Happy Spring!!

Yesterday was the first official day of Spring! Yay!! I'm looking forward to a season of sunshine and fresh veggies. We started discussing a vegetable garden and I may attempt a sunflower house. I have a book called Gardening with Kids that has a pretty cool "fort" made of sunflowers and climbing morning glories. I show the picture to the kids and they are pretty excited. Hopefully it works out! I'm still debating about what veggies to plant. One of my problems every year is that I plant more than I should in the small space I have. Maybe I'll see about building another raised bed this year. Oh, I'm excited!

Growing garlic!

The website said to plant in the fall, but I wonder if I planted too early... this is what we've got now.

I hope they survive the winter. We put a nice think layer of shredded leaves on top, but that just seems to have fueled the growth. Hmm... I guess I'll just have to wait and see. My parents have a pretty cool garlic braid which got me thinking... :)

Garlic

I planted garlic today. A little impulsively, but I had a head of garlic that was already growing so I was thinking of putting it in a pot of dirt to see what happened. A quick search found a website that said plant in the fall and harvest in June, so I thought that would be a good use of the garden for the winter. We planted two rows, using the already growing head of garlic and a few big cloves from another head. It will be pretty cool if we have our own garlic next summer!

Harvest time

The fall weather is here and the nights are getting chilly. I got tired of watching the forecast for frost alerts (ok, I was really watching my neighbors to see which nights they covered their gardens!) so I decided to harvest the garden. We were down to just carrots and tomatoes anyway, with a few stray purple beans here and there. The tomatoes are still pretty green, but I think at this point they have an equal chance of success on my window sill as they had in the garden at night. Hopefully some, if not most, will ripen so we can keep eating delicious garden veggies for a few more weeks. The surprising and impressive haul though was the carrots! There were lots of really big carrots and, because of my lack of thinning, each had a handful of little ones tucked in nearby. Part of me is curious about how big they could have gotten, but mostly I'm just ready to be done :) The best part of the whole harvest? The kids love it!! They have been eating carrots for days! Next year's veggie garden will be bigger and better!




Now... to winterize the rest of the gardens... and find some way to stay unburied from all the leaves beginning to fall!!!

Carrots!

Look what I found in the garden today! I'm psyched. They taste so delicious too! Yay! The greens out there are growing, but since they are so crowded together I was loosing hope for any actual carrots... then I found this little present. I actually went out to see if I could find anything to put in my salad today. All we had in the fridge was lettuce, which makes for a boring salad. I found carrots and tomatoes and a few purple beans. Yummy! Gardening is fun :)

Powdery Mildew

My pumpkin plants seem to have acquired a good case of powdery mildew :( I fear I will have no pumpkins this year. I don't think I thinned them enough, and so perhaps with all the rain and the plants densely packed (relatively speaking) I created an ideal environment for mildew. Oh well. The plants themselves grew really well, invading the nearby tomatoes and carrots. My carrots seem to be growing like wildfire, but I've pulled up one or two and the carrot itself was quite small. Again, I don't think I did a good job of thinning. The greens look beautiful, but we'll see what we get for harvest.

Lesson learned: In the early part of the season when there are so many beautiful little seedlings, it's important to pull them! It's sad, but I guess in the long run it's necessary.

Rain, rain, go away!

We've had almost two full weeks of rain every day. Blah!! The garden is happy though. I think the peas are on their way out. We see fewer and fewer new ones each day. I read in a book that MIL gave me about how to properly stake up the pea plants, so next year that will be a little nicer. The pumpkin plants are doing well, big flower, and big, dominating leaves and vines. I fear they are overwhelming the carrots, which have tons of greens but are too close together so I don't have a lot of hope for them anyway. The huge peas and poorly thinned carrots seem to have done a bit of a number on the green beans as well. They started off strong, but now the plants are all yellowish and the beans are pretty small. I think they probably needed more space and more sunshine (don't we all these days!!) My replanted tomato plant is thriving again and the two from Julie are starting to flower as well. C'mon tomatoes!! I LOVE eating salad for lunch with veggies fresh from the garden. Next year I'm going to add a few more bed and plant some salad greens.

The rain is coming down in buckets now. Sigh. Maybe next week we'll see the sun again.