Prepping The Army

May 9th is the day.  The day we finally can put all our tomatoes, pepper, and eggplant seedlings in the ground.  The past week or so has been really busy, carrying all the plants up from the basement and outside.  With well over 200 seedlings, we were worried at first about how to keep them protected initially from the sun, however we forgot about our deck canopy that is up year round. Naturally, the plants took over the table (and we added two additional tables), as well as about 1/3 of the deck floor and all was well.  Our babies wouldn't get sunburn, and we would not be able to eat outside until they are safe and sound in the garden.  A small sacrifice for the greater good.

Currently, we have about 50 of our largest tomatoes out on the deck in the sun full-time.  They are the first batch we brought up about three weeks ago and are fully acclimated to the sun.  The only problem we have with them now is they are growing at an alarming rate.  Some are nearly two feet tall already!  Today I started the long and tedious process of bringing out batches of the other tomatoes and peppers to adjust to the sun.  It was 85 F and sunny today, so it was no easy task.  Fill bins with plants, carry them into the sun, time each batch only an hour or so to prevent sunburn, then carry them back under the tent and water.  Repeat!  Good times.  More like it's a good thing I love plants :)

Now there are random boxes of tomatoes all over the deck.  Keeps things interesting...

Since my last post, I've planted a bunch of new things, and have watched many of the seeds sprout I planted weeks ago.  Let's see, I seeded all my herb boxes (this year I'm growing sage, flat-leaf parsley, curly parsley, basil, purple basil, cumin, dill, oregano, thyme, and cilantro) as well as planted the few herbs my dad and I started indoors late march.  I wanted to have some early herbs to tide me over until all my other herbs sprout!  I absolutely love cooking with fresh herbs and therefore have to refrain from killing my plants by cutting them all in one day!  Like how I use about a head of garlic when cooking greens, I use large handful of herbs to season things.  Yet another reason it's good I like gardening!

This is just a teaser herb box.  (My real herb boxes are 3-5 feet each.  Go big or go home!)  Actually, I call this my "lazy" herb box.  It is on our top deck, between two flower boxes, and I'm going to use this when it's raining, super hot, or I'm just too lazy to walk ALL the way down the two steps to the lower deck to get some herbs.

Baby sage plant

Baby cilantro plant...that my dad is a maniac and staked and tied up.  I think he's been spending too much time with the tomato plants :)

My basil box <3

Here are my crazy purple chives, that I loveeee.  They come back every year by themselves (score!), and grow like weeds.  I use them every day, but it barley looks like I've made a dent. 

I planted one pot of each type of squash and zucchini I have, just because.  It's so hard to wait to plant things!  However, there is good reason you don't have to start squash or any vine plant indoors for that matter.  They grow at an alarming rate!  I planted these guys...oh, two weeks ago or so?  Time to get them in the dirt.

Here are my eggplants.  This is my first year growing eggplant from seed, as we have had trouble in the past with these guys.  They are very finicky to grow, and two years ago we had horrible mites that just wouldn't go away.  I'm hoping this year we're in the clear from those pests, and I just had to grow them from seed.  I'm growing two types: black beauty (classic, large black eggplants) and shooting star variety (smaller, purple and white striped eggplants).

Here are our beet, spinach, onion, and scallion patches. Most of the beets are small, you can just see three large ones on the ends.  I planted those indoors, just to have a taste of what's to come.  The rest of my beets and spinach are all very small.  Our onions and scallions came back from last year, we simple moved them to a new place and added seeds to both.  Scallion are another thing I adore to cook with!

This is our lettuce patch, obviously.  Can't you tell there is romane lettuce growing?!

I lined the sides of the garden with beans; sugar snap peas, green beans, yellow beans, and purple beans, while the back of the garden is lined with massive sunflowers.  Beans are super cool to watch growing because they are a large seed (think of the inside of a green bean) and also quite fast growing.  In no time these guys will be full of fruit!

Anddd....the cabbage patch, with both green and purple cabbage.  Last year we harvested baseball-sized cabbages, so this year I planted them slightly closer together.  I don't think they like growing in clay :) However, they were still delicious, you just had to use 3 whole cabbages to make anything.

