Big jump from seed starting to garden planting

Once again, the blog updates are coming far less frequently than I would like. Between work and kids, there isn’t enough time to really even make it to the garden, much less find time for a garden update.

While getting a forced break, I figure I’d try and sneak in a post. I’m currently sitting at LAX waiting on a flight back home. My wife and I are heading back home after helping our oldest get settled in for a summer internship. With this trip almost off the plate, maybe there will be a bit more time for the garden and blog updates… eh, probably not.

The started tomato seeds grew quite well this year. I’ll assume that the heating mat made a difference and will reserve full judgement until after another year or two.

By April 17th, the plants had very much outgrown their seed starting tray and needed to be transplanted into larger pots.

April 17th progress

Makeshift potting bench

Unfortunately, it wasn’t warm enough to move them out to the greenhouse so they had to hang out inside for two days

After the near freezing nights, the plants made it outside

While the tomato plants grew some more in the greenhouse and the weather continued to warm, it was time to do some garden repairs. The last of the second generation beds finally gave up the ghost and needed to be replaced. After this repair, all beds are again in good shape.

I miss the minivan for some chores

Old boards were very rotten

New bed in place

All smoothed out and ready for planting.

Fast forward to May. The tomato plants no longer fit in the greenhouse and I haven’t had time to get them planted. Finally, on May 8th I carved out enough time to get them in the ground.

Well past time to get these in the ground

I planted two of each variety making it a total of six plants. The rest have been given out to family and coworkers.

One final update in this post and I’ll be current. Before the trip to LA, and I mean literally the hour before we needed to head to the airport, I quickly planted some seeds. In this session I planted peas, cucumbers, one hill each of zucchini and yellow squash.

I plan to do a second planting where I put in a second hill of zucchini and squash as well as green beans, carrots, lettuces and some flowers. Due to spending more time at work, I’m planning to tone down the garden to what I hope is a more manageable level.

Sample summer harvest

Throughout the summer I took a number of pictures with the intent to post them here but never managed to make blog entries.  So, this will be a bit of a catch up post to show some of the summer harvest and tasty results.

Zucchini Nut Muffins

No summer would be complete without making at least one batch of zucchini nut muffins. This tasty batch was taken into work for breakfast.

Sample summer harvest

Not all tomatoes and sunshine

I am not sure if I will ever have a summer where the squash vine borers don’t bring the zucchini and squash to an early end.

Another fruitful trip to the garden

Cherry tomatoes starting to ripen

Extremely delicious cherry tomatoes

I should make a post just about these cherry tomatoes this year. Not sure if it was the variety or the growing conditions but they were the sweetest I’ve had. I’ll be trying them again next year to see if the results are reproducible.

Homegrown corn all slathered in butter

So many tomatoes

Spring planting for 2018

Over the last two weekends I was able to get all but one vegetable planted in the garden.

First off though, is this years diagram of the planting plan.  Nothing too radical this year, pretty much most of the same from past years just rotated so I don’t have things in the same spots.

Garden plan for 2018

The first weekend (May 5/6) was a bit rushed because I had to first get the second garden bed replaced.  I also had to move the lettuce from the back two beds to the second replacement bed.  All of that took a while. In the end, I had time to get the peas and radish planted and get the tomatoes out of their tiny pots and into the ground where they can have all the root and head room they could wish for.

In the years past, I never provided the peas and beans anything other than water and occasional fertilizer.  This year I am giving an inoculant a try.  When ordering seeds this year I threw Burpee Booster into the cart.  We’ll see if I notice any difference.

Giving the beans and peas a boost

All six tomato plants with ladders

Two Brandy Boy tomatoes

Two Happy Day tomatoes

Two Cherry Baby tomatoes

Pea tower with a few left over lettuce plants I did not move

Transplanted lettuce and bean tower

For the second weekend (May 12/13), the goal was to get the rest of the garden planted. The weather forecast looked like this.

