Green Pepper patch on May 30, 2009. This one has 6 plants
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Sweet Corn
Our Mini Corn patch has started catching on in these pictures taken on May 30, 2009. This has 12 corn plants 2 in each group. I dint bother to thin it and remove the weaker plant. Just want to see what happens with them
Seeing Green..
This Picture on May 30, 2009 shows our first Cherry tomatoes from our one and only cherry tomato plant. This plant initally had fungus in the leaves, for which I simply plucked off the affectedd leaves. and it stopped after a couple of weeks. This was a plant we got as a gift from one of our friends from walmart.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Gardening Takes Work
By the first week of June, the sprouts were big enough to be identifiable from the weeds. We had waited, to weed our garden since we were not sure which of the sprouts were from the seeds we had planted and which were weeds. Also when the sprouts were too small, uprooting the weeds may cause the sprouts roots to also be disturbed. So after having waited despite having a big growth of weeds, we started weeding our garden, in the first week of June. Interestingly, as a side note, around that time in my morning devotion I had read this (Matt 13:24-29). I could identify very well with what was being said in that passage. It took quite a few hours to get our garden weed-free. Our method of weeding is simple and old-style. The picture here is our strawberry patch, just weeded.
We decided to have the most natural garden we could possibly have. So we chose to stay away from chemical watersides, which would have made our job much easier. But we would love to do it the natural way for two reasons. One, we love to work in the garden; there is something very relaxing about working with plants and nature, it a great stress-reliever (not that we have very stressful lives, but just reliving whatever stress we do have). The other reason is the unknown (or un researched) side-effects. Scientific research ( or any research for that matter) tends to be uni-dimensional, whereas life is always multi-dimensional. Anyway, that is another topic, I wont go too much into here. We don't intend to use any chemical fertilizers. We have decided to experiment with only our kitchen waste composted and added as fertilizer.
So natural gardening takes a lot of work. We spend about 20 man hours per week keeping up with the de-weeding and re-seeding to keep continuous produce. The way this works reminds me of the quote "By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food" from Genesis. But life I said before we enjoy doing it, so we never notice the time fly by.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
A Slow Start
Our Fruit trees arrived in the last week of April. We had bought 2 kinds of apple trees, a peach, a nectarine and a cherry. We had also bout a Poplar hybrid for a shade tree. We planted those behind our vegetable patch. They took a couple of weeks to stabilize their roots and start to sprout leaves.
We had gone to Menards and bought a large variety of vegetable seeds, that included carrots, radishes, bush beans, peas, cucumbers, zucchini, eggplant, tomato, green & red Bell peppers, Jalapenos, Habanero, Mixed peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, watermelons, thyme, cilantro and parsley. We also bought a few perennial flower bulbs for our flower patches in the front of the house.
Reading the instruction on the seed packets, we realised that all the Peppers, the eggplant and the tomatoes needed an early indoor start.
But since we were only going to be experimenting we decided to start them indoors anyways. So we got ourselves a seedling tray and started the seedling indoor. The tray had a dome to keep the pellets moist and the seedlings shot up from the seeds.
It sat on our kitchen counter for a little more than 2 weeks, as per the instruction on the seed packets. We discovered that this was a little too long. Within a week the tomato seedlings had reach the max they could support on the pellets. By the end of two week most of the tomato seedlings were pretty weak. The Thyme which was the first to sprout, got a fungus within a week. The peppers and the eggplants were slower so the 2-week time frame suited them well.
By the last week of April we had seeded our garden, however we made one mistake. In our eagerness to keep the seeds from the birds, we had seeded them too deep. After a 3-week wait we saw only a few sprouts here and there and since we weren't sure what kind of leaves were were should be expecting, we had to let all sprouts grow before we could ascertain whether they were weed to the plats that we planted. So we had a slow start. We had also planted onions and potatoes, but there was no sign of sprouts on the ground, even after week 3.
