Sprouts 2013: Lettuce Turnip the Beet

Lettuce!

I also have some dill, red chard, kale, parsley, and I think maybe carrots? growing. I planted my winter garden a little late and my main objective was to grow lettuce. This is my first harvest! I clipped this last week, and already the lettuce grew back in!  I am looking forward to planting my spring garden, but I want wait until the lettuce stops producing.

Sprouts 2012

Between making time to get to the Sunday morning Farmer's Market to buy our seeds and the general busyness of the childfolk, we planted our garden late this year, in May. I planted basil, tomatoes, bell peppers, cantaloupe, cilantro, zucchini, and some other random seeds I can't remember. My garden guru Jenny always gives me her leftover seed, and I know there were some exotic things like Japanese eggplant and some beans.

This is what our garden looked like in July.

I grew one small cantaloupe, but I had a lot of vine and I could see there were different kinds of leaves and melons growing. I had planted Persian melons last year without much success, and either last year or this year I had also planted some baby watermelon seeds that Jenny gave me - I was pleasantly surprised when I my vines turned out to be baby watermelon vine!

 

Initially, the cantaloupe vine was doing well, and I wasn't sure what I was going to get when we cut this melon open, but lo and behold, it was a not-yet-ripe watermelon.  I learned to leave the melons on the vine longer to ripen.  I think the watermelon vine strangled out the cantaloupe vine, because after the initial little cantaloupe we grew, my cantaloupe melons would become about tennis ball-sized, and then kind of just rot on the vine. 

My zucchini plants did well initially and I grew a couple of large zucchinis, but then the zucchinis started rotting on the vine when they were fairly small before I could harvest (fancy word for "pick") them. I think I just don't have space for the giant zucchini plants to thrive, which is a bummer because we eat a ton of zucchini. 

My basil took a while to start growing, and I had pretty much given up on my tomato plants which hadn't produced AT ALL. Same thing with my bell peppers, which I have had good success with the past two years, so I was really disappointed that my bell peppers did not do well. I usually have one potted bell pepper plant that does awesome, and then a garden bed plant that does okay. At that point, the plants are in the back right and they hadn't really grown much at all - they were probably about a food tall.

And then came Fall.

You know, when all the plants are supposed to die?

Well, August and September are when my garden really took off. Here's a photo I took earlier today of my little urban jungle. I love how the vines are overflowing onto the patio and rock. Clearly, I need more space to grow melon. (Someday, someday...)

See the vine spilling out and creeping along the rocks and wall?

Most of what you see here is basil and the overflowing vine is mostly watermelon. We have had about four great watermelons, and still have another three on the vine still growing and ripening. AND I have dozens of cherry tomatoes, although they are all still green. Four have finally turned pink, so I am still holding out hope for a Fall cherry tomato crop. Even though I am actually ready to clear some things out so I can plant a winter garden, I am going to wait out my tomatoes. And I desperately need to make and freeze a ton of pesto so that the basil doesn't go to waste. And this is after two weeks of bringing bag fulls of basil to giveaway to Bible study. Good thing I love me some basil. We have also had about four bell peppers. My potted bell pepper seed never sprouted, but my garden bed bell pepper plants are doing pretty well - I can see the beginnings of a few more bell peppers on the plants now, another reason I want to wait to start the winter garden.

Enjoying our homegrown watermelon

So once my tomatoes and bell peppers settle down, I am ready to clear out and plant my first ever winter garden. I can't wait to grow lettuce!!!! Lettuce and kale and cilantro and parsley - I think those are what I'm most looking forward to. And I want to try onions and carrots, although I don't really have enough space for carrots.

Here's a list of everything you can plant in October, per my garden guru:

 Artichokes, asparagus, beets, broccoli, brussel sprout, cabbage (I like to do bok choy!), carrots, cauliflower, celery, chard, collards, endive, fava beans, kale, kohlrabi, leeks, lettuce, mustard greens, onions, parsnips, peas, radishes, spinach, turnips. Herbs: arugula, anise, cilantro, chives, catnip, dill, fennel, parsley, sage, summer savory. Flower: zinnias and sweet peas.