Not a good forecast for planting

As a result, I was up and in the garden before 8 am in an effort to get as much planted as I could before the rain arrived.  I’m happy to report I was able to get the garden planted.  In fact, it didn’t actually rain until Monday afternoon.  I had time to go to Lowes and get some sweet potato plants and get them in as well on Saturday. Between the vegetable garden and other needed yard work, we ended up being out until dark.  I was beginning to wish for the promised rain so I could be chased inside.  🙂

So, what all was planted this weekend…

• Sweet corn
• Zucchini
• Yellow Squash
• Green Beans – Pole
• Green Bean – Bush
• Cucumbers
• Basil
• Carrots
• Sweet Potatoes

Twelve sweet potato plants

All that remain are the onions. I’m still waiting on Burpee to process that portion of my order. I am tempted to just cancel the onions and try and find some locally.

Needing some room to grow

I’m afraid I might have started some my seeds a bit early. The tomatoes are fine but the lettuce, cucumbers and zucchini seem to be growing faster than spring weather is getting here.

To give some of the plants a bit more elbow room, I transferred about half over to some 3 inch pots.

I also received my onion plants in the mail this past weekend.  I checked the garden tonight and it is still too wet to plant.  Tomorrows weather looks like a great day, but I am not too confident that a single day will dry out the soil enough to prep it for planting.

Crowded seedlings

Angle view of the crowded seedlings

Transplant in progress

Catch up post

I’ve been neglecting the blog lately and hopefully this catch up post will get me back into the swing of things.  I took a family trip up to Chicago last weekend to check out my sister and her husband’s new house as well as give the kids a taste of a big city.  Before leaving, I took some pictures of the garden with the intention of writing a status update for the blog.  Well, that was a week ago and I am just now getting the post written.  Last week was the time in the garden where everything looks nice and neat.  Not overgrown, not overcrowded.  No troubles with insects or disease yet, just a happy time.  By the end of this month, that carefree time will be over.  Below are some pictures showing the state of the garden before we left for our long weekend.

Here we have the Bush Green Beans, Zucchini and two tomato plants anchoring the far end of the bed.

Next up are the sweet potato plants. I’m waiting for them to start vining out so I can bury them deeper with the mounds of soil.

Sunflowers are starting to stretch their legs

Brussels Sprouts. Two good, one sick and one already gone.

Four Golden Egg yellow squash

Sugar Snap Peas all in bloom

Mess of onions

Four more tomato plants

Basil and Lettuce

Cucumbers with some lettuce and radish growing in the shade of the trellis

Pole beans just starting to climb

Two rows of carrots

Closeup of the blooming tomotoes

Since the above pictures were taken last week, I have managed to harvest a couple more vegetables. First up was some peas which I finally had a chance to steam up tonight. Very tasty. I also thinned some of the onions and chopped them up for a salad and tacos.

First harvest of peas

A couple green onions to be chopped up for a salad

 

Lift off!

With a week of nice and warm (almost hot) weather, the seeds planted last weekend have almost all emerged. Okay, to be honest, not ALL seeds have emerged, but at least a couple from each vegetable planted.  Forecast shows some rain expected over the weekend an decently warm weather continuing.  So far, off to a good start in the garden this year.

Bush green beans muscling their way to the surface

Zucchini trying to sneak out

First cucumber spreading its leaves

Pole bean fully out of the ground

Fuzzy leaves of the yellow squash

Hard to believe that this little sunflower will grow to over 10 feet tall

 

Rolling the dice

I decided to take a chance on the garden today.  In the end, I think the risk will be pretty light. Today I planted about 85% of the garden.  What made me decide to take the chance?  With a 10-day forecast like looks like this?  How could I not take advantage and get the garden going.

A great forecast to start off the month of May

(I couldn’t get the rest of the 10 days in the screen capture, but the remaining 3 days currently look just as warm.)

In the end, I managed to plant all but tomatoes, sweet potatoes and a basil plant.  The only reason I skipped those three was that I don’t have any sweet potato or basil plants yet and I still need to get some landscape fabric to put down before planting the tomatoes.

Armed with garden tools, seeds and the following planting plan I headed to the garden this morning.  Here is my original plan as designed back in March.

Original 2015 Planting Plan

As many of you also know, plans have a way of falling apart as soon as they hit reality.  Apparently, I do not have the best spacial mental map of the vegetable plants and how much space they require.  I would think that after all these years in this garden, I would have it down by now and could work from memory, but guess not.  Working with the original plan and going from bed to bed, I was able to re-work and re-orient the plan to the following design. We’ll see how well it works as the plants grow.