So off we went to find a few plants that from the garden center that were in the sapling stage. We bought six-packers of tomatoes, green & red bell peppers and corn. We had them planted in the patch that we had still empty.
We used the six packs to transfer whatever seedlings were left in our seed tray. We set them up indoors for another week by our kitchen window.
We were off to a slow start. By the 4 week we had just a few sprouts and we decided to reseed everything. We dug up the potatoes and found that they had all sprouted and were slowly making their way to the surface. So we left most of them alone and covered them back with soil. We had to wait a little more.
The flower bulbs planted in the front of the house, for whatever reason, started slow too. The Phlox we bough from Stark Bros, went in the front too. But they never took off and dried away.
We had gone to Menards and bought a large variety of vegetable seeds, that included carrots, radishes, bush beans, peas, cucumbers, zucchini, eggplant, tomato, green & red Bell peppers, Jalapenos, Habanero, Mixed peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, watermelons, thyme, cilantro and parsley. We also bought a few perennial flower bulbs for our flower patches in the front of the house.
Reading the instruction on the seed packets, we realised that all the Peppers, the eggplant and the tomatoes needed an early indoor start.
But since we were only going to be experimenting we decided to start them indoors anyways. So we got ourselves a seedling tray and started the seedling indoor. The tray had a dome to keep the pellets moist and the seedlings shot up from the seeds.It sat on our kitchen counter for a little more than 2 weeks, as per the instruction on the seed packets. We discovered that this was a little too long. Within a week the tomato seedlings had reach the max they could support on the pellets. By the end of two week most of the tomato seedlings were pretty weak. The Thyme which was the first to sprout, got a fungus within a week. The peppers and the eggplants were slower so the 2-week time frame suited them well.
By the last week of April we had seeded our garden, however we made one mistake. In our eagerness to keep the seeds from the birds, we had seeded them too deep. After a 3-week wait we saw only a few sprouts here and there and since we weren't sure what kind of leaves were were should be expecting, we had to let all sprouts grow before we could ascertain whether they were weed to the plats that we planted. So we had a slow start. We had also planted onions and potatoes, but there was no sign of sprouts on the ground, even after week 3.
So off we went to find a few plants that from the garden center that were in the sapling stage. We bought six-packers of tomatoes, green & red bell peppers and corn. We had them planted in the patch that we had still empty.
We used the six packs to transfer whatever seedlings were left in our seed tray. We set them up indoors for another week by our kitchen window.
We were off to a slow start. By the 4 week we had just a few sprouts and we decided to reseed everything. We dug up the potatoes and found that they had all sprouted and were slowly making their way to the surface. So we left most of them alone and covered them back with soil. We had to wait a little more.
The flower bulbs planted in the front of the house, for whatever reason, started slow too. The Phlox we bough from Stark Bros, went in the front too. But they never took off and dried away.
In the beginning..
We decided we would slowly convert the part of our property, that was filled with prairie grass and wild growth, into a garden in small stages. We decided to put in a few fruit trees, at least one shade tree and a vegetable patch.
We chose to put start behind the black sheets that were laid by the property developer at the end of the lawn portion of our back yard. We started out in early spring with a little research.
We ordered our fruit trees on the web (at Stark Bros), we had a friend recommend this catalog nursery to us. we ordered 5 fruit trees and a shade tree, strawberry plants and phlox.
We had to see what kind of a soil we had. We had heard that more often than not, property developers put in soil that does not suit vegetable growth. Thankfully ours was not too bad at the spot we had chosen.
So we started out in mid April, with a shovel, a garden rake, bales of peat moss and bags of compost. After three hours of digging a 12 X 4 patch. it was soon apparent, this was easier said than done with a shovel, despite all the "help" we were getting from our 2-year old.
In a couple of days beat the retreat to Home Depot to rent a a Rear Tine Tiller. Pretty soon after some landscape edging and more bags of peat moss and compost, we had our patches ready we had 4 separate patches, 24 X 4 feet each, all arranged in a 2 patch wide L-shape.
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