The Green Mile

Spring has sprung and the planting has begun in our second season of square foot gardening! Woohoo! Can I get a Hoo-Ra? I always imagine what it must be like for new plants entering my garden... Seedlings pop thru the soil (or show up in little pots from the store) and they're all excited to be planted in someone's vegetable garden... and then the other half-dead plants clinging to life in my Little Shop of Horrors shout out "Dead plant walking!" and they realize they've entered the gardening version of The Green Mile. Quite sad.


We've got a lot going on in the garden this year, and as always, I'm hoping for more alive than dead at harvesting time, which means a big fat success in my world. I don't measure success in pounds, but in live plants.

Here's what's entered Death Row…er, my garden. Let's hope we get a lot of pardons before their sentences are up. I've gone for variety again with the hopes that I find something that gels with our gardening mojo.

Cabbage
Broccoli
Swiss Chard (existing plants doing well)
Carrots
Parsnip (I'm about to give up and pull out my remaining one. Funny story. I was weeding my raised bed and saw a funny looking weed. I yanked it out and there was a parsnip on the end. CRAP! I quickly dug a hole and stuck it back in with the hopes the 5-second rule that applies to fallen cookies also applies to accidentally pulled parsnips. Note: it does not. It's dead and in an impressive show of solidarity, the other parsnip is going down in a blaze of glory as well.)
Leeks
Kentucky Wonder beans
Yellow beans
Green beans
Cucumber
Peas
Spinach
Potatoes
Tomatoes
Zucchini
Yellow Squash
Strawberries (holdovers from last season)

I put the cucumber and peas in there as sort of an offering to the garden gods since it's no secret that I can't grow those at all. They're my gardening sacrificial lambs with the hopes that once they've given their lives, that fate will leave the rest of my plants alone.



Of course everything is quite young and already has issues. The bottom leaves are yellowed on most of the plants, which I think would mean they're too wet, but in the raised beds this isn't supposed to be possible. Maybe the two big boatloads of rain we've had recently were just a bit much for the new seedlings. We had about seven inches in a week, so that's what I'm clinging to as the explanation for my premature yellowing at this point.

I've fantasized about growing spinach and my little seedlings already look ready to give up the goat. They, too, are yellowed and droopy, but I'm hoping that they'll come around soon enough. They've been in about three weeks at this point, so I hope they turn around quickly.


My chard is going strong and I've come to love a chard, leek and Canadian Bacon quiche for Sunday lunch. It uses 8 eggs, so it's a good use of eggs, which is always great since the girls' egg factory is still in overdrive. I don't know at what point chard gives up and dies. It's been growing for quite a while, but I'm sure it has some sort of growing expiration date, right?


Whoever said that a SFG doesn't have weeds hasn't met the thick angry weeds of Central Florida. We have pricey landscaping cloth underneath each raised bed, but these thick grassy weeds have still managed to poke through just to show me that I was feeling too cocky about my weedless SFG. Take THAT, Mel.


Knowing nothing about strawberries, I assumed that because they were brown, brittle and dead that they should be discarded. I've found that dead things do best in the trash, but luckily I'm a procrastinator and didn't throw away these dead pots of strawberries . Oddly, they have awoken from the dead and are looking green again. I've even seen the odd bloom on them. Gardening lesson learned: Like zombies, strawberries rise from the dead. Must make a note of that.


On a sad note - and I'm almost embarrassed to admit this - Farmer B brought home a bunch of cabbage and broccoli seedlings, but I didn't have enough room in my raised beds to plant them all. I don't have anywhere to plant them, so they sit in their tiny little seedling pots slowly dying. I actually think they're past the point of survival.


In a perfect world I would have whipped together another raised bed and slung them in, but it takes a good chunk o' change to get the wood, peat moss, vermiculite and compost necessary to get a raised bed ready for action. Every time I go to the garden I see their purple leaves and I feel so incredibly guilty.

Dead plants walking, indeed.

