine) and a great big bowl full of lettuce. Solana will be preparing a special salad today.

Chloe celebrated by rocking giggle-fest 2011 with the dogs and then walking around the family room for about two hours straight. She refused to stop and was getting so sweaty that I had to tie her hair up to try and get it off her neck. It was so crazy! She walked a bit in Texas and Mexico but only under close supervision. She obviously felt really comfortable in her own house and just took off. It was so cool!

Today we have no plans at all. I have TONS of laundry to do and vacuuming. Hopefully, I'll have time for blogging this week because I have many memories to capture!