Garden Expansion

This post was actually prompted by the husband, who as soon as we were done with planting and photographing this afternoon said "you're gonna write a post about this right?" In all fairness to him, he was pretty instrumental in this next step for our little garden. It expanded rather nicely today. 

You can see that my seedling staging ground is mostly empty now, replaced with the houseplants that were enjoying the outdoor weather until it hit 90 degrees the last two days. The jade was starting to look sunburned unfortunately, so it'll need to spend a few days inside and then only be placed in partial sun when it gets back out.

Here I am watering things after we were done planting. Our army of potted plants is growing, with a few more herbs added to the collection today and the first fruits of the summer. One is a small tray of strawberries that just looked too lovely to pass up, and the other was a splurge purchase: I bought the last blackberry plant at the garden center. In the picture above, though, I'm giving the zucchini some attention, as they started blooming this week and need a little extra oomph.

You're probably also curious about that pile of wood and branches. Our landlords live close to us and we share a gravel lot behind the houses. They recently took down a dead pine tree, and made huge piles of the branches out back. We took a few stumps as "seats" but I kept staring and staring at the branches thinking they were going to be a huge waste. And then I realized that very soon I'm going to need about 10 trellises to support tomatoes and peas and blackberries. So what I'm going to do is set up small tripods using these branches and make rows with twine for the plants to support themselves. It may be a disaster, it may be awesome. We'll see!

The big news of the weekend though was the new herb planter that the husband made for us. It's got three tiers though it's open all the way through. I put a few empty soda bottles at the bottom to decrease the volume of soil (and thus the heaviness), but hopefully everything will have enough space. It's hard to see but up top is the rosemary plant, on the second tier is the pineapple sage and new lavender and thyme plants. At the bottom are a few of the basil plants, testing out whether they're hardy enough to move outside. The rest are still inside so I can transition them a little more gently. To the left of the planter you can see the blackberry bush, and a bit of one of the zucchini plants looking lush. 

Ok, the above is a slightly odd picture. But before you think I'm a lunatic, hear me out about the kitty litter buckets. I have a lot of tomatoes to be growing in a container garden, and I've been a little stuck with finding them good pots to grow in. And then I realized that I have lots of leftover kitty litter buckets, and that these make perfect pots if you drill holes in the bottom. I further realized that they come ready-made with handles, and that I could experiment with keeping tomatoes upside-down, utilizing vertical space. So we cut 2-inch holes in the bottom, stuck the plants upside-down in them, secured them with a bit of newspaper, and then filled them up with soil.

But, having read online about how to do this sort of thing, most people recommend that you plant something up top as well. So I've added a few colorful flowers to attract pollinators. They'll grow up and over the sides pretty soon, and hopefully won't compete too much with the tomato at the bottom. Within a few days I anticipate the tomatoes flipping their leaves around and then continuing their grand progress using gravity.

One set of my plants isn't doing so well though, and that's the broccoli. Something's decided that the leaves are the perfect place for some baby insects to hang out, and lots of them. Luckily I'm not growing the broccoli for their leaves, but it's still not going to be healthy for the plants to lose their primary method of energy production.

Here's a close-up of the back of a leaf, with three little wrigglers hanging out and chomping on my broccoli. And a couple more eggs. I'll have to do some research and figure out what they are (unless one of you knows), and then decide whether or not I'm going to try to get rid of them. I don't like the idea, but I also don't want to lose my plants.

We'll keep taking photos as things grow!

- Cait

Plants Glorious Plants

It's a lazy Saturday afternoon, and I thought I'd share an update on all those plants I started in mid-March. There have been a few failures, but there's also a decent amount of success for my first time starting things from seeds and transitioning them outside. 

Here's the spread outside, all placed in a little clump right now. There was a nasty thunderstorm earlier this week and I moved all the plants under the eaves of the house to the best of my ability. They still got really swamped, but they're all still standing!

Here's the tomatoes. There are nine of them right now, all moved to their own pots last week. They really perked up without the intraspecific competition, but now I need bigger pots rather quickly, and trellises.

The zucchini! These have been my biggest failure in my opinion, as I started with 18 sprouts and now only have 4 plants. But these four look great, and they each have about a dozen buds on them already.

The broccoli, which I'm probably most excited and most worried about. Their stalks are very thin, and they took the worst beating in the storm. When I got up in the morning, half of them were entirely underwater, which I tried to dump, but their soil is still very compacted. All five of them are still alive though, so maybe they're hardier than I think.

This might look funny, but I'm also keeping dandelions in a few pots as food for my lizard. Ironically, these were the only pots I needed to weed today.

Here's a (really bad) picture of the only two houseplants I keep. The jade plant is from the historic house I worked at in California, and the purple guy is from the Beloit College greenhouse. Parts of that plant live in five states that I know of off the top of my head (Illinois, Wisconsin, New York, California, and I think Virginia). They're happy to be outside after the winter.

Inside, I still have a few little guys in pots, just upgraded today from their seedling trays. I have seven pots of basil, probably 4-5 plants in each pot. There will be delicious pasta dishes all summer long.

You can't see these very well as they're still the smallest in my little green menagerie, but on the right are a few lavender seedlings and on the left are sensitive plants. I wasn't sure about transplanting the lavender, it's grown so slowly, and I'm not very confident about them making it to bloom. The sensitive plants are looking pretty good, but haven't grown much in the last few weeks. I'm planning to bring a few to work for kids to poke at, and I'll keep 2-3 for myself.

The husband brought home a couple of plants for me a few days ago too! It was funny, I rubbed the leaves first to smell before reading the labels. This one confused the heck out of me, and it turned out it's a Pineapple Sage, which indeed smells like the fruit.

This one's a more normal rosemary, but will still be delicious on meat this summer. I need to get both of these into new pots soon, which will mean a trip to the store. 

That's my plant update for this week! I'll keep taking photos as they grow, and hopefully bloom and fruit!