Ah, my beloved kale patch.  I'm pretty sure I will always mention my kale patch, as it's my favorite (shhhh don't tell the other plants!).  The first kale pictured is old-growth kale from last year that came back.  Kale has a two year cycle, flowering it's second year.  I decided to save some of my older kale and let them flower so I can try to collect the seeds and grow them next year.

This is the chard patch. I'm growing the rainbow and bright lights varieties.  Nothing against regular chard, it's just not as pretty.  I actually have never been a big fan of swiss chard until last year, when I grew a lot of it.  I figured I had to eat it because I had so much, and it's really grown on me. Now it's one of my staple greens.  I use it for everything from sautéing to wraps for sandwiches (yes, a big 'ol chard leaf makes a wonderful alternative to bread!).  And yes, I know I have to weed.  We really need to newspaper and straw around the plants soon so stop these pesky weeds from sprouting up everywhere.

Yet to be planted: the butternut squash patch.  If you couldn't tell, butternut squash is my favorite squash of all time.  I seriously eat about a squash a day in the fall, so I decided to make this patch solely butternut squash instead of pumpkins.  I have 200 lb pumpkins, blue pumpkins, and sugar pie pumpkins growing in the front.  Along with beans and more sunflowers...I really should do a whole post about the front lawn garden!  Back to squash.  98% of this will be butternut.  I might throw one or two plants of spaghetti squash in, just for fun.  I always want to love spaghetti squash but never really got into it.  This might be the year!  I'm going to try my best, and hopefully show my delicious creation off on my food blog, Margaret's Dish.

I leave you today with our budding pepper plants.  They are confused: they need to grow up before growing fruit!  Guess we did a good job raising them the past few months :)

As Saturday draws near, we are as busy as ever hardening the seedlings, laying out the rows, and collecting the tools needed to plant.  I have a friend coming to help, but besides that it's just my dad and I, working away in the garden and planting over 200 seedlings.  I'm excited as well as dreading this green day, but all I need to do is think about what's to come to know that the labor is worth it.  I love my plants, my garden, and most of learning more each year about how to become a better gardener.  So for now, keep watering and sunscreening your plants, and maybe join me in digging up the dirt this weekend and planting dinner.  Look for a post next week about how my planting goes!

~Margaret

Springing Up Veggies

Hello friends!  I can't believe it's almost May...which means it's almost time for the big planting again. Nothing like a weekend of non stop planting.  My kind of marathon :)  Anyways, we're not quite there yet.  Actually, there is a frost warning here the next two nights so my dad and I are going to be in full action later this afternoon bringing flower pots in and tarping some of the seeds already planted in the ground that are not frost hardy.  We started hardening our tomatoes and a few other veggies about a week ago, so those were the first to come in.  Our sunroom is now another plant room.  Story of our lives.  They have taken over the basement, now they are creeping into the rest of the house.  But hey, they are our little friends.

What is plant hardening and why is it necessary?  When you start seeds indoors, those plants grow accustomed to the lighting they are under.  Even if you get high-powered heat lights, nothing comes close to the power of the sun or the other elements for that matter.  If you don't gently break your seedlings into the outdoors before planting them they may break from the wind or shrivel up under the power of the sun.  Basically, plants can get sunburn!  In my last post I talked about how I lost a bunch of little kale seedlings because I took them directly from our grow room to planting outside.  They shriveled up within a day!  Don't make that mistake.

Let's move on to other gardening news.  Basically, it is springing up veggies over here.  We have kale, chard, spinach, onions, and collards sprouting currently.  I just put sunflowers, beans, and my first batch of squash in the ground yesterday so in another week or so there should be more little sprouts! My chives are out of control.  I swear I blink my eye and they have grown an inch.  I've been enjoying cooking with them and adding them raw to salads, however it doesn't look like I've made a dent in them.  Love it!

