Archive for 'Gardening'
Posted on February 20, 2009, under Gardening, Seed Starting.
Its seed starting time, and I’ve got a few going already. Above is a snap shot of my Green Bunching Onions that I panted a couple of weeks ago. They’ve just started to show some green on their tips in the last couple of days. I’ll let them get a couple of inches tall and I’ll thin them out. I don’t think I did too good of a job getting the seeds covered up though as some of them sent out roots on top of the ground and have now stopped all activity (like the one in the middle bottom of the pic above, the white stuff is the roots). Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to pull some of the plants from the ones that have two or more growing in them and transplant them to the ones that have none. These are the little Jiffy peat discs in this tray. I don’t really like to use these because what happens if Jiffy goes out of business or decides not to make the little discs anymore? I’ll have to start over from scratch. I’ve looked around town for just the little trays that you refill but everyone seems to have something that you have to buy refills for every year. I really would rather not have to do that. So, I think for this year I’m just going to purchase a cheap pack of paper bathroom cups and plant my seeds in them. I won’t be planting too many seeds so it shouldn’t be that big of a deal. Plus I know we have 10 or so small clay pots that I can use as well. I’ll be starting some catnip seeds and some Yellow Pear Tomato seeds tonight hopefully.
Update 7-15-08
We just picked a few more items from the garden. We picked more cucumbers some okra, potatoes, peppers and two tomatoes.
Raised bed update
The raised bed I have at our house is doing good. The German Queen tomatoes are up about 4ft now and have some small green tomatoes on them.
First pic of bed right after the catnip and the carrots were planted:
Pic right after I installed the irrigation system:
Pic taken this morning before I tied up the tomato plants again:
Blackberries
Susan and I have gone out to my parent’s house twice this week to pick some of their blackberries to make jelly out of. We picked just shy of a gallon on Monday (7/7/08) and last night we went back out there and picked probably 1 1/4 gallons. Susan made the first pickings into a little over 4 pints of jelly. I think this next batch she is going to put them into half pint jars. I’m going to guess we’ll be about 12 half pints from this batch. Maybe a little more. Here’s a pick of last night’s berries.
…and here’s a pic of Susan braving the “stickers” on our first picking.
Pic of said stickers:
My Two Plots
I seem to be having marginal success with my container garden here at my house so my dad offered to give me two plots out in his garden. One plot is 73′x24′ and the other is 28′x24′. In the larger one we have planted red potatoes, great northern beans, cucumbers, okra, a few different kinds of peppers, 28 tomato plants and 6 yellow squash plants. In the smaller plot we’ve planted it all in sweet corn.
Here’s a pic: (kinda hard to see the first plot as the shade had moved in)
