New movie - "The Flattening"

If you thought "The Happening" was scary, wait until you see "The Flattening." It's M. Knight Shyamalan's blockbuster thriller currently in production. It's about a novice gardener in Central Florida who actually grew some nice looking zucchini seedlings and plants them in her garden. Then it happens - a freak cold front blasts through with a vengeance bringing with it insane winds that flatten everything in its path, including the precious seedlings. Oh the humanity!

These winds were a sustained 30 mph all day with gusts up to 40 mph. I saw two trees down in our neighborhood.

And the seedlings went flat.


As a pancake.


A couple managed to stay strong.


But the carnage. It's rated R for violence and gore.

She's got leggy plants and she knows how to lose them!

I have been ogling my seedlings on the patio table recently and thinking how amazingly talented I am for growing plants in pots. My gardening bravado was quickly crushed when I perused other gardening blogs and learned that my little seedlings are leggy. This "leggy" term is new to me - as are most gardening terms I've come across.


Leggy is fancy gardening talk for "New gardener doesn't know what she's doing and screwed up the seedlings by planting them too shallow, too hot, too far from light, or too anything, which has caused a long, flimsy craptacular stem, which usually leads to premature floppage and untimely death."

Yes, I have a case of the leggies. I've read that leggy tomatoes can be saved by planting them deep because the stems will grow roots enabling the plant to be stronger, so maybe there is hope for some of my long-legged little fellers. But the rest of my leggy minions? I wonder if their future is bleak. Has their fate been sealed? I fear it has. Just look at this death row line-up of seedlings if you've got the heart. Pitiful.



I have leggy okra. Leggy cauliflower. Leggy broccoli. Pretty much leggy everything. I went from being proud everything was so tall to being crushed that everything is so tall. Sure - I started my seedlings on the patio with only sunlight as their light. It's boiling in the garage, so that didn't seem like a cool place for them. We keep the A/C in the house set to about 81 degrees, so the house didn't seem cool enough - besides, I have no idea where I could safely put an entire tableful of seedlings inside the house where they'd be safe from boys, chickens, cats and a clumsy dog. So the patio seemed like the right place. Apparently the patio is the source of the evil-legginess that plagues my seedlings.


I'm not sure it's even worth planting these leggy things in the garden. Maybe I should just to give them a fighting chance. It seems a bit drastic and sadistic to snuff them out with a quick chuck in the compost pile when they're clearly alive today. Oh the life and death decisions that plague me now that I have entered into the dark world of gardening…What to do…what to do...

The planting of the Zucchermelons and a garden update

With all the recent talk of chicks, badgers and travel blogs, I've completely veered away from writing about gardening this week. I think the best way to end the week is with a gardening update so that you can see I'm still toiling away in my sad little plot of dirt, even if my blog doesn't reflect it.

Last week we planted some potatoes and I'm giving them about a 10% chance of turning into potato plants. We couldn't find any seed potatoes around here, so I decided to get some store-bought potatoes and put those in the ground. I had some regular ole' new potatoes and some super funky purple potatoes that I thought would be fun to try. I'm convinced I cut the new potato pieces too small before putting them in the ground and I've heard that people have poor results with store-bought taters, so my expectations are low. It should be obvious by now that the threat of poor results doesn't dissuade us from moving forward with something. So a line of taters is in the garden.


Next the boys and I made a teepee from some bamboo poles and planted some green bean seeds around the bottom of each leg. Aidan was really helpful to his little brother and was very patient while trying to show him where to plant the little beans. I thought it was such a sweet brotherly moment until I heard them muttering to each other about climbing the beanstalk when it grows to see the ogre, so I think it was a self-serving planting experience for them. It wasn't so much to help mom and embrace the gardening experience, but more the chance of climbing to an alternate universe, battling a giant ogre and stealing his gold. Won't they be disappointed when our beanstalks don't grow through the clouds? Won't I be disappointed if the boys try to climb them anyway?


