Garden Pics!

Here are the latest pictures from my garden. I have baby tomatoes and baby sugar snap peas and TONS of lettuce!! We ate the peas for dinner tonight. It was a teeny harvest but SO worth it! They were the sweetest, yummiest sugar snap peas I've ever had! I blanched them in a little bit of water for just a minute or two and then lightly salted them. They tasted like I'd dipped them in sugar! SOOOOO good!

Potatoes and onions

Baby Husky Cherry Red tomatoes

Baby Yellow Pear tomatoes

Herbs, lettuce, tomatoes and peppers (they're even bigger now...maybe more pics tomorrow. I seem to be a blog slacker so I'll try to be better in the future!)

Potatoes...again

We moved our potatoes tonight. It has finally been sunny, although cool, for a couple of days now and we were able to get outside and do a little bit of work. We decided to not only plant more potatoes per square but to also transfer them from the north end of the garden to the south end. I didn't really plan that box as well as I had thought and need the north end for some squash that will need a trellis. If I plant the squash on the south end they'll end up blocking all the rest of the veggies from the sun and from my kitchen window view.

I also planted some of my buttercrunch lettuce transplants. I know I shouldn't have planted them quite yet (frost warning tonight) but they were looking VERY sad and sickly since they'd been hanging out in my garage for, well, a really long time. I figured they were going to die in the garage anyway, might as well give them a chance in the outdoors!

My little lettuce seeds have finally popped up through the dirt! It was no 3 days like Mr. Man from Wal-Mart assured me but they're really growing. When I planted them I discovered the seeds were SO tiny that I couldn't pick them out and plant one seed per hole...so I just dropped a bunch in. Now there are little bunches of lettuce all over the square instead of nice neat rows...oh well!

My onions are AWESOME! I only hope they are looking as wonderful underneath all that soil as they are up above! They're doing so well that we planted another square :)

Only about a week and a half left until we can get started planting all the rest of the goodies...I can't wait!

The Bible

I bought the bible of square foot gardeners today: "All New Square Foot Gardening" by Mel Bartholomew. It's really great. It gives a lot of in depth info about square foot gardening...the kind of info you want BEFORE you start your garden! I should have bought it sooner.

In his book Mel talks about how to build the boxes (that part we did mostly right) and what exactly to fill them with so you don't have to weed. We filled our boxes with plain ol' dirt from the huge pile in our yard and mixed it with lots of peat moss to soften it up. I'm sure it will be ok for this year but next year I really want to try to make "Mel's Mix." It's a combination of peat moss, compost and vermiculite. He also puts down a black plastic sheet under the box so no weeds from the ground can come up through the mixture. I've been pulling lots of weeds out of the boxes already and I'm really sorry I didn't pay more attention and buy this book first.

Mel also gives really detailed info about how many of each vegetable to plant in each square. Most of what I found on the internet said to plant 1 potato per square but Mel's book says to do 4. We still haven't seen any potatoes growing yet so I think we're going to chance it and dig up what we've planted already and get more in each square. We may also relocate them to the bottom of the square grid. We initially put them at the north end of the grid but now, after reading the book I realize I'm probably going to need that north end for more vertical growing plants like my squash. I've also decided to plant some sugar snap peas which will need a trellis to grow on too so I think I'll rework my grid and put those things on the north end.

Still no lettuce news to report but tonight when I went out to water I counted 15 onions sprouting out of the ground! How wonderful is that?! We planted 27 onions and we have some coming from all 3 squares we planted in. As I stand at my kitchen window I can look right out into the garden and see them peeking out at me. It's so exciting!

Yippee!

Well, the Garden Gods have looked down upon my two 4 x 4 boxes of dirt and peat moss and decided that yes, they will indeed grant me the ability to grow at least something. As I was out this evening watering the potatoes, onions and lettuce and staring as hard as I could at the little squares, trying to make out something coming up from the ground, I saw what I'd been looking for! There, right where I was looking was a teeny tiny nub of ONION STALK!!!!! I, of course, started screaming. Dave came over and looked and assured me that it was actually a real, honest-to-goodness piece of something coming out of the ground! As I looked around a little I found more! All together I spotted 5 little green guys poking their heads out!

Although I've been excited since deciding to quit talking about the garden and actually do it, I've been a little scared that nothing would grow. Ever. And even though I know just because the tippity-tops of what will become--hopefully--a nice, big, juicy onion does not necessarily mean that the whole garden will be perfect and disease/pest/animal free, it does give me a giant helping of optimism that is sure to last me quite awhile!!

po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to

We got our first veggies in! Last night, after Samuel hit the sack, Dave and I planted our seed potatoes and onion sets. I'd heard different dates to have these cold-weather-growers planted, so hopefully we've gotten them in the ground early enough that they'll actually produce enough to matter.

When planting potatoes using the square foot method you only plant one seed potato per square. We took about 6 inches of soil out of each square and placed the seed potatoes in --thanks to Becca's dad for those!!--and then barely covered them with a layer of soil. As they grow, we'll keep covering them with more and more dirt; this is supposed to help them develop a strong root system and produce more potatoes. I'm not sure how many potatoes we'll get from each square (we planted 6 squares in all) but I'm hoping it's more than 1! The onions only produce one per plant so we planted 9 onions per square; 3 squares total.

I've been so excited all day about the new stuff in the ground. I think I have been outside 3 times during the day to "check" on them. I know before I get out there that nothing could have possibly grown overnight but I don't want to miss anything!!