And my other gardening friends recommended urbangardener.com

Someday maybe I will live in a big farmhouse and have giant garden beds and chickens and a cow who sticks her head in my kitchen window in the morning, but until then, I love my little backyard urban jungle.

8:38 pm

39 weeks 1 day at 8:38 pm...

I'm just saying, officially late

(at least, according to his excited-to-meet-him-mama's expectations)

:)

Also, turns out that this

was a melon after all!

It looked and tasted suspiciously like a cantaloupe.....

Sprouts 2011

So we did do a garden again this year, despite the lack of blogging about it thus far. But posting it all now is more fun, because you can see the development over the months all at once, right? (Click here & here to see my gardening adventure last year.)

For me, gardening is an area of my life that is all freestyle - I am lucky to have my own personal gardening guru, my friend Jenny, who is in the midst of blogging her Bountiful and Bountifail gardening series right now, and who gives me detailed, well-researched responses and action plans to all my gardening questions, even though she knows I will only do about 1/4 of what she recommends. Emailing Jenny is generally the extent of my research. I bought my seeds from her seed lady at the Farmer's Market this year (Westwind Seeds - when you live in Southern Arizona, you have to make sure you have breeds that are designed for our climate) and then Jenny also gave me a bunch of seeds she had leftover from her garden. I tried to follow Jenny's instructions to sprout my seeds indoors in a warm, damp area, I really did - we had egg cartons on our master bathroom counter and a couple of pots in our stairwell for weeks (although later Jenny pointed out that I was supposed to do that for a couple months - I had totally missed that in the instructions, even though it was there in black and white when I went back and reread). Somehow I still found myself dumping the egg carton, sans any sprouts, into an empty area of the garden come late March and shrugging my shoulders. I'm still not sure exactly what's growing in that little plot (it's front and center) - I remember some eggplant, some sugar baby watermelons and maybe some squash in the mix I think. But I kind of like it this way. It's all a surprise!

Some things that I do know are growing are our mint and parsley plants that survived from last year. Other than those plants and one tomato plant, everything else in the main garden plot is grown from seed. We did a lot of tomato seeds, some persian melon seeds (recommended by the seed lady) and some basil seeds. We also got some parsley and cilantro transplants that we potted, but the cilantro didn't live very long, and when you see the latest parsley picture, well, it's not in the prime of life anymore either (although neither is the one from last year, so I'm hoping the parsley's sad appearance is weather/heat-related and not accidental plant-slaughter.) We did a bell pepper plant in a pot again this year, also from seeds (instead of a transplant like last year) and right now there are 9 or 10 bell peppers growing on it! Can't wait for them to get bigger so we can eat them.

BB loves to help us water in the mornings, and is getting better about not just pointing the spray at the empty soil but at the actual plants. He tells me "BB's turn, BB's turn." Yesterday he dropped the hose on the ground spraying straight up and I had set it to stay on so that he just has to point it, and we both got soaked by the spray. I was annoyed for a second and then I realized how perfect it was and I laughed (and peeled our soaked clothes off in the privacy of our kitchen). Usually BB just ends up a little damp because he loves to stick his hands in the spray when I'm watering. I tell him when we're eating tomatoes that we grew from seeds and watered in our own garden (we are finally starting to get a lot of tomatoes at once). I hope he keeps these memories.

April


This is after things had started sprouting a little bit - the front left is the parsley from last year, and the front right is the mint from last year. The back left big plant is our tomato transplant, and all the sprouts around it are tomato seed sprouts. I think the back right sprouts are what I thought were the persian melons...

The parsley and cilantro plants in their heyday

May


Tomatoes from our transplant, ready to go in our salad

June

Seeds sprouted, everything looking lush but not overgrown


The potted plant is the bell pepper plants that finally sprouted and grew (it took a while)

The flat-leaf parsley, still looking good

A basil plant I bought at Trader Joe's before my basil seeds sprouted, and then planted. It looked awesome for a while, but now it is getting really dried out. I think I wasn't supposed to let it flower like that.

