Updated Photos of the Garden

I purchased this lavender plant a few weeks ago from the Hub City Farmer's Market.  It's grown a lot since I potted it and it smells wonderful!  In the background is my favorite little blue chair I got from an antique store/ flea market.

I just purchased this transplant last week from a guy people call "The Professor".  He grows and sells transplants and fresh veggies from home for a killer price! Most of the transplants are $1 and his veggies are cheaper then at the grocery store.  You can even pick a gallon of blackberries for only $10- that's only $2 a pint!  This particular bell pepper will actually be purple when fully grown!  The Professor had some already full grown peppers and they are beautiful!

This is a very small sampling of our blackberries!  I can probably pick 2-4 cups a day of berries right now, if I had time, and there are just as many red berries that will be ripening soon.  It's been great having the huge production this year.  I've made a few desserts with them and have been putting them in my salads for lunch frequently.  The best part is being able to "gift" freshly picked blackberries to friends and family.  I can even show them the little cuts I got on my hands from the thorns from picking their berries that morning. That's a labor of love!

Figs in waiting!  Our fig tree has loads of unripened figs just soaking up the sun and waiting for their time to shine!  We may put some kind of netting or a fake owl in the tree to deter birds from eating the sweet fruits.

A peak at the front beds of the house.  You can see Frank the Frog defending the garden, the varigated liriope, the nandina bushes, and the newest addition to the garden, caladiums! 

Front to back: Garlic chives, Roma tomato plant in wire hoop, jalapeno plant, a very dry rain barrel, wood pile.

The tomato plant is hard to see behind the freshly planted, sprawling chives but the plants are doing very well! 

Green beans! This is one of several plants producing beans.  I will be snapping those suckers off today and preparing a delightfully fresh dish with them! 

Tomatoes and Peppers

         Its been a few weeks since I invested a little time and energy into the garden.  Mothers day worked out to allow for free time during the day, so I took full advantage of my time and the beautiful day and tended to the garden.  The veggies are looking a lot better since I added the Miracle Gro a couple of weeks ago but I still wanted to add a little top soil under each plant to reduce the amount of compost.  This, as you can imagine, was somewhat time consuming to achieve.  The black weed paper was one obstacle I had to overcome.  I thoroughly enjoy not having to pick weeds (yet) out of the garden thanks to the paper so it was important that I didn't rip the paper too much and have gapping holes.  The other concern is obvious: the plants are rooted in their location and I didn't want to uproot them.  With painstaking care, I added enough topsoil to make myself feel better and offer a little incentive to the plants to continue growing.  I did, of course, rip a huge hole in the black paper in one area of the garden but, ah, what's a girl to do!

Roma Tomatoes
(The variety I am growing) 

        I also transplanted my three tomato plants and a banana pepper plant.  I had previously moved the tomato plant seedlings to clay pots outdoors to give each plant more room to grow.  The plants quickly became larger transplants and looked great.  When I finally moved them to the garden I was amazed at the speed in which the roots grew.  It seems like the roots must have been out of room to grow a week or two ago without my realizing it.  I carefully transplanted the four plants into a lovely mixture of top soil, native soil, and compost.  Hopefully, delicious ripened tomatoes and peppers will make it to my table soon!

         The green bean stalks are starting to flower and the fig tree is starting to produce figs (not yet ripe).  I plan to get a camera soon so that I can share photos of whats going on.  We already have a camera but its designated for the business since Justin takes a lot of pictures for work.  My last little project yesterday was one of inspiration rather than a "to do".  More on that for my next post!

A Little Left of Well

I've been sick for nearly two weeks now so it's been a little while since my last post.  On top of that, the garden is struggling and hanging on for dear life due to some mysterious cause.  The leaves of the plants were turning yellow instead of a bright and happy green and it seemed that the plants' growth was stunted but there were no bugs to be seen and I don't suspect any type of disease.  We have a few hypotheses for the culprit: too much watering, not enough watering, high levels of chlorination in our water, too much compost, the garden gods are against us.  After talking it over with a few family members that garden and are much more skilled than I, we decided to get Miracle Gro for vegetables (which I was mildly saddened to have to purchase) and 200 ft of extra hose so that we can better water our garden.

Side note on the watering situation: The garden is about 200 ft from our outside source of water.  We have a rain barrel that we put out a couple of months ago with the intent of watering the garden with rain water but it has rained exactly 1 time since we put it out, so no watering from the rain barrel yet.  I was lugging jugs of water to water the veggies until today.  (See why I blame the garden gods?  One dose of rain in two months, really?  I guess the garden gods forgot the phrase, "April showers, bring May flowers".)  Ok, back to the story.

This 200 ft. of hose just made my life and my garden so much better.  I expect that with the Miracle Gro, the new found source of water, and the Alaska Fish Fertilizer we have been using, our garden will recover in no time.

Since I haven't been out in the yard for about a week now because of my sickness, I was delightfully surprised by our blackberry bush.  Four cups of plump blackberries were ready for the picking and literally hundreds of red berries are patiently waiting to turn black.  I doused the bush with water (thanks to my new hoses) to encourage nice plump berry production.

For the first time back in the garden in a week, it felt really nice to be out there and feel like I was being productive with the garden.  I still need to transplant our tomato plants which look great and I need to pot the lavender transplant I bought from the farmers market.  Those thing will have to wait until Monday though, because Festival International is this weekend and plenty of good music, friends, and food are awaiting!

Harvest!