Growth Spurt

A couple of weeks ago I had the exciting job of beginning the Fall planting in our brand new raised beds. I found the Mel's Mix soil a bit weird to work with because it's so fine and moveable and very unlike the weird heavy thick sandy soil we had in our rows. I planted mostly seeds this time, but bought a couple of seedlings at Lowe's to jumpstart the garden and give me the instant splash of green I need to feel good. The thought of planting a seed-only garden gives me a serious case of gardening anxiety. I am just not "there" yet in my gardening journey.



Here's what went in:

Yellow bush beans - seeds
Green bush beans - seeds
Kentucky something-or-other pole beans - seeds
Garden peas - seeds
Black-eyed peas - seeds
Leeks - seeds
Carrots - seeds
Swiss Chard - plants
Parsnips - seeds
Cabbage - seeds
Romaine lettuce - plants
Green, Red and Yellow Bell Peppers - plants
Radish - seeds
Broccoli - seeds and 1 plant
3 types of tomatoes - plants

Turns out that I hadn't planned on the whole trellis system necessary for some of these climbing plants. Apparently the Kentucky-something-or-other beans and the black-eyed peas that my oldest son insisted on are both climbing, vining plants. Luckily I used my fine gardening skills to plant them in different boxes, so now I need to figure out how to pull off some sort of trellis in both boxes. Both plants have two side-by-side squares dedicated in each box, so I am clueless as to how to cheaply and effectively trellis these suckers. We bought a couple of trellis nets, but I'm not what to attach them to. This will not come as a surprise to anyone who's read this blog in the past, but I never had to worry about a trellis before because everything died before getting tall enough to need the trellis. So I'm prancing around in new territory. I assume the bush beans need no support.


I'll admit to being quite guarded when it comes to all of these plants. Since I've had such crappy luck in the past, I don't have a lot of confidence that any of these will grow to the point of producing anything. But I'm going to continue as if I know what I'm doing and let nature take its course. Let's just hope that nature doesn't get lost.

Surprisingly many of the plants have sprouted already and look quite strong. I thought the seedlings would thrive nicely in the slightly cooler October weather, but the heat has been a bit overwhelming. The heat index has been around 100 degrees every day for about two weeks now so my youngest son and I have been watering the garden often and hoping the new sprouts don't get burned in the heat. We're about to set a record here in Central Florida for the most consecutive days in October with temperatures over 90 degrees.


Honestly, Fall in Florida just plain sucks. It's just Summer part II. Let's hope my Summer Part II garden falls into place because I could do with something to boost my gardening confidence.

Fall Planting Time

It's Fall planting time here and I've read that it's much easier for unskilled gardeners to have a successful crop this time of year. I'm hoping my life to death ratio is much better this time around because, let's face it, it really can't be much worse. We won't have any frost concerns until next year, so at least I can cross frost off my list of possible culprits when the inevitable happens. I'm not sure what's easiest to grow in October, but we chose some things that were recommended to me on GardenWeb and some things that just seemed like they'd be fun to try from the Fall planting list.

Of course I put my two slave laborers to work. Both of them enjoy a good muck about in the garden and we only managed to step on a few plants while involved in a crazy stint of extreme hoeing. I am a firm believer in extreme hoeing, both as a gardening philosophy and a workout plan. On to the plants.

1. Eggplant - we got one eggplant from Home Depot because the boys saw it and were intrigued with it. Sadly they both seem to think it will produce eggs at some point. We don't really eat eggplant, but since we've never had the issue of actually growing a plant until it produced fruit before, that didn't seem relevant. The boys grabbed it off the shelf and put it in the cart, so it's now in the garden. I assure you that if the damn thing actually grows an eggplant, we'll become eggplant connoisseurs right away.
2. Mr. Stripey tomato - Aidan was quite excited about our original Mr. Stripey tomato plant when we purchased it and planted it several months ago. But Mr. Stripey (may he rest in peace) was one of the many plants that met and untimely death during the floods of Tropical Storm Fay. So when we saw another Mr. Stripey at Home Depot, Aidan was so excited to give the cool stripey tomatoes another shot.
3. Peas - I purchased some "Alaska (Wilt Resistant) Peas" and planted about 3 rows of them. As is my custom, I held back about 1/2 the package incase these ones don't make it. I was just happy to find some seeds that said they were resistant to anything so I bought them. Everything we bought in the past must have said "resistant to growing" in fine print and I just missed it.