Updated Planting Plan for 2015

Let’s get to planting this garden! First up green beans. This year I am actually planting both pole beans and bush beans. I’ve got big plans for canning green beans this summer and having a harvest of both kinds should well… I guess give me more green beans.

Ring of green bean seeds

In addition to the new plants, I am also getting an second planting of some of the cool weather vegetables. Another round of spinach, lettuce and radish.

Shaking out some spinach seeds

Time to get some of these plants out of the basement and into the garden. First up to escape the artificial light is the Brussels sprouts.

Basement Brussels Sprouts get liberated

After planting Brussels sprouts, Sunflowers, Yellow Squash, Zucchini, Bush Green Beans, Pole Green Beans, Cucumbers, Carrots, Lettuce, Radish and Spinach… I was tired. Oh wait, that wasn’t where I was going, after getting all those planted, the garden is about ready to explode with vegetables.

End result

End result from a different angle

Now that all the new seeds are in the ground, I also took the time to check in on the other plants that already blazed the 2015 garden trail.

Radish with some lettuce and spinach in the background

Peas are now starting to climb

This years onion forest

In the hopes to improve the pollinators in the neighborhood, I got this swanky Mason Bee house for Christmas. I placed it right back by the vegetable garden. If all goes well, I’ll hope to report later this summer of the new tenets.

An extra band to keep the house secure to the tree

And finally, I also updated the 2015 Planting Calendar.

Welcome to the Jungle

I think this year, at least in the later part of July, the garden gets a theme song. The two leading candidates are Welcome to the Jungle by Guns N’ Roses or The Lion Sleeps Tonight by The Tokens. So far, I have yet to finding a sleeping lion or a corruptive large city in the jungle garden, so maybe in the end, these are not the best candidates after all.

Before looking at the current state of the garden, perhaps a refresher on what the garden looked like BEFORE the plants took over would be a helpful perspective.  Check out this post from a short three months ago.

Welcome. Enter if you dare.

Tomatoes, Sunflowers and Green Beans

Cucumbers, Tomatoes and Green Beans

Sunflowers on the left, yellow squash on the right.

You can actually see a bit of gravel pathway in this one.

Some lima beans peeking on the left with towering sunflowers in the background.

Green beans, brown sugar and bacon

The moment we’ve all been waiting for! Okay, so maybe not everyone, but it was a big day for me and the wife. Yesterday was the first green bean harvest! To celebrate, I cooked up a batch of old fashion green beans. To be honest, after cooking in brown sugar and bacon it could have been Catawba pods and still tasted pretty good.

Fresh green beans

Green beans with recently added brown sugar

As if the green beans were not enough vegetable to go with the grilled pork chops, I also grilled a yellow squash and a zucchini.

Grilled Vegetables with a bit of steak seasoning

And if that wasn’t enough, I also sliced up the first cucumber of the year. After some with just salt and some with humus, they were gone before I could get a picture.

First cucumber. Kinda ugly, but tasted good

Growing Garden

I was away from the garden for a few days this week on a family vacation and boy did the garden grow during those four days.  Everything is bigger and greener than when I left.  The plants are big enough now that the ground based bugs are not causing much problems anymore and we are still early enough the flying insects haven’t started attacking yet.  This is the time of year when the garden goes from neat and orderly to crowded and messy. Even still, great progress this week.

Plenty of pea blossoms

No pods forming yet, but they have got to be getting close.

Baby cucumbers

The plant itself isn’t very tall yet, so I don’t know if these little guys will hang around and become full size cukes or not, but it is encouraging to see some fruit starting.

Tomato blossoms

Not too bad considering I started this guy from a seed.  I wish I got them started a bit earlier, but this plant at least seems to be doing pretty well.

Baby yellow squash

Can’t wait to slice once of these up and cook it on the grill.

12 inches in 7 days

Since the last post on the Sunflowers, they have grown about a foot in the last week.  I wish I had an easy way to get a webcam out in the garden, I’d place a measuring stick next to these and watch them grow.  With favorable weather forecast for next week as well, I expect another foot or more.

Baby green bell pepper

Climbing green beans