Tah dah! Summer garden is in!

I finally got around to planting my garden yesterday. Even though I hope to sell the house over the next few months, I figured I should at least make the garden look nice. I'm going to try to sell without removing it, hopefully someone will like it.

The garden was a pretty big mess, since last fall I was too busy with my 11 month old son to do any cleaning up, and unfortunately my husband has a brown thumb. So as you can see below, the before pic is pretty ugly! But I'm happy with the after pic, even though I have a few more finishing touches to complete (like fixing the fence). You can't see much b/c they're still all seedlings or seeds, but you get the idea. The entire list of what I planted is on the 2012 garden plan tab.

 Before

After

Now the other side of the yard was an even bigger mess. I'm embarrassed to show this before pic, but I guess at least I had a decent excuse. The good news is a month or so ago I removed everything and replaced it with grass seed. That side of the yard was just too hard to maintain, the paths grew so many weeds and it never really got enough sun. So even if I wasn't selling the home, I'd decided last year to remove it. I didn't really believe one little bag of grass seed would fix it, but lo and behold it came out great! I can't get over how you can't even tell there was a garden there 2 months ago.

I guess that is a testament to the benefits of concrete block gardening. One of the reasons I originally chose them was so I could move them if needed (low cost being the other reason). I was really happy to find out that they truly were easy to take apart.

  Before - beds 1 and 2.

After!

Second Week of March Update

I'm posting from outside in the garden right now!! Haha gotta love technology.

We put in two new raised beds on the other side of the yard today! I am so happy, I can hardly believe we managed to get it all done. It was a lot of work, but not as bad as last year. (at least right now. We'll see what my muscles say tomorrow!) Especially b/c last year we hurriedly buried a huge plank of wood underneath one pile of soil. Whoops! Had to shovel up the whole pile to slide the board out from underneath.

The compost pile, unfortnately, doesn't seem done. I was only able to get out a sprinkle. But, I worked in lots of cottonseed meal, lime and rock phosphate so hopefully that will help. I'm going to try to find some compost tea at the local nursery so I can put that in too.









And now we are on our way to Ikea to get a shelf (Gorm) for our growlight setup. Got full spectrum florescent lights, chain and hooks last night so all we need now is the shelf to hook it to. Hoping to get that done tonight.

First Week of March Garden Update

I planted peas!! It was 69 degrees here yesterday, and despite 8 inches of snow and freezing temperatures in the beginning of the week, my raised beds were totally workable. I tested it with a shovel, and was able to dig up all the over-wintered carrots remaining from last spring. So, I set to work and cleaned up all 4 of the existing beds. First I removed the remains of the kale, dried branches, etc., then weeded & raked. I also extended the strawberry bed into twice its size. Then spread about a cup of rock phospate and another of cottonseed meal on the beds, lightly tilled it in with a garden claw and watered. Finally, I planted two types of peas.

I also started 6 types of lettuce inside last week. I soaked them first, and to my surprise I got 100% germination! So I have 25 individual seedlings about 1 inch tall now, and I put all the leftovers in one big tray to use as cut and come again variety. I have a little florescent light on them but today I'm going over to the hardware store to get a bigger light and we are going to build a table-top growlight system.

Finally, I started some flowers and herbs. I soaked johny jump ups and pansies using the soaking method, but they are just starting to germinate now so they aren't planted yet. I also winter-sowed some lavender, pansies, and johnny jump ups in recycled containers outside. Who knew it would get warm so fast! My partner also got me these neat looking soda-type-can planters from a computer show he went to last week. Inside are violas and lavender, plus soil & fertilizer already in there. So you just had to pop the can open and water it. Neither of these have sprouted yet either, so I guess we'll see what happens.

Here is the finished indoor setup on March 8th:



Update: This all of the lettuce, two days after the above (3/10), when I added a second florescent light: