Fail

 

More like Epic Fail.  Most of my tomato seedlings that seemed so happy and healthy after germination have slowly withered away to something pathetic and sickly.  Some have yellowing leaves.  Others have leaves that just shriveled up and died.  There are also some with leaves that have some darker spots, like they are diseased.  But none of them really grew after about 3-4 weeks.  I'm not really sure what killed them.  Maybe they didn't like the Jiffy peat pots that they got transplanted into after about 3 weeks.  Or maybe we watered too much.  Or too little.  Or maybe our soil mix was bad.  Or maybe our grow light wasn't good enough.  Or maybe they caught some horrible fungal or bacterial disease.

There are just too many variables here and I honestly don't know what caused most of my seedlings to die, or at least get very close to dying.  I did notice that some of the pots had a few roots showing through the bottom hole, but when I peeled off the peat pot, it didn't look like the seedlings were rootbound at all.

As a last, desperate measure, I picked out most of the better looking ones (still not all that much better than the one pictured above) and transplanted them into the garden last weekend.  I don't have high hopes for their survival because they are all still too small and the outdoor weather is still too rainy and cold.   Still, I'm hoping that natural sunlight and raised beds can work some miracles here.

If not, then I'll just have to go buy (gasp!) some transplants from the store later this month.

Ugh, if there is such a thing as mass seedling failure induced depression, I think I have it.  It's really sad to see all these dying seedlings.  It makes me especially sad to think about how so many of these seedlings were from seeds shared by other generous garden bloggers - I had such high hopes for these seeds to grow into healthy vegetable plants!

5/2 Harvest - Green Garlic

I harvested some green garlic and overwintered parsley this weekend.

Green garlic, as I've only just recently learned, is just immature (young) garlic that looks like an overgrown scallion or green onion.  When I first read about it, I was really curious to try it myself, but I hesitated to harvest any because we only planted 22 garlic cloves last fall and I didn't really want to sacrifice any of them before the garlic bulbs matured.

But this weekend, I noticed that some of the garlic greens (leaves) had already bent and broken on their own, either because they were getting too big or because it's just been too windy/rainy in Indiana the last several weeks.  I suspect both, actually.  Anyway, so I thought, well, if some of these leaves are already damaged, then I won't hurt any by harvesting some, right?  So I snipped a few leaves just below the damage.  In case you're wondering, green garlic really does smell just like fresh garlic! 

I chopped up my first green garlic harvest into small pieces and used them as one of the toppings for our homemade pizza this weekend.  The green garlic flavor was very subtle, much less than garlic, but we enjoyed it all the same.  I wondered if the white part (immature bulb) of green garlic would taste similar, but I won't know until I actually pull a whole plant out.  Hmm, I probably should try it next week, just to see if it's worth planting a lot more garlic next year to harvest some as green garlic and some as fully mature garlic bulbs.

Happy Harvest Monday!

Building a fence to keep pe(s)ts out

When Keith and I planned our vegetable garden expansion for this year with new raised garden beds, one of the things on the To Do list was to build a new fence to protect our vegetable garden from pets (our two dogs) and pests (wild bunnies that get into our back/side yard by squeezing and/or digging their way in under the outer backyard fence).  We considered various materials for the fence - chicken wire (ugly), wrought-iron fence (holes too big), pine, etc. - and eventually decided to go with pressure-treated pine to match the backyard fence, but 4 feet high instead of 6 feet.  We would have actually preferred it to be even shorter (3 feet), but the boards came in 4-foot lengths and we didn't want to spend the time/energy to trim a foot off each board.

It's been a slow project due to our limited free time and one too many rainy days so far this spring, but we finally completed the project last weekend.

First, Keith used a post hole digger to dig holes deep enough for fence posts.  I tried to help, but I was no match for the hard clay/rocky soil in our yard. 

We then used a piece of string as a guide to evenly place the fence posts.  It was a bit tricky because this side of the garden is at a slope (as you can clearly see with the raised boxes).  Once the posts were lined up, we filled the holes with concrete mix.

Several hours later (or maybe the next day, I can't remember now), this is how it looked.

