Hellchick

Wow. I meant to update this sooner -- I didn't realize I went so long without a garden update.

So everything is still alive and things are growing. The squash plants -- Delicata, and summer green and yellow -- are absolutely thriving. Which is great, since we love us some squash. The watermelons are purring along as are the cucumbers, although something seems to have dug up one of my cucumber seed hills. The seeds nonetheless struggled through anyway.

As I may have mentioned, the only drawback is that things just aren't growing very fast. Some of those things are plants I started as transplants and some were directly sown. I'm disappointed in the tomatoes and peppers I started as transplants from seeds I bought -- they got to be about an inch high and then simply stopped growing. My hypothesis is that I started them in very tiny seed starter pots and I suspect that they might have eaten up all the nutrition in that soil and then just stopped growing.

Because of this, I got a couple of transplants for peppers and tomatoes just in case mine don't produce any fruit -- and at this point it's highly doubtful they will -- and as you can see from today's picture, my sweet banana peppers, a transplant from the nursery, are starting to fruit. I picked up Brandywine heirloom transplants and I'll likely also pick up a pear tomato plant or two since those are also very tiny.

But at least there are things starting to produce soon-to-be-edible foods now, such as my turnips. The beans are looking good and are beginning to flower, while the potato plants are just getting plain huge. I'll have more pictures of those through the week.

So far, the good news is that things are growing. Since my last update I've planted my winter squash, zucchini, and beans (wax and soup), and all of them are practically leaping out of the ground. The only thing I'm worried about is the time it's taking for everything to grow. I'm using my radishes as a baseline -- they should only take about 30 days, but I definitely planted them over 30 days ago and they look only half-grown. So I'm thinking that maybe adding a good amount of organic matter next year will help speed that up, and maybe making sure to properly add fertilizer at the right times this year.

The spinach had started to grow big enough that I needed to pick some of the leaves. The only problem is that I should have planted more spinach than I did, because the amount of leaves that resulted is only enough for one salad. Oh well -- there'll be plenty more when I do my fall spinach crop planting. So next year: plant more, plant sooner!

Everything else is looking great and I'm planning to put in the tomatoes and peppers next weekend, and plant my cucumber seeds this week -- I have to pick up another packet.

You can see some of the progress at my Flickr page.

Lots of progress on the gardening front this week. Today I worked on my favorite part of this house: the giant window boxes on the front of the house. I put in red and white petunias just like I did last year. Petunias are probably the most pedestrian plant you can get, but I love them -- they're hardy, they're cheap, they come in a zillion colors, and they're pretty. I picked them up today at ShopKo along with several pots for the front of the house. In those I plan to plant several different kinds of flowers -- nasturtiums, morning glories, poppies, and more.

In the vegetable garden I transplanted the broccoli and the onions. Both seem to be doing fine today. I also started the bush delicata squash seeds. The only seeds I have left to plant now -- and these will go in next weekend -- are the watermelons, cucumbers, summer squash, and corn.

And speaking of the cucumbers, I had started them earlier in the greenhouse downstairs along with the watermelons. After realizing I had the light too high and I was top watering them, the watermelons began to droop as if they had damped off. I figured that I'd started them all too early and should have just been patient enough to direct seed them since they only take 55 days to mature, so I removed the tray from the greenhouse and set it on the floor of the basement. I expected them to all be dead the next day, but while the watermelons had indeed all died, the cucumbers were actually [i]thriving[/i]. So this week I began hardening them off and I hope they'll transplant well.

Everything else I'd direct seeded in the garden has come up, which is basically the root and leafy vegetables: turnips, beets, carrots, radishes, lettuce, and spinach. However, the transplanted lettuce isn't thriving; the seeds I started the same day are overtaking them. Next year I can direct seed them.

That's it this week. Everything is doing better than I expected!

I drive by two or three gardens on my long drive into work each day. And when I do I always check them out during the season to see what they're doing, since I know the gardens have been there for a while. So when my own experiences don't line up to what I see in other people's gardens I worry. But then I remember that I'm new to this, and these people have established gardens that are going to grow things faster.

At any rate, I'm just happy to see some seeds sprouting. I don't know why I'm paranoid about seeds sprouting -- I sort of assume nothing is ever going to come up. With transplants you can at least see something there. With seeds, I sometimes wonder if the birds got them and I'm staring at an empty patch of dirt.

