Growing Challenge Update #5

Living in a new city, posting on her brand new blog, my lovely sister has (finally) started up her Growing Challenge again. Hooray! Of course that means that I need to update everyone on how our garden grows...

This year, I ordered a majority of my seeds from Baker Creek Seeds. They came so highly recommended from many of you that for some reason (duh!) I never looked to see where they're located. Last week the lightbulb came on and I realized that they're here in Missouri, just an hour or two away by car. I wonder if that's why the freebie seeds they tucked into my order have worked out so well in our little garden. This lemon cucumber - apparently named for the shape and color, NOT for the flavor - has taken over the strings and poles originally slated for use by the pole beans we planted earlier in the year. The beans never made it, but it's apparently a great location for the cucumber. It's just starting to flower now, so we may have tiny little fruits by the time we get back from vacation next week!

I hate to admit this, but I don't actually know the variety names of all of our tomato plants. The three varieties I planted from seed all died, so we bought three organic ones from the farmer's market. Those just didn't seem to grow at all for quite some time, so we bought two more from the Home Depot (I know, I know, but I really wanted tomatoes this year and everyone else had stopped selling plants!). Well, now all five are doing relatively well, though the Home Depot hybrids are doing better than the farmers' market varieties. I just picked our first tomato of the season this morning, and we have at least a few dozen little green tomatoes on several of the plants now. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we'll have more to pick when we get back.

Our tomatillo is essentially an ornamental this year, since apparently they can't self-pollinate and need a "special friend" nearby to fertilize the flowers to produce fruit. Ah, the lessons we learn. The green pepper plants are pretty and all, but haven't flowered and don't seem to be growing at all. For now, they'll just sit tucked behind the cucumbers until it's time to pull out all the plants at the end of the summer.

Squash would be next. We had a little incident with our power company this week, as they came out to trim limbs in the easement along our back property line and dropped a few limbs directly on the raised planting bed. What had been the healthiest plant (table queen, an acorn squash) is now not doing so well, but the others (zucchini, yellow squash) have more than made up for it.

In a last ditch effort to have home-grown green beans this year, I planted a new round of bush beans last weekend. Hopefully they'll be up and growing by the time we get back. If not, we'll keep eating the beans that our CCSA provides.

I think that's it for now. I'll keep you posted on any new developments after we get back next week. Photos will also follow...

Growing Challenge Update #4

In the month of May, the greater St Louis area received more than four times our usual rainfall. In fact, we're already more than halfway to our normal annual rainfall, but we typically have rain fairly well distributed throughout the year, eventually reaching our rainiest month in November.

This has proven to be very bad for some of my new plants.

The Odessa Summer Squash babies I started indoors are trying valiantly to reproduce before dying.


If you look really closely here (or click on the image to enlarge it), you can see that my Royalty Purple Pod beans dropped all their leaves...AFTER they started growing tiny little purple beans. Bummer.

Another side effect of the rainfall is that ants have moved into the lovely, well-drained soil of the planter bed to escape the waterlogged clay that makes up the rest of my yard. When I cleaned out a handful of dead leaves, I unplugged the rain-stopper the ants had fashioned and discovered this hole. It's about the diameter of my index finger. I found about 12 holes this size throughout the planter.

Should I be worried? Because I am.

Yesterday, I planted two new Odessa squash near each of the dying seedlings. I also planted two new Royalty Purple pod beans near each of their denuded friends. Hopefully they'll quickly sprout and overtake the poor waterlogged seedlings...

On the upside, our tomatillo plant and its companion nasturtium sprouts seem to be doing well. Guess it's not all bad news...

Did I mention that thunderstorms are in our forecast for every day this week? I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the rainfall will be minimal and that the winds don't do any major damage.

UPDATE (6/6/08): I decided to cover the garden with a frost cloth and plant new seeds next to the dying squash and beans. Half of the new seeds are already up! I'll keep you posted...

Raised bed...fully loaded

Everything's planted...now hurry up and grow!








Can you tell we have abundant bunnies and squirrels in our neighborhood?

Growing Challenge Update #3

Okay, I'm officially on a roll here - three posts in one week. As promised, this post will be an update on my planting plan and how the garden is growing.

Rob was kind enough to take a picture of my planting diagram, which is shown here. It may seem strange to note that I am an architect by profession, which means that I have the access and the ability to draw this up in AutoCAD or REVIT, but I still drew my planting plan by hand. My reasoning is that as an inherently imprecise adventure, gardening shouldn't necessarily be subjected to straight lines and dimensions. Besides, I like to bring the drawing out into the garden with me, exercising my right to change my mind by revising things as I go along whenever I'm out there working on things. As this is my first year with veggie gardening, we'll see how that goes as things progress.
Now, for the progress I've made on the plants themselves. I initially planted two 72-cell seedling trays, using coconut coir for seeding medium and placing the trays on a cart in the basement. I used artificial lighting with daylight CFL bulbs, three 1-bulb shop lights per tray. Just about everything came up right on schedule, and I quickly found that I'd planted WAY too many seeds in each cell. But, after five weeks and lots of thinning, things were growing like crazy.

Except the tomatoes, which still staunchly refuse to grow beyond 1/2" tall. I asked my sister, who is studying to be a Master Gardener, and apparently the poor little things had developed powdery mildew from being over-watered. Oops - something to note for next year.

Thinking it may have something to do with the light they were given, I moved everything upstairs to the guest bedroom window for some true sunlight.

Everything except the tomatoes kept growing and growing, until the beans started to bloom indoors.

It was definitely time to plant things outside. Which I did last weekend.