 

Now they were ready for the next step.  I think we did this another week or two later.  I know because I can see that sugar snap peas have all fully sprouted in this picture.

Before we put up the fence boards, we laid down chicken wire on the ground (and secured them with landscape fabric pins) so that bunnies can't dig under the fence to get into the garden.  We'll eventually put some soil over it so most (if not all) of it will be hidden under the soil.  Maybe I'll even try to grow some groundcover-type of plants or flowers over it to make it look a bit nicer.  For now, we're satisfied with its functional value.

And here it is, the finished garden fence with a gate in the middle.  We even have a small piece of garden art.

My co-worker Jamie gave this to me last year when she left our project.  It just makes me smile every time I look at it on my way into our new vegetable garden area.

4/25 Harvest - Pea Shoots

Our peas are growing well enough that I felt that it would be safe to harvest some young pea shoots this weekend.  This would have been totally unthinkable last year, when what few pea seedlings I had constantly struggled against the hot weather (in both spring and fall!), cutworms and bunny attacks. 

Since this was my first time harvesting pea shoots, I wanted to be careful, just in case it somehow negatively affected the future growth of these plants.  I am, after all, growing them more for peas and not for shoots.  For this trial run, I snipped off the top 3-4 inches of just a few plants.  I'll go back and inspect the cut plants next week and see if they are still continuing to grow and branching off from leaf nodes below the cut tip, like they are supposed to.

I also snipped off some overwintered basil to make pizza and breadsticks (garlic basil).  Basil grew fast and furious in our garden last year to a point where I got tired of harvesting and processing it.  But having (far) less of it this winter has made me appreciate it more in the kitchen. 

I forgot to take pictures of the finished products, but here is one picture of my first attempt at garlic basil breadsticks just before they were popped in the oven.  They turned out pretty tasty, although I think I will try upping the amount of both garlic and basil next time.

Check out Harvest Monday to see what other gardeners are harvesting!

Garden Tour - Mid April

The Indiana garden is still looking pretty bare and naked, but here's a quick tour.  I thought I would be a lot more organized and plan/re-plan where everything was going to be planted down to the last square foot, but actually, I really just kind of slacked off this winter.  I have loose ideas of where I want things to grow, but in reality, I've just been sowing seeds where there is empty space, deciding locations and space allocations of each vegetable on the fly. 

Right Side: In the first (bottom) bed, we have three rows of peas (several varieties of sugar snap peas and snow peas).  These peas took about two weeks to germinate after mid-March sowing, but they have been growing really well since then.  Germination was good for the most part, except for that empty patch you see in the middle row, about 3 feet down.  I don't know what happened there, but it looks like about 4-5 peas didn't germinate or got eaten by a mysterious pest.

The rest of this pea bed has been sown with sugarloaf chicory, china choy, purple top turnip, spinach, lettuce, and swiss chard.  They are difficult to see in this picture, but most of them have germinated and have started growing.  Hopefully all the rain forecasted for this week will help with the growing process.

The second (middle) bed currently has some carrots and onions.  The rest of that bed and the third (top) bed will be planted with many different kinds of tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and okra, all currently growing indoors under lights.

Here's a close-up of the healthy pea seedlings, about 2 weeks after germination.  After two dismal pea growing attempts last year (spring and fall), it makes me so happy to see these healthy seedlings, all 12 feet of them.  We need to get the trellis up asap in the next week or two, since these peas look like they are ready to put on some height.

Left Side: The first (bottom) bed has all sorts of teeny tiny seedlings that recently germinated and are peeking their heads out of the soil.  You can hardly see them in this picture, but in person, this whole bed is full of new sprouts consisting of cilantro, parsley, dill, all sorts of lettuce, arugula, turnip, beet, chard, radish, spinach, and a few more peas. 

The second (middle) bed has garlic, parsnip, onion, chives, bok choy, tatsoi, Red Russian Kale, Dwarf Blue Curled Kale, mizuna, Seven Top turnip, radish, carrots and broccoli.  I probably could have started a lot of these indoors, but I was lazy and didn't want to plan that far in advance.  So all of my spring vegetables were  directly sown outside, except for broccoli.