The rest of my future transplants continue to do well in the greenhouse now that we lowered the light. I was worried about the bell peppers at first; after a day with the light lowered they looked a little piqued, but after some water yesterday I checked on them this morning and they look plump and healthy. The tomatoes look good, too. I was worried that I was going to have to buy some transplants to replace these guys because of my light faux pas, but they seem to be doing okay.

Things I have learned this week:

- Always bottom water. I should have known this but I didn't until this week.

- Keep your grow light about three inches from the plants to keep from getting spindly, leggy plants.

- Start seeds earlier than you did this year. I couldn't do it on time this year because we had to build the greenhouse and that took time, so I think my plants are lagging behind a bit. But not by much, so I think I'll still get some good plants and veggies.

- Be patient when it's called for. When it says to sow seeds outdoors after frost...just do that. Don't be too eager to start the squash, melons, and cukes before you need to.

I'm planning to start my potatoes today as well as my heirloom Grandpa Ott's morning glories. This is exciting for me because it'll be the first plant that I've ever started using seeds I saved myself from last year's plants. The potatoes are going to be fun because I'm growing them in a bucket. I found multiple forum posts and web sites that say you can easily grow them in barrels by just piling more dirt on top of them as they grow. In fact, here are some great links I found this week:

- Growing barrels of potatoes

- Making recycled seed pots from newspaper

- Making self-watering pots from two liter soda bottles

Lots of good information!

So that greenhouse Len built is absolutely perfect. But I mentioned in the last entry that I was getting worried that my seedlings just didn't look right -- some of them (the cucumbers, squash, melons, and the tomatoes a tiny bit) are growing really tall with a couple of leaves at the top. This didn't look right to me.

Fortunately I found the wonderful website You Grow Girl, and their forums are a treasure trove of information. It turns out that my seedlings are growing like this because they're not getting enough light. So my one grow light (that I borrowed from a friend) is too high and also might not be enough light for them.

Whew. That's a fixable problem at least for next year's seedlings, and partially for this year's. Because the cukes, squash, and melons have grown this way, they may be a bit weak and may fail on me in the garden. Either fortunately or unfortunately, I'm technically supposed to start those plants directly in the garden. So if I have to, in a couple of weeks (after our last frost date) I'll just sow more seeds directly in the garden. Perhaps as a result of this mistake of mine, when I tried to harden off the squash plants to put them in this coming weekend, they all fell over. Whether this is from seed rot or because they got too tall and thus too weak to handle being hardened off is unknown.

So, Caryn's first major gardening mistake has been made. But it's only a small bump in the road -- Len and I are going to move the light down tonight so the rest of the seedlings don't grow this way.

The garden has been made! Len took off all of the grass for the 40' x 12' spot and then rototilled it up this past week, which means it was time to plant the cool-weather veggies today. I planted some Burpee's Golden Beet today to try for a spring crop -- the Detroit Dark Reds will wait until the end of the summer when I'll plant them for a fall crop or an early spring crop next year. I planted some fresh lettuce seeds and also transplanted some of the lettuce peat pots. I don't know how well those transplants will do, but I'm not too worried since I should get more lettuce from the seeds. I also planted turnip and spinach, and finally I planted my carrots and radishes. I'm a little worried about the carrots being able to grow -- everyone I know who's ever grown carrots has never had success, and I think it's because they're very picky about their soil. I'm not sure our soil is the right kind for them, but we'll at least try. And hey, this year anything that's reasonably edible will be considered a first success.

I've also started hardening off the winter squash plants. This morning I pulled them out of the greenhouse and saw that the cucumber and melon seedlings are really tall, must like the winter squash plants. I'm actually kind of worried that they're too tall -- the greenhouse may be working so well that I might have started them too early. I'm a little worried that they're vulnerable because they shot up so fast and became all stem. But I'm lucky to have a resource for gardening information -- our office assistant at work, Mary, is a gardener and told me that for the squash plants it meant strong plants. I'm hoping it also means this for the melons and cukes.

Next weekend I'll be transplanting the onions and the squash. And then the garden will actually look like a garden with things growing in it.

I've decided to use my blog as a way to keep a gardening journal since this will be my first big garden, and especially since I'm growing all heirlooms. This way I can keep track of what worked well and make notes that might help me out next year. And my first note will be this: next year, start the winter squash in bigger peat pots right away rather than the tiny seed starter pots I use for most other things.

