My Best Garden Ever.....And A Confession

So so many wonderful veggies every day.  I'm loving this.  I have the right amount of everything, which comes from years of learning from mistakes.  It's ironic because there almost wasn't a garden this year.  Like many people with kids, the spring months are insane.  If you have a graduating senior it becomes even more ridiculous and I was busy going to end of year banquets, concerts, etc. 

  There were years in the distant past where I would grow all of my tomato plants and many other things from seed.

It was a fun little project and would net me so many tomato plants that one year I loaded them up in a wagon, sent out a Facebook blast what I was doing and I walked around the neighborhood giving out my baby tomato plants.  But here's the problem:  Even though I started those tomato plants in late Winter, they still were pretty tiny when it was time to plant them outside.   By time they were producing a LOT of tomatoes, it was time for the first frost.  After all that work, my tomato harvest was ok, but not fantastic.

MY TOMATO CHEAT IDEA

What I do now and what I did this year when I finally was done with graduation festivities and could catch up on the delayed planting of my garden, is I went to a local big box discount store and bought the biggest tomato plants I could find, that were already staked and ready to go.  I didn't go to a fancy nursery.   I got 5 big tomato plants and other vegetable plants and planted them.  I have tomatoes a good month and half before I normally would get them.  I probably spent the same amount of money and I am enjoying a prolific harvest.  

I won't lie.  I enjoyed growing them from seed, and as my kids all head off to college and I have more time again, I probably will be starting a lot of plants from seed.   However, I will probably focus more on certain types of plants that worked better, like coleus, impatiens, and for my veggies like tomatoes will continue to purchase sizable established plants that might already have blossoms. 

Here's a rundown of what I did:

Cucumbers:  Planted seeds in garden

Tomatoes:  Purchased plants

Peppers:  Purchased plants

Green beans:  Planted seeds in garden

Lettuce:  Planted seeds right in garden

Spinach:  Planted seeds in garden

I feel like I'm forgetting some so when I remember I'll post again.  

So there you have it.  The truth.  Not everyone has unlimited time to have a garden and it's ok to cheat.  I think a lot of people, probably most, do this anyway, but to me it seemed like I was somehow cutting corners and not being a true gardener.  I wanted an authentic garden, that was all original down to each and every seed.  It's unrealistic and I wonder how many people don't have a garden because they think it's complicated and that you have to do all that work when basically you can plop a bunch of plants in the ground, water them, and have fabulous results. 

Growing Cucumbers

Like usual, I wasn't overly concerned with the directions on the cucumber seed packet, even though I had never grown cucumbers before.  Yup.  I'm a gardening rebel.   I planted probably 10-12 seeds spanning the width of my square foot garden.  I knew it was a vine and that the plan was to go upright, and I had some ideas I had seen on Pinterest.  I am not into overly labor intensive plans or gardens, and my ideas looked pretty simple.  I had seen some vegetable trellises made from pvc, but once my husband saw the pics I showed him, he took some metal pipe and with some pipe bending tool he had, he constructed this in about 10 minutes.  I used twine to give my cukes something to grow on and that was it.

Cucumbers have been one of the most enjoyable vegetables I've ever grown, and I can't believe this is my first time.  It has been a summer of drinking cucumber/lemon/mint-from-the-garden water (again thank you Pinterest!).   We've all been eating cucumbers regularly with my latest favorite being cucumber sandwiches made with cream cheese mixed with powdered ranch dressing mix or with various herbs from my garden.  My mom always made canned bread and butter pickles which are amazing, but being time challenged, I want to try one of the delicious refrigerator pickle recipes I've been seeing everywhere.

Garden Bounty

So after ignoring this blog for over 4 years, I'm back.  I am having the best garden ever, and being blessed with a little more free time than I've had in a while,  here I am.  I will recap my garden failures and successes bit by bit.  Being a little short on attention span (a mid-life occurrence.....or maybe from raising kids), I will divulge all information in increments.   The ironic thing about this year's garden is that I probably put the least effort ever into it.  In fact, it almost didn't happen.
But here we have what I just picked today, and my goal is to eat as much as we can FROM our garden.  I think eggplant parmigiana is in our future!

Waiting For Spring

Found some old pictures I took a couple years ago. It looks like we have a while to get to even this point. My seeds are ordered, along with a batch of strawberry plants, plants that I have no idea where to put. This is the scary part of January-March: Getting overly ambitious with upcoming projects. The strawberry plants shouldn't be a big deal, but hopefully I will not plan more than I have time for.

