Garden Week 3

I guess since we don't have children (yet!) I'll just have to blog about my garden - haha!

So slowly but surely we are recovering from the garden disaster on Monday. I've kinda gotten over it...that which will grow...will grow! :)

I bought 3 different types of basil seeds from Territorial Seed and started them today in egg cartons and black trays. I planted lime basil, siam queen (thai) basil and the classic sweet basil. Basil likes warm weather, so I am going to start these in my classroom because I have grow lights in my room. Hopefully, we'll have a warm summer (yeah right!) and I can get a good enough harvest to make/freeze my own pesto.

I also planted some cilantro in some transplant trays that I'll also take to my classroom lights. Can't wait for fresh salsa!

A clump of arugula and lettuce mix. Things are kind of clumpy and messy thanks to our " evil visitor."

So far, the radishes are doing okay. I'm a little worried they will have trouble forming an edible root, but we'll see! They are definitely behind schedule...

The spinach finally came up! YAY!

Walla walla onions are getting bigger too! These will take ALL SUMMER to grow.

Sugar Ann snap peas are starting to climb up the trellis. 

My second planting of radishes are in much neater rows. Thankfully, the evil creature didn't really disturb them.

My cauliflower (top) and cabbage still aren't looking so great. They lost a lot of support from the upheaval. Quite a few plants were found buried under soil in a completely different spot! I'm nervous about these guys!

Strawberry plant that overwintered...wondering if I'll get strawberries???

Lettuce transplants - not doing as well as I thought. They ended up with a lot of dirt on them from the evil creature's digging. Almost want to just start eating this now and plant something new...

Box number 2. There is random arugula everywhere, from the evil creature's digging - but at least it's growing! :)

I think I'm going to try and get some fertilizer this week and see if that will revive some of the older plants. It is supposed to be sunny this week too! We had nothing but pounding rain last week and I think the beds are getting a little soggy. 

Also...still no carrots. It's been 3 weeks. I might have seen beets today. So just in case, I am trying to germinate carrot and beet seeds in a wet paper towel in the warm house. Once the roots emerge, I'll place them outside and wish for the best. 

My potatoes also arrived from Territorial Seeds. We bought fancy french fingerlings (kind of like small red potatoes), because those are often more expensive to buy from the market and they are so tasty! Still haven't figured out where I want to grow them...but I've got some time, as it needs to warm up a little bit.

And last, I just found this funny article that talks about human urine as fertilizer! The study specifically cites urine as being beneficial to cabbage due to excess nitrogen. Hmmm...I think Dan would go for this!?! :)

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Garden Nightmare

Today I came home to total destruction of my gardening beds. I can't believe it, but some filthy lowly creature decided to entirely dig up my two veggie beds today. It was so devastating, that I literally had tears. I felt pathetic for crying. But I've invested a lot of time into working outside and hoping that our little garden will sprout up....See, I told you I was going to be really let down if something didn't work out!

Everything is in chaos. I spent 1+ hour hunched over when I got home at 7pm trying to find hundreds of little 1-2in plants.

Two full weeks my garden made it. :(

I think most of the transplants will survive. The cabbage and cauliflower that I put in last weekend, is looking questionable. They are all wilty and leaning over now. Good thing Dan doesn't really like either of those veggies. :)

So I did my best to find all the little plants and stick them back in the ground...but I'm really worried. It's been the longest 16 days waiting for those little baby plants to finally get green and start to grow leaves! Tomorrow is going to be a sunny day too - that's lots of growing that could've been happening. Now they are all uprooted, stressed out and hidden under the soil...

Yesterday, I planted another few sqft of seeds too so that I could have a continual harvest through the early summer. Ugh - I have absolutely no idea where those seeds are now. Hopefully they are on the top of the soil!

I saw that some of my carrots put down roots the past few days...now I'm pretty sure I won't have a carrot harvest  this year as I could not find them tonight. The next chance I'll get to plant more seeds might be thursday, so I'm really going to have to get more carrots going because they've taken a really long time to germinate. Same thing with my beets. Bummer...

Now it's too dark and too late to get up a protective barrier over my beds to prevent this from happening again. We think it was a neighbor cat. I'll be so pissed if this happens again!!! Thankfully it wasn't Lily, she's so cute it's hard to punish her! :)

Off to bed to sulk a little bit more and then time to try and stop thinking about it...

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Garden Week 1

Thankfully the weather wasn't too bad this weekend, so I was able to get out and work in the garden beds. I'm so excited to have a project that I can work on all spring/summer/fall!

Germinating radish

Walla Walla onions - might possibly become green onions?

Romaine lettuce (from transplant)

Today, I filled up the second bed. This time I actually marked off my square feet with yarn and a staple gun. I wish I would have had 5 hands to hold everything, but I managed to measure out the spaces fairly fast. This bed also holds cool weather veggies.

Today I planted:

4 older Buttercrunch lettuce transplants

3 sq.ft. Beet seeds (I presoaked them a little, because they take forever to germinate)

1 sq ft Carrot seeds (Larger)

1 sq ft Carrot seeds (Little finger baby's)

2 sq ft Arugula seeds

4 sg ft Cauliflower transplants

2 sq ft Red Cabbage transplants

5 sq ft Golden Acre Cabbage transplants

1 sq ft of 3 puny-sad-looking cabbage transplants (we'll see what happens...)

Cabbage + Cauliflower

We bought a trellis this weekend for the growing peas.

I also planted some Little Marvel peas seeds behind some lettuce and added a few spinach seeds to the spinach plot. Not too many of the spinach seeds have germinated yet, so I thought I'd throw in a few extras just in case. The arugula and lettuce mix is also coming up, but I'll take a picture in a few days when it looks a bit more substantial. :) I've yet to see a whole lot from the carrots...but they take a bit longer to germinate so hopefully they will start to sprout soon!

I've also got a sweet potato in water and I'm trying to grow some splits. We don't really eat sweet potatoes, but I think it would be really fun to try and grow them. They are such a healthy vegetable, so I think I would be encouraged to eat them more if I grew my own. I think I'll grow them in containers to save space in the beds for other veggies we eat a lot of (tomatoes, peppers, etc)...we'll see!

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