I started all the peppers (two bell pepper varieties and a hot pepper variety called Thai peppers), the tomatoes (three varieties: hillbilly potato leaf, Wisconsin 55, and Beam's yellow pear tomato), the onions (Australian Gold), lettuce (Yugoslavian red butterhead), broccoli, and delicata winter squash. I was worried that they weren't going to sprout because I was faced with a problem in putting all the seedling trays somewhere where (a) it was warm enough and (b) they were safe from the cats. Any place that solved one issue invariably didn't solve the other.

But then Len was there to be My Hero. If you need a solution to some kind of mechanical problem, Len is your man. The ideal place to store all of these, we'd agreed, was the basement, where I had plenty of room. The problem was temperature -- it's a maximum of 65 down there, even in the hottest weather. While this is perfect for the cool-weather vegetables like lettuce, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and spinach, the rest of the veggies would never sprout in such cool conditions. But how would we make it warm enough down there? We don't have much money so I couldn't afford to go get special heaters for seedlings.

Len had an idea: he put a large sheet of plywood down there on two sawhorses and then drilled a bunch of holes in it. He then attached a plastic skirt around it, then hung the growlight over it and cover the whole thing with plastic. We have a hot air heater that we've had since we lived in Wyoming -- my sister bought it for us to dry our snowy boots and gloves on it. He put it underneath, set the thermostat, and voila -- instant greenhouse. We set the seedlings in (with room to spare for more) and then checked on them the next day. The temperature inside was a humid 80 degrees or so. Perfect! Within just a couple of days sprouts were coming up in the trays.

Everything has sprouted, most noticeably the squash. They grew so big so fast in the greenhouse that today I transplanted them into larger peat pots since it's going to be at least a couple of weeks or more until I can work the ground. I'm taking a bit of a chance transplanting squash since they apparently don't take transplanting well (although last year I transplanted fairly mature plants really well into the garden). I'm hoping they'll survive, and I should get at least enough for the garden considering quite a few seeds sprouted. In fact, if they all stay alive I plan to ask my coworkers if any of them want the left over transplants -- I hate to see good seed go to waste.

The lettuce has also been growing fast, so I decided to transplant that into larger peat pots as well before it goes into the garden. This is the veggie I'm looking forward to trying the most. And I've been doing some reading on growing lettuce in containers -- turns out that it's very good for that, so I plan to grow lettuce in the sun room over the winter, where there are perfect conditions for it. The sunroom stays at a cool 60 degrees or less but gets decent light, and we always keep the door closed in the winter (since it's so cool out there and thus makes the living room more expensive to heat) so the cats won't get to it. If I do the planting right, we can have a constant supply of the stuff all through winter and it'll give me a chance to do some gardening in the cold months.

I'm trying to decide which veggies I want to save seed from. Part of the whole idea of growing heirlooms is to save their seed -- it helps preserve genetic diversity in our food supply, and it keeps some rare vegetables from dying out. I thought the term heirloom was strange until I read that some heirloom vegetables really are handed down in the family. I like this idea, so I plan to save seed. But I probably won't try and save seed from every plant I grow this year -- this is my first year gardening on such a large scale, and I want to concentrate more on getting them to grow well. For some items saving seed will be easy -- pick the best couple of peppers from your crop, cut them up, dry the seeds, then eat the peppers. But some vegetables, like lettuce, broccoli, onions, and many more, require that you sacrifice a few plants in order to save their seed (once you let lettuce bolt -- throw up seed shoots -- it's too bitter to eat). Since I'm growing lots of things in small areas, I don't know that I want to sacrifice some things yet for seed. I'd rather eat them.

Today I started the Brussels sprouts, the cucumbers, the watermelons, and the spinach. We'll see how well they do in the greenhouse this week.

Oh, my loooooovely seeds. How I cannot wait to plant you. We will spend byootiful days in dee sun too-geh-zair. And then we will sit too-geh-zair at zee din-air table, where I will enjoy your sweet fruits of looooove.

(/Cheesy French accent)

Also, FYI, there's some updates to the Charity Knitting pages. In fact, Allison is posing with her new scarf right over there to the left in the featured item slot. Bid! Give money! Feel like a good samaritan!