Ok, so maybe the title is a bit exaggerated!  I'll explain.  I have a morning routine of checking on and watering my front beds and my vegetable garden in the back.  I particularly love doing it right now because its still a bit chilly (at least for this Southern girl) at 7:00 am in the shade.  To get to my garden I have to walk through about a 1/4 acre of shade and then get the pleasure of being kissed by the morning sun when I make it to the garden.  We chose a spot in the yard for the garden that gets plenty of sun!  Presently, its a nice little routine but soon enough it will be hot and humid at 7 am, so I'll enjoy this weather while it last.  In the evening, I have a similar routine: check on vegetables, check on fig tree, check on pear tree, and check on blackberry bush.

While, there isn't much change each day I enjoy seeing the process of growth for the different fruits and vegetables.  The pear tree has budding pears that are only about an inch long and half an inch wide.  Because we haven't had a good rainfall in over a month, they have remained that size for a while.  The fig tree's leaves are big and beautiful but figs haven't started growing yet.  The blackberry bush on the other hand, started producing red berries last week so I have anxiously been awaiting the change from red to black each day.  Our bush was actually already here when we purchased our home.  At that time, it was a small little bush that wasn't terribly noticeable.  In the two and a half years that we have lived her, the bush (left to its own devices) exploded in size.  It is now about twelve to fourteen feet long and at its thickest point about eight foot wide.  Technically, its not a bush but individual stalks that easily propagate without any assistance (or approval) from this homeowner.  The size is a bit of a problem that I am trying to resolve, not so much because of the amount of space it takes up (we have a whole acre of property) but its impossible to access the entire bush and harvest it.

All of these details aside, I did my evening ritual of observations, and to my delight 5 whole blackberries were ready for the pickin'.  Yup, just five in what will eventually be hundreds by the end of the season.  I was a little surprised because I guessed a few would be ready this weekend at the earliest.  I ate a couple right off of the stalk and saved the others for my husband.  Harvesting, even if only a few blackberries, is especially wonderful when its just a gift from Mother Nature and I didn't have to invest any time or energy into producing this delicious treat!

Endless Questions

Yesterday I spent a little time focusing on my garden and preparing for future gardens as well.  I did simple things like watering the garden and trimming back the black weed paper where needed.  I closely inspected each plant to look for any early signs of disease or insects.  This is my first rodeo so I'm not looking to lose all hope for a successful production because I didn't catch a few insects in time.  Through my reading, it seems like the real threat for disease and insects come a little later though, around when the plants are blooming and flowering.  It was also finally time to transplant my tomato plants to pots (with the final destination to be the garden).  I planted the tomatoes indoors on March 13th...a little shy of a month ago.  Tomato transplants take about 8- 10 weeks before they are ready for the garden, thus, growing plants from seeds is definitely not instantaneous gratification but rather an exercise in patience. 

4 week old tomato seedlings 

 I also considered what I want to do in the future with our garden.  What do I want to grow? When do I need to germinate seeds to grow them? Do I have enough space in our current garden?  Do I even want to keep the current garden as it is or change the layout? With all of these questions swirling in my head, I sat down with a couple of books on veggie gardening and a printed out calendar of the next year and a half.  I simply put on the calendar when I needed to plant transplants in the garden for the different vegetables I want to grow.  Then I counted backwards to the number of weeks it takes the seeds to become viable transplants and I logged that date too.  Now that I know the "when" for my future produce, I can focus my attention on other questions.

Snap bean (front) and zucchini (back)
4/6/2011

As a new gardener, without much knowledge there are so many questions to answer.  It seems like just answering one question leads to even more questions.  For me, tackling one question at a time makes things more manageable!  I've already learned a few things I did "wrong" with the current garden.  Some of the herbs I planted, would probably do better growing in pots for a while then being moved out to the garden.  I probably planted my carrots to early too.  Certain seeds I started indoors should have been directly seeded into the garden.  To make sure I learn from these missteps, I keep a log documenting dates, types of plants, things learned, etc. in a notebook in order to reference the information when I start my next crop.  For now, I'll hope that Mother Nature works her magic with what I've given here!

Hope!

We transplanted a few veggies that were begging for more space and a spot of their on.  In the picture you can see a few of our snap bean transplants (about 2.5 inches tall), squash and zucchini transplants in the background, and a rosemary plant in the furthest point in the background.  A jalapeño plant and carrot seedlings are not shown and the rest of our crops will be planted as soon as the seedlings are ready for their new, big, brave world!  


Since this is our first joint garden and our first time growing plants from seeds, I am anxious to see the results and fruits of our labor but I am also relishing in the hope offered by these mini versions.  A couple of the seedlings, particularly some of the snap beans, may not make it to production but if even one of these plants produces, the waiting and nurturing will be worth it.  It may seem silly that something as simple as a 2nd grade science project, like planting a seed in a cup, can cause a grown adult so much excitement, but it does and I'm okay with that.  Lucky for me (and my husband), I don't need expensive, fancy jewelry to get excited...just a little seed to sprout and offer its own version of hope!  

Gardening 101

Our first "real" garden: 25 by 6 ft.

Justin (my husband) and I recently decided to really try our hands at vegetable gardening.  We both are interested in living a more self- sustainable life style and recognize that one of the first ways to do that is through growing your own food.  While we have done a rather small garden once in the past, we are both pretty green to growing a larger size garden started with just seeds.  I plan to track our gardens progress on my blog so that I can learn from our mistakes and so that others trying to grow veggies in South Louisiana will be able to learn from our mistakes and successes- or at the very least point and laugh at our meager attempts. :)

The picture above is the result of many hours of work including multiple tillings of uncultivated land, shoveling yards of free compost from our local consolidated government,  and, finally forming 3 rows and covering with a weed barrier.  We are attempting to grow zucchini, squash, tomatoes, snap beans, carrots, rosemary, basil, oregano, bell peppers, and jalapeños.

After hours of hard work in the hot sun I enjoyed the cool afternoon breeze that only Spring can offer by reading a book from the library and relaxing on an outdoor blanket given to me by a friend.