4. Green beans - These are "Burpee's Stringless Beans" that I ordered from
Seed Savers Exchange months ago. Oddly enough when I first planted these beans this summer they grew so well so fast… and then Tropical Storm Fay came and drowned them all and the rest is history. I had 1/2 a package of seeds left so I thought we'd try again.

5. Giant Musselburgh Leek - These are also from Seed Savers Exchange, but it's my first time planting them. I didn't manage to hold any seeds back because they were so tiny and Aidan was helping and next thing I know the whole packet was dumped out. My confidence level is quite low with these leeks since I've read that there is some sort of bulbing thing to be done in January-February that I have yet to understand. I planted them next to our peanuts, which seem to be growing quite well, with the hopes that some good karma will rub off on them from the peanut plants. I do quite like the humor factor of having leeks and peas in the garden. There are so many fun gardening jokes to be said about taking a leek… having a pea… yes, we're 12 years old thank you.

6. Radishes - much like with the eggplant, we aren't big radish eaters. But I've heard they grow quite well and they grow quite fast so I thought it'd be worth a shot. I planted two short rows of radishes and have over 1/2 of the packet here for next time.

So there you have it. Six poor defenseless types of vegetables that you will probably see soon on my R.I.P. list in my sidebar. If the peas and green beans actually grow, I'll have to figure out some sort of trellis system. My friend at Our Engineered Garden has some killer trellises he's built for all sorts of climbing plants, but I know mine won't look like that. Expect some sort of McGyver'd contraption involving plant stakes, coat hangers and duct tape.

Let the germination begin!

Sunday afternoon rolled around and it dawned on us that we had gone two days without insane rain - brief showers, but not the rain of biblical proportions that we'd been used to. Our swampy little garden dried out a lot in the blazing hot Florida sun in just this short amount of time. Farmer B had the great idea to whip out the gas-powered tiller and till our swamp with the plan of mixing up the wet soil with the dry soil to end up with something plant-worthy. He got this idea after my little panic attack yesterday afternoon. I saw the seedlings we purchased and went into panic mode because they were already wilting and drooping after being in our possession for a mere two days. Yes, our black thumbs act just that quickly on living things. We decided to take the plunge and plant the garden while the littlest and most destructive gardener was napping, which also happened to coincide with the hottest part of the day. We're great planners that way.

Once the tilling was complete we excitedly hopped into the garden with the packets of seeds and the wilting seedlings and with so much gusto and excitement and we…came to a standstill. That's when we realized that neither of us really knew what to do next. We stared at the seeds in the packet - do we hoe the soil into rows? Make hills? Poke our finger in and make holes? Do we rake it first? Pat it down first? Then we stared at the seedlings - do we just dig a hole, bung it in and cover it up? The directions on the seed packets and on the plant tags were meant for people with gardening common sense - of which we have none. You know how in the directions for using a hair dryer it says not to use while sleeping and not to use while in the bath? And you think - what kind of idiot needs those instructions? Well we are the kind of people that need those instructions for plants. The tomato tags said to "plant deep" and that "80% of the plant should be covered." So were we really supposed to put the whole plant in the hole with just the top sticking out? That didn't seem right to us at all, so we planted just the soily bit in the hole with about an inch of the planty bit and left the rest above ground.

The best part was sewing the carrot seeds. Aidan was so intrigued with planting the pumpkin seeds that I thought it would be fun for him to compare the large size of the pumpkin seeds to the small size of the carrot seeds. One thing led to another and next thing I knew we were sprinkling a row of these insanely microscopic seeds into our first hoed row. Then Aidan went to look for the carrot row marker he made. That was when I realized that we didn't have a row marker for carrots because we aren't supposed to plant them until October. So we can list the carrot seeds as the first casualty. We may have a moment of silence for them when the time is right.

But seriously - we got the whole garden planted. From beH peppers to peanuts and pumpkins to zucchini . It's all in and now we just wait until it sprouts, it dies, or it gets eaten. Let's all pray to the gardening gods that it grows.