Monday, August 6, 2007

Catching Up!


I have been just super busy for the last month, so am way behind in posting, time to catch up.

The corn has grown to about 8 inches tall. Late last week I transplanted in the crook-neck squash seedlings and the other squash seedlings, as well as one pumpkin seedling. I'd like to grow a lot of squash, but have had so many bad experiences with the squash vine borer that I'm not going to get too crazy. Today I transplanted some bean seedlings. These are my first pole beans, hoping the corn will outpace them and provide something for them to grow up.

This is my first attempt at a "Three Sisters" garden.

I've started planting seedlings in bin numero dos. I already had my green pepper and banana pepper plants in the back, and some peanuts in the front, so I've been filling in stuff between. Added about six square feet of peanuts, a square foot of leeks, a square foot of green onions, some kale, a couple other things.

I need to fill in the other two bins as well. Right now I have a pretty big cherry tomato monster in one, as well as some ginger, and in the other I have some lemon grass, tomato, and sweet potato. Still, wasting about 45 or so square feet that I need to get something planted in.

I've been reading Mel Bartholomew's book "Square Foot Gardening," which is mostly about garden management, with some assisted info on what to plant and what to plant it in. I think it fits in pretty well with John Jeavons & Co's books. Mr. Bartholomew has you break everything down into one foot squares, keeping it simple enough to manage, and he has you plant crops in a certain order and using certain amounts, so that you can pretty much always have something ready to eat. His claim is that two of his flats (each flat being 4 feet by 4 feet) can provide a single person with all their vegetable needs. I think this is a reasonable goal for me, and it just so happens I have the equivalent of 8 of his flats, which probably ought to cover me and the family.

Plus I think I might be able to extend some of it to the jungle in the back, so that'd be a nice usage of space.

I keep planning to start the upside down tomatoes. I'm planning to take a plastic milk jug, cut the bottong off, stick the bottom back on, turn the jug right side up, plant a tomato seed in the pour hole, let it sprout, then hang the thing upside down. Tomatoes can take a LOT of space, and are susceptible to a lot of garden pests, this might solve a bunch of problems. My only worry is that they'll be too difficult to water.

The chickens are doing fine. They eat a lot. They're about 9 or 10 weeks old. I should start getting eggs anywhere from 6 to 14 more weeks from now. That'l be a nice score. Eggs in the store are now about $2 per dozen, if the chickens start producing an egg a day, that'll run me about 75 cents per dozen.

Of course, with ten birds, what the hell am I going to do with ten eggs a day?

The turmeric that Doug gave me has sprouted, big stem, big leaves, though one of the stems has the top bitten off by something.

I put up some images of my first garden from three years ago. At the time everything was pretty much hydroponics and containers. My first garden.