March 5, 2012

Garden Update #1

It’s been about a week since planting the backyard garden and it’s doing so well I decided to start some summer squash,  spinach, lettuce, and green beans. I started them all inside again until they sprout. When Matt saw them he called them my “army” of garden pots! Maybe they’ll grow into my own personal plant army soon! Lettuce cannon anyone?

There’s so much going on in those little pots above, two rows of squash, a row of spinach, and a row of green beans. The two pots on the left are lettuce and basil. The bottom right square is full of peppers, and zucchini. Hopefully they all start sprouting soon and we will have a full garden of veggies soon. The time line for veggies varies so widely, the packages say 7-10 days to sprout, but in my researching I’ve found it could take longer. I’ll just be over here waiting and crossing my fingers for successful sprouts.

Our two avocado seeds are still floating in their water cups. We did two because apparently not all seeds will produce a plant, so we wanted to up our chances. Some sites said to remove the skin from the seeds so we removed the skin from one and left the skin on the other and just scraped the bottom a little. I’ll be sure to keep you updated on our little experiment.

 

 

With all the impending sprouts hanging out in our living room that will soon need a home outside it was time to get to work expanding the backyard garden. Some of my earlier sprouts of tomatoes and onions were getting too big for my inside pots. It was time to move them outside, but I had a specific plan to lay out the garden outside including which plants I wanted to put together. I didn’t want to put the tomatoes and onions together with the squash because squash grows in a vine and needs lots of room to spread out.
Step one is always to clear the ground where you want to place your garden You don’t want to plant on top of grass and weeds because they’ll just keep growing under there and eventually suffocated you garden you worked so hard to plant. I choose the section right next to my already established box of squash. Clearing the grass and weeds isn’t easy but if you have a rototiller it makes it 100 times faster. I inherited one from my grandpa and it has come in handy more times than I can count. I pieced together my next square (note one good thing about putting the boxes next to each other is that they share one side to it will cut down on the amount of boxes you will have to buy!) and filled it up with fresh garden/veggie soil. There are lots of choices of soil you could choose from, but I like the specified veggie soil because it has added food and vitamins that help the plants grow. Now you’re ready to transplant you sprouts to their permanent home. I always make sure to use the paper cups to start seeds because all you have to do is tear the bottom a little and plop them down into the soil. It’s less traumatic for the plant that way. Make sure to be careful about how many seeds you place in each cup though, I over did it and the onions were all bunched. I had to carefully split one of the pots into two, and since the sprouts weren’t very strong I may had accidentally traumatized them unnecessarily.  After that I left the other one alone, just in case, I didn’t want to ruin all of them. It took about an hour to set everything up and transplant the tomatoes and onions. We now have two garden squares in our growing backyard garden.

 

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