Today I decided that some of the plants I've been growing in little plastic cups on the patio were ready to go in the garden. The paperwork Farmer B picked up from the Extension Office says that when plants get about four "real" leaves on them, they're generally good to go. I found a few watermelons and zucchini seedlings with four nice-sized leaves, so off to the garden they went. If my past is any indication, these seedling should be dead brown sticks within 10 days.


Although… on my way out there I noticed that one of the cups had a zucchini sticker AND a watermelon sticker on it - and one cup had no sticker. I looked at the leaves to distinguish the plants - no luck. So I don't know which plants are which. I'd like to extend a special thanks to my sticker-switching children for this fun moment. So we're calling those two rows zucchermelons, since we don't know if they're zucchini or watermelon.


Finally, I was feeling up my tomato plants in the garden and noticed something weird going on with the bottom leaves on my two beefy plants. I have two beefy tomato plants and one small one - the rest are still teeny-tiny seedlings on the patio. The bottom leaves have sort of a yellow variegation in them and are a bit curly - not super curly, but the edges are curling up. The top 3/4 of the plant looks completely normal.


I looked this up online and it turns out that almost every tomato malady involves some sort of yellowing and leaf curling. Once again, I don't know what to do to fix this mystery. One of my major gardening Achilles Heels is having a problem and not being able to diagnose it by looking at pages in a gardening book. Hopefully I can figure out what is going on with my tomato plants. They both have nice yellow flowers on them, but the bottom leaves must be indicating a problem.

So there you have it. Turns out I can fight off a vicious badger and still find time to play in the garden too :o)

Nursery School

Our seedlings in the little seed starting greenhouse actually sprouted, so the boys do not need to be my scapegoats after all. Now that things actually sprouted, I'm taking full credit for it. It should be no surprise to you that I had not planned for what I'd do after the seedlings poked through the soil. I learned that they need to go into a larger container pretty quickly because their leaves smash up against the plastic lid within a day or two of their first appearance.



I grabbed some leftover pots from recent landscaping plant purchases and then rummaged through the recycle bin for some yogurt cups to house our seedlings. I jammed a steak knife into the bottom of the yogurt cups and twirled it a bit to create drainage holes. I transplanted all of the okra and some of the broccoli into the bigger containers and then ran out of containers.


Getting the seedlings out of their tiny pots proved problematic. I used a spoon from the kitchen to sort of scoop them out. The problem was many of them had already grown very long roots that were sticking out of the bottom of the tray. I was just grabbing them out before I noticed they were coming out rootless - that's when I discovered the long roots and was a bit more gentle with subsequent seedlings. No one told me they'd have such long delicate little roots so fast. That was not in the gardening book.





When I needed a cheap idea for more mini-planters, my friend EG recommended drilling two holes in the bottom of some cheap plastic cups and using them for my seedling planters. This seemed like a great way to save money so I was all over it. They'll be reusable too so I got over the guilt of buying plastic.


(See my little budding photographer's shadow? He's a natural)


I also learned that labeling the pots is essential. If you're not a skilled gardener you cannot recognize an okra from a broccoli from a watermelon. They're all small green leaves to me. I grabbed some masking tape and a Sharpie and labeled all the pots. Not long after labeling them I discovered my boys wearing Okra masking-tape stickers on their arms. I'm sure I re-stuck them on the right pots.

It's the Final Sproutdown!

After my not-so-hot first time planting experience last season, I decided this time around that buying a lot of seedlings for the garden was both too expensive and too depressing to make it worthwhile. It's expensive because it's about $2.50 to $5 a seedling and you need quite a few to fill up a row. And it's depressing when every seedling you buy wilts and dies within 10 days. Been there, done that. Don't want to do it again.

I decided that I'd buy just a handful of seedlings this time around and try my hand at starting more things from seed. Last time we did great sewing seeds directly in the garden even though many of them died before producing anything. This time I thought we might have even better luck starting the seeds indoors and then transplanting lots of seedlings. It just feels more economical to try it this way and I feel that with our garden there's safety in numbers.