It turned out to be a nice enough day for Jack to come out and "help."

I broke down and bought three tomato plants and splurged on two pepper plants from our local farmer's market - organic and locally started, so I didn't feel too bad. I also direct-sowed some of my plants, such as marigolds, daisies, alyssum, onions, radishes, carrots, lettuce and mesclun mix. As you can see, I had lots of seeds to choose from.
After an afternoon of planting, most of the seedlings were in the ground. I don't have a picture of the final product right now, but I will be out there planting the final three tomatoes, nasturtium seeds, and a few more squares of lettuce. Be on the lookout for shots of my fully loaded planter, coming soon!

Growing Challenge Update #2

Today, there's another small break in the madness that is my life, so here is a modest installment in my long-overdue Growing Challenge Update...

What am I growing for the challenge?
My seed list for the Growing Challenge includes:

beans: Henderson's Black Valentine, Royalty Purple Pod
carrots: Atomic Red, Amarillo
cucumber: Lemon Cucumber (freebie)
greens: Mesclun & Lettuce Mix (Southern Exposure), Tom Thumb
herbs: Chives, Parsley, Sweet Basil
onions: Dry Bulb, White Bunching (both from Southern Exposure)
squash, summer: Odessa, Early Prolific Straightneck
squash, winter: Table Bush Queen
radish: Long Scarlet, Early Scarlet Globe
tomato: Sub-Arctic Plenty, Marmande, Moneymaker (freebie)

All of the seeds came from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds unless noted above. Even though they're not included in the challenge, I'm also planting Sunflowers, Dianthus, Nasturtiums, Marigolds, Midwest Wildflower Mix, and Sweet Alyssum from seed as well. Most of these are companion plants to attract good insects or repel pests. The sunflowers are a part of The Great Sunflower Project, so I'll be keeping an eye on those to see if we have any apian visitors. The wildflower mix is intended to fill a large bare patch in the back yard we're not ready to deal with yet. I'm also hoping that planting tender yummy wildflowers at the east end of the yard will distract the many marauding bunnies from the vegetable garden at the west end of the yard. I'm not keeping my fingers crossed about that one, and I have a small roll of 24" high fencing I think I may install shortly after I plant the raised bed.

For My Next Post: What's the Plan? How is it Going? (and yes, I will include pictures...)

Growing Challenge Update #1

On January 29, I joined my sister's Growing Challenge. The rules are deceptively simple:

1. For this challenge, you must grow one additional type of fruit or vegetable than you did last year, and grow it from seed;
2. If rule #1 is not enough of a challenge for you, you may make your own rules; and
3. You must post (or send an update) about gardening once each week.

Even though we did plant a few tomato and pepper plants last year, we harvested a grand total of ten cherry tomatoes and the birds, squirrels and/or bunnies absconded with the two jalapenos we managed to nurse along. Great, I thought, this should be an easy challenge. And then I started thinking about what I really wanted to grow this year. And then I started looking at (and ordering from) the seed catalogs. And then I started looking around our yard to figure out where all those seeds would grow. We have very little sun in our yard (the town IS called Webster Groves for a reason, and we have huge trees all around the house), and the back yard is all lawn and weeds. All of the sudden, this turned into a lot of work.

As for the planting location, Rob and I spent a few days scouting around the yard to see where the light was best and determined we should replace a 4x12 corner of the back lawn with a raised planter bed. Two weekends ago I ripped out weeds and vines around the area, and I tested the existing soil only to find that it is completely dead - the pH is okay, but it holds no nitrogen, no potash, no nothing. Bummer. Last weekend, Rob and I re-routed a drainpipe, removed the patch of lawn, dug down about 6" to accommodate all the good soil I ordered, built the cedar planter out in the driveway, and dropped it into the hole.

Yesterday morning, at long last, I picked up the gravel we tossed into the bottom for good drainage, our soil delivery arrived, and things looked like this:

Yep, I had ordered 1/2 yard of gravel (already in the big hole by this point), 1-1/2 yards of "garden soil" (around here, that's generally silt and clay dredged out of the Mississippi River, mixed with some percentage of compost), 1 yard of compost, and 1/2 yard of sand, for a grand total of 3-1/2 cubic yards of fill. Due to a lovely twist of topography, we couldn't have it delivered to the backyard, and the driver had dumped it in a big pile in our driveway. Good thing it was the perfect day for it, because we had some shoveling to do! Here I am, shoveling a wheelbarrow of dirt into the planting bed.

Thank goodness Rob pitched in for the day (again, even though this is supposed to be my project) - transferring 40 wheelbarrows of soil from the driveway out front, down the concrete stair, and to the opposite corner of the yard would have taken me all weekend long!

In the last 4-6 inches of fill, I started layering in small amounts of fresh coffee grounds from the downtown Starbucks I frequent. I also worked in 6 cups of organic fertilizer into the top 3-4" of soil. My plan is to let things settle for a week, test the soil again, and see if I need to add anything else. Here is a picture of the fertilizer I used.

Finally, after a full day of work (9 am to 7 pm), the planting bed was finished!

The plan is to take next weekend off, then start hardening off the seedlings I've been nurturing indoors, with the hopes of planting everything in the ground mid-May. My next post will cover the plants - my seed list, the planting plan, and how things are going. For now, I'm off to liberally apply a coat of Arnica ointment to soothe my sore muscles...

Note: I did edit the text a bit after the initial post. It was late last night when I published this...when I read it again this morning I realized that I didn't give Rob enough credit for his support and his help with this project. Sorry, Rob!