Last summer I had so much fun having a garden. Granted, it was a tiny plot of dirt that only grew three things: watermelon, squash, and peppers. I also had a tomato plant off to the side of the house. But it was successful, something I wasn't completely expecting. It's funny...I've never liked tomatoes, but it's amazing how good one will suddenly taste when you've grown it yourself.

I've been spending the winter months planning out Caryn's Garden 2.0. In doing this, I've had to balance out Len's enthusiasm for what he wants to cook and eat in the kitchen with what Im capable of growing as a novice gardener and what we have room for. We've decided that the plot will be a 40' x 12' area in the backyard that gets good sun, with one end of it getting decent shade for the plants that need it. I've spent a lot of time and effort deciding on what I'm going to grow, although I don't know why as it seems like there isn't anything I'm not planning on growing. A couple of weeks ago I graphed out my garden idea and figured out what was going to go where, carefully cross-referencing each vegetable in The Garden Primer, a great book for beginners on gardening.

The book keeps cautioning that you should start small and slowly work your way up. Naturally I'm not going to do this, for two reasons. The first reason is that Len has requested everything under the sun and balks at the mere mention of not growing it due to space or effort constraints. I'm working hard at explaining to him that just because you want to grow something doesn't mean that something is going to cooperate for a variety of reasons -- you may not have adequate climate conditions, you may not have the space and you have to pick and choose what you want to grow to fit in there, and also that you can't just throw a bunch of seeds in the garden and expect them to grow. Growing two types of tomatoes or peppers without careful planning and set up can result in cross-pollination, which will give you sterile plants if you get anything at all. Lettuce is a cold-weather plant and can't tolerate heat above 70 degrees; the 95 degree Wisconsin summer will ruin any lettuce we plant, so it has to be planned for either very early spring or late fall and winter, and all of this depends on the workability of the soil. After some explanation, I think he's started to get it.

The second reason is that I really do want a big garden that I can work on during the weekends. I enjoyed having my little My First Garden, but it was practically maintenance-free. With the exception of the daily waterings I had nothing to do. There were days that summer where the weather was beautiful and I wanted to badly to go outside and sit in the garden and do things. What things? I have no idea. I wanted to garden. They say there's a lot of effort involved and I wanted to be involved in it, but it wasn't happening.

With the garden I'm planning now, I'll have plenty to do, and I've even made up a planting calendar so I know what gets started in the ground and how far from the first frost date, what gets started indoors, and what has to wait to get sown in the summer so that we get some good fall crops.

Another challenge I'm putting on myself that may make this garden hard work is that I'm only growing heirlooms. Heirlooms are strains of vegetables or flowers that are not hybrids and are sometimes in danger of being lost as a species. By growing these, you help preserve the genetic variety of the vegetable world. And I'm always all about natural foods, so not growing hybrids or genetically altered plants sounds better to me. There are so many varieties of really wicked looking heirloom vegetables, and the fact that you can save the seeds to refine your crop from year to year is really enticing. Today I bought all my seeds from Seed Savers Exchange. In many cases, especially with tomatoes and peppers, it was really hard to narrow it down to just one or two varieties to grow. Here's what I plan to grow:

- Scarlet Nantes carrots
- Hillybilly Potato Leaf tomatoes
- Wisconsin 55 tomatoes
- Beam's Yellow Pear tomatoes
- Delicata winter squash (which I can get from the local nursery)
- Criss Cross watermelons
- King of the North bell peppers (Bell peppers are one of my favorite veggies!)
- Purple Beauty bell peppers
- Orange Thai hot peppers
- Brittle Wax pole beans
- Jacob's Cattle dry bean
- Early Fortune cucumbers
- Black Beauty zucchini
- Golden zucchini
- Golden Bantam corn (this one's going to be an experiment; I'm not planting very much so I may get low yield, but I want to try)
- Purple Top White Globe turnips
- Detroit Dark Red beet
- Burpee's Golden beet
- Yugoslavian Red Butterhead lettuce
- America spinach
- DeCiccio broccoli
- Arikara sunflowers (for the tasty seeds)

Wow, that's a lot. But I've been doing planning and research and I think I can handle it, and I'm really looking forward to having a garden I can tend on the weekends. And besides, doesn't the thought of all those gorgeous vegetables on your plate direct from your garden make your mouth water?