I found a little mini-greenhouse seed starter kit at our local hardware store for under $5, so the price was right for this experiment. The directions were touted as simple enough for a child to understand, so it was perfect. It said to add a special seed starting mix to each little pot, so we filled the little pots with Miracle Grow potting mix because that's all we had on-hand.



Then it said to make a hole and drop two seeds in each hole. I cannot wrap my head around why you put two seeds in one hole. But we followed the directions - reluctantly.



We got a big stash of seeds and read the backs to find out which ones can be started indoors. I let the boys pick out which ones they wanted to try. This involved them in the gardening process and gave me two scapegoats to lay the blame on when this little seed starting gig doesn't work. I can call it the "children's project" and just roll my eyes at their inexperience when nothing sprouts. I'm not above this.



So after packing the little pots, we grabbed a pencil to make holes in each one somewhat close to what the backs of the seed packaging suggested. Then we started planting two seeds in each hole.



There are 12 little sections with 6 pots in each one. We chose 8 different types of seeds - Zucchini, cantaloupe, broccoli, watermelon, cauliflower, okra, tomatoes and lettuce. Then we were left with 4 empty sections. I divided these sections up into 8 rows and decided to see what would happen if we only planted one seed of the above-mentioned types in each pot since the two-seeds-per-pot nonsense bothered me. Is there any question as to why we can't grow things? I doubt everything I read.



I discovered that it's essential to make a little chart in a notebook to record where each seed type was planted. And then it's even more essential to put a sticker somewhere on the seed starter kit showing where at least ONE of the seed types is planted so you can figure out which way up the thing goes when you're referring to your chart in your notebook.

Then we watered them and put the top on them. The directions said to put them under a light, keep the soil wet and wait for life to blossom. So I stuck them on the patio since we have sunlight out there. I can't imagine they'd be better in the house than on the patio, so that's where they're living. We're crossing our fingers that at some point something sprouts.

Tommorow is D-Day, or is it?

We had a nice little surprise in the mail this week. Our seeds arrived from Seed Savers Exchange. I'm quite intrigued with the little packets of seeds, but can't imagine we'll ever get them to grow into real live veggie-producing plants. The seeds came really quickly, much to our surprise, and arrived with a little card saying that Seed Savers Exchange is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving more than 25,000 endangered vegetable varieties. Fancy huh? So now I have the added pressure of making sure these little packets of seeds grow so I don't disappoint the Exchange - I know they won't know...but I have serious guilt issues. Seed guilt. I'll add it to the list.
The boys and I went to Lowe's and Home Depot this morning to buy our seedlings. When I see the cost of seedlings, I see why it pays to start from seeds. But our plan was to do half seeds and half seedlings our first year, which is much less intimidating than an entire garden of seeds. We brought the seedlings home and loaded them into the boys' little red wagon. As we're loading them it started to rain. I panicked and quickly pulled the wagon into the garage so the plants wouldn't get wet. Yeah, I really did that. Then I realized that the seedlings actually need rain, so I ran into the garage and pulled the wagon out... as the rain stopped. I'm a natural, don't you think?
Tomorrow was supposed to be the big planting day. August 1st - our gardening D-Day - the first day of the Fall planting season. But there has been a snafu. We've got the seeds, the seedlings, the garden has been tilled, hoed and left to sit ready for planting. But the rain. Oh the rain. Oh the never-ending rain. If you don't live in FL you don't know that much of FL was once a swamp and the developers came in and built subdivisions on the swamps. So when it rains, our yard returns back to its prehistoric swampy state. Aidan is just shy of 50 lbs and when he stood in the garden today his boot was surrounded by a little pool of water. It makes a fun squishing sound when you walk and it moves like a pit of quicksand. But something tells me that this swampy wet garden isn't the optimal medium for planting seeds and seedlings. Although I can find nothing online that says you can't plant in this - I have a gut feeling that it won't be a good thing. So now what? Do we wait for the rains to stop? That's another month at least. And then we're in the meat of hurricane season. What do we do with this wagon full o' seedlings? I think Farmer B and I need to have a gardening conference tonight and figure out what to do next. This is not in the gardening book.