For example, one year I ripped all the sod out from the perimeter of our fence in our back yard, with the help of my wonderful husband, of course. This ended up being a LOT of flower "bed" space. Then what do you do with all that sod????? I actually turned it over and layered it with newspaper and ultimately covered it with mulch. I had read about doing something like that on garden web, and it sort of followed the principle of lasagna gardening. It worked but took longer than everyone said it would. I had my sod mounds in various places and it ultimately turned into very rich black dirt, but honestly it took a good two years to get to that point. This expanse of perimeter bed is too much to keep up with. It's hard to keep the grass out and keep a straight line, mostly because it's too much space and more than I have time for. To mulch it costs a fortune, and then I compounded the problem by planting purple coneflower and shasta daisies all over and it just looks sort of junked up by time you hit July. I've tried to pull some of it out, but my main enemy is TIME!!! I have too much going on in those beds! It will look really good for a few weeks out of the summer, but the rest of the year it's just pretty much a mess. I'll post pictures later in the summer so you can see what I mean. To keep this honest, I figure I better plan on showing you my successes and my failures!!!

Ordering Seeds

So this is the weekend where I am ordering seeds. This picture was taken a previous year. I use an old baby changing table which works perfectly in my sunny dining room. This year I'm changing up my seeds a bit, using more heirloom seeds to see if my tomatoes will be even more flavorful. I'll still get the salsa and roma tomatoes but will definitely throw in a couple more varieties. All the seed catalogs have a variety of lettuce where it's easier to pick large clumps, so I definitely want to try that variety. I'm going to have to replenish my "Mel's mix" in my beds, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my source of coarse grained vermiculite is still open. You never know with the crazy economy! Before it gets nice out, I hope to have the beds replenished. I also hope to be on top of things so I can get early season veggies planted so I can enjoy the fruits of my garden as early as possible!

I would also like to grow strawberries this year......and am trying to figure out where I could put them. I think I would like a mini raised bed. I've seen those circular terraced ones which would be really cool. I could have strawberries on one level and then maybe move some of my herbs and have them on another level. I have a picture in my mind, but unfortunately I don't have a rabbit solution for that type of bed. Hmmmmm.....There must be some way. I also am pretty sure we have skunks living behind us still. It's hard to believe we're in suburbia with all of this wildlife!!!

Happy planning to everyone!

A Rose Before Japanese Beetles!!

I LOVE roses. Years ago, we lived next to an elderly couple that were "rosearians." They had over 150 rose bushes, and had each one labeled with what variety it was. They were huge fans of the old garden roses more than the hybrid teas, but they had everything from miniature roses to shrub roses. As I type I can remember Mr. W's voice telling me about "rosa rugosa alba" and "rosa rugosa rubra." I'd watch him prune his plants, putting a dab of Elmer's glue wherever he cut to stop rose borers from destroying his plants. They would take cuttings of roses and compete at rose shows and came home with ribbons every time. Throughout the summer, I would get tours, over and over again. Luckily some of what I learned from them stuck in my brain, but mostly what I developed was an appreciation for the beauty of roses.

I love my roses, but I think Japanese Beetles love them more. I know they are the adult version of grubs and even if we treat our lawn, they are always going to be there SOMEWHERE. And sure enough, as summer rolls on I have accepted that Japanese Beetles are something we just have to live with. If you take soapy water, you can manually pick them off, something one of my daughters oddly enjoys doing. They seem pretty slow moving and even shaking them into the water is amazingly successful. Unfortunately, the beetles seem to really reach their peak when we are on vacation and by time we get home, they've already done their damage.

One of my neighbors got so disgusted with the beetles, he ripped out all of his rose bushes. I gladly salvaged them, which means more roses but also more beetles for me.

But they're so beautiful, and I remember our "rose" neighbors before we moved away and how much I learned from them, before sadly Mrs. W passed away and Mr. W went into a nursing home. When I look at my roses, I think of them....

There's A Toad In My Chives

Another season of successes. Another season of failures. Here are my top 11 thoughts:
1. Swiss Chard is awesome and is one of my garden favorites, behind tomatoes.
2. Next summer when we leave for our 2 week vacation, we really need to ask someone to water our garden!!
3. I mysteriously ended up with twice as many tomato plants as I planted. (Due to poor clean-up last fall???)
4. I think my rabbit fencing is working.
5. I prefer zucchini to summer squash.
6. I LOVE lettuce, but I need to stagger planting better than I did this year so I don't end up with too much or too little at one time.
7. MUST do a late summer planting of lettuce.
8. For Spring, I'll need more vermiculite, compost, etc. to build up my beds again.
9. Not sure about peppers. Are they worth the space for as much as I get from my plants? I've never had much luck with them and I don't know if it's me, or if they just simply don't produce as much as say, tomatoes? In a dilemma.
10. Most of the seeds I used for this garden were OLD, so I didn't really purchase anything this year, which is awesome. I'll be needing the seed catalogs this year, though!
11. There really is a toad in my chives. It's also time to move the chives to somewhere else in the yard. I'll save the SFG space for other things. Definitely need to try some new veggies next year.