July

Our garden, looking overgrown, but this is actually after we put up the trellis, weeded, and thinned out some mint

Our cherry tomato plants on the trellis

Our bell pepper plants, with tons of peppers - the red one was the first. Hoping a few other also turn red!

My sad parsley plant - I have vague memories of someone telling me not to let your herbs stalk, and I have to assume this is what they meant? Still hoping it's just too hot for parsley, not that I did something wrong.


What I thought was a persian melon until I saw this post - guess I will have to just cut it open and see!


Another squash I found growing the other day - the squash vine has spread out amongst the mint (which is almost weed-like!)

Cherry tomatoes ripening on the counter, yum.

Mint leaves drying in the oven - J requested some dried mint leaves to make tea, so today (spurred by a burst of manic energy - and yes, I am definitely wondering if this is an indication of impending labor?) I tried two different drying techniques, as well as read that we can just use the fresh mint directly for tea. I also started making some mint syrup that Jenny had mentioned, which I hope to put in lemonade, iced tea, or maybe even coffee. Jenny puts it in her water, which sounds so refreshing in this heat! I'm really hoping the syrup comes out because I've gotta find a use for all of this mint!

So that's the tour of this year's garden!

Sprouts: First Fruits

Our potted yellow bell pepper plant is the flourishing member of our garden family, and last week J spotted our first little pepper among the leaves and little white blooms.

Do you see it? Close up!
And here it is just 3 days later - so much bigger already!


Here you can see the other two bell pepper plants, which are no where near as tall and leafy as the potted plant is.Up against the back wall you can see our 5 zucchini plants that grew from seeds! SEEDS!

And here is our very first tomato!

BB comes outside with me to water the garden in the morning - he walks in the grass and on the rocks (crazy boy!) and likes to dig his fingers in the soil while I talk to him about what plants are what and show him the strawberries growing or the first tomato. Looking forward to more fruits of our labor!

Sprouts

J and I made a garden! I really wanted to experiment with growing food in a garden, but I was anxious that we would put the money into the project, and then I would fail, and all the money would be wasted.
Failure. A fear that weaves it's way in and out of my life fairly consistently and gave me a slight panic attack at Lowe's as J was ready to purchase the blocks for the garden wall (here in AZ, you have more success with gardening if you build up, due to the caliche). As I ran out of Lowe's he had to explain to the workers that he would have come back for the blocks that they were about to load into our Element "because the baby needs to go home". The baby being me, of course. I just get nervous with commitment, especially commitment that involves time and money and possible failure.

BUT I really wanted a garden and J knew that, so once he discovered that my hesitance was all centered around my fear of the ominous failure, he pointed out that it was okay if I failed because we could try again next year or put flowers in the garden, and also that spending money is what is going to get the country out of a recession (in response to "should we really be spending money on this right now?") - what calm, sensible points and suggestions. And then he dropped me and BB off and went back to Lowe's to get the blocks. And yes, I know how lucky I am.

Well after that little window into my psychosis, here are some photos of the process. I loved going to Home Depot and picking out plants that are things that I actually use when I cook, like basil and parsley and tomatoes and bell peppers!

And I love going out and watering each morning. And today I L-O-V-E-D seeing little sprouts in place of the empty soil where we had embedded zucchini and cucumber seeds. Leaves popping out of the ground where there was emptiness! Did you all know that plants grow from seeds? Little bitty seeds? They turn into plants, people! Revelation!
(Yes, I did go to elementary school, but it's a magical thing to be a part of!)

SEEDS!

SEEDS, people!

I am already imagining BB monitoring the growth of the plants and marveling over the leaves and vegetables that bloom from fingernail-sized promises we bury in the ground. My nieces have already taken turns helping me water. I love the learning I am imagining taking place in all of their little minds, and the wonder happening in mine.