The third (top) bed is currently empty, but will be planted with zucchini, winter squash, cucumbers, melons, and beans.  I guess I will also be rotating beans into the other beds with peas and other cool weather veggies once they start to bolt/die this summer.

This is a close up of a section of the left middle bed, where I transplanted very small broccoli seedlings last weekend.  Looks like I'm growing plastic bottles here.  I wanted to see if these tiny broccoli seedlings would survive outside (I still have a few more seedlings growing under lights, just in case), but it was really cold and windy last weekend, so I wanted to give them a little extra protection.

I sowed the broccoli seeds indoors under lights about three weeks ago, and I think they took a little less than 1 week to germinate, so these seedlings are about two weeks old in this picture.

There's still lots of work left to be done in this area.  We have to finish building the inside fence (to completely fence off this area from dogs and bunnies) and put up vertical support for all the tall-growing vegetables.  Then I would like to clean up the rest of this garden area, get some of the remaining in-ground weeds under control and figure out where I can plant some flowers.  As the weather warms up in May, I'll also have to transplant or direct sow warm weather vegetables (solanums and cucurbits) in the remaining three raised beds.  We also have a small in-ground side garden on the east side of the house (this main garden area is on the south side of the house) that I need to clean up, since it's just been left alone with some inadvertently overwintered vegetables and herbs.

Oof, just thinking about these upcoming garden tasks makes me want to take a long nap!

4/18 Harvest - Overwintered Indiana Veggies

A few of the Red Russian Kale, tatsoi and bok choy plants actually survived the Indiana winter in our side garden without being protected at all .  Actually, they were more like abandoned and forgotten, but the important thing is that they survived!  Unfortunately, this "survival" was very short lived, since there were only about 2-3 weeks between my noticing the new growth on the stumps of plants leftover from last fall and my discovery this weekend that they were all bolting.

I harvested most of them (there were not that many to begin with), except for a few that I'm going to leave alone in my attempt to collect seeds from them.  The bok choy and tatsoi looked like their leaves were changing shape (became more elongated).

I told Keith that I wanted to toss them in the salad, to which he scrunched up his face and said "can't we just have normal salad like normal people?"  Ha.  Not if you're going to marry a newbie gardener who wants to eat everything that will grow in the vegetable garden!  I think he was scared by the flowers.

This was the flowering bok choy (or tatsoi, I couldn't really tell with the elongated leaves).

Here's the Red Russian Kale bolting.  Only two plants survived in the side garden, so I harvested one and left the other one alone to go to seed.

I washed and trimmed all the edible leaves (some of the outer leaf stems were starting to look a little squishy).  I didn't weigh the harvest, but I would guess they totaled a few ounces.  Instead of tossing them in the salad, I made a quick stir fry with some olive oil, a dash of soy sauce and some garlic powder (we didn't have any garlic).  There was barely enough for us to each have a few bites as a snack, but at least we got to eat something tasty that we grew this week, and it made me happy.

Oh, here is a little handful of overwintered parsley and cilantro that also came from the side garden. I meant to toss these in the salad, too, but in the process of discovering and dealing with the bolted hardy greens, the salad making plans got forgotten.

Tomorrow, I will post some pictures from our main garden.  With all the rain we had last week, the peas are really starting to take off.  I have 12 feet of peas and more peas growing!

Happy Harvest Monday!

Rosemary from Seed - Update

I started growing some rosemary from seed last May.  The first four months of excruciatingly slow growth were described here.  Since then, we've taken the low maintenance approach of just ignoring it altogether except watering once every other week or so.  Apparently the rosemary likes it that way, because it's still growing.  It's not exactly growing fast, but it's growing.

Rosemary on April 2, 2011 (at about 10 1/2 months)

We took this picture with the rosemary on the kitchen counter right next to the wall light switch for size comparison.  That tall stem standing straight up is actually leaning up against a wooden craft stick for support.  It looks like the rosemary is starting to branch out (the beginning of a tiny little rosemary bush??), so maybe it's time to transfer it to a bigger container.