Here are some of the flower boxes I planted last week.  Let's see...there are snapdragons, morning glories, dehlias, cosomos, wildflowers, forget-me-nots, petunias, and purple and yellow beans.  I had the genius idea this year to plant the colored beans and morning glories on the edge of the boxes so they will drape over the edge and grown up the side of the deck.  That should be pretty cool.  

Of course the entire time we are gardening, these girls are watching us.  The suburban hen gang. Gotta love fresh eggs (and quality chicken poop fertilizer for the garden:).  

Our drainage system we dug for the main garden has been working great.  No more epic floods...yet. My squash patch, on the other hand, has been sitting under water for days.  We neglected to trench this for awhile, and the other day I decided it was necessary.  Our high-tech drainage system involves a hand-dug trench that we took under the fence and connected it to the main ditch in the big garden using a hoe and a few shovels. Crazy complicated, right?!  Look, you don't need to pay a ton of money or use top of the line materials to solve problems.  A little common sense and usually a shovel will do.  Hopefully this patch dries out over the next two weeks so I can get my squash in the ground.

From left to right:

1.  Super tripod for a sprinkler.  This year I refuesed to spend hours watering by hand.  After we extended the garden by over double last year, it was getting a bit ridiciulus to hand water everything. With this high sprinkler stand, we can area water in two or three shifts.  Do you know how many hours of my day I'm going to get back with this thing?! At first I called my dad a nerd for getting a sprinkler stand, however now I'm thinking he's a genius.

2.  Garden lining of beans (sugarsnap, purple string beans, and yellow string beans) and sunflowers (mammoth and pikes peak variety).  I'm pretty excited about this.  Instead of dropping fences in the garden to grow our beans, we decided to let them grown up the 4 ft fence lining the garden and we are going to drop in 7 ft bamboo poles every so often for them to grow up.  (I have a pretty good story about how we got the bamboo, but I'll save that for later).  This will save room in the garden while adding to the ascetics.  Win-win!  I planted a row of enormous sunflowers along the back, guardians of the garden.

3.  BABY SWISS CHARD!  Love me some greens.

MORE GREENS! This time in the form of kale.  I love my kale patch so, so much.  Eat more kale! Also, I believe there is a restraunt opening up in NYC called FuckKale.  Pardon my language, but that's the name.  I dig it, and am totally going to have to eat there!

Quick glance at our onion, scallion, spinach, and beet patch because I didn't want to slop in the garden and get my shoes all muddy.  My gardening boots currently look like a giant clump of dirt.  I don't want my regular shoes to met the same fate.

Annddd here we have our garden menace.  Pickles is our plant-eating, flower-box laying, the-garden-is-my-litterbox, cat who is always getting into trouble.  Sometimes I feel like we are doing more to try and keep her out of the garden than the deer and squirrels.

Last but not least, I wanted to share my obsession with seeds.  Seriously, I'm like a kid in a candy store when I walk into the seed section of Home Depot.  The seeds have been buy one get one free for the past week or so, which is basically like giving an addict drugs and saying don't use them. Obviously I have bought, oh, probably 20 packets or so.  As if we needed MORE things to plant. But I needed the red and gold sunflowers.  And romane lettuce (the green leaf and butterbush isn't enough).  And how could I pass up on growing a 200 lb pumpkin!?  I'm excited and terrified at the same time.  However, I know bigger is always better, so bring it super-sized pumpkin!

That's all the news from here, hope you're enjoying your Spring and starting your garden!

~Margaret

Digging Up The Dirt

This past weekend was a gardening marathon.  Saturday and Sunday my dad and I were out digging up the dirt and getting early plants in the ground.  First off, we didn't dig up the entire garden by hand because that would be crazy!  Sheer death.  Instead we used our trusty rototiller.  Thank god for modern technology.

While the rototiller is much easier, it is no walk in the park.  There is still serious energy involved in steering it, especially when your garden is mostly clay and saturated to the brim with water.  As in sinking into mud and having difficulty getting your food out saturated.  The sloshing and suction noises were very unnatural (and downright disturbing!) to have in a garden.  Alas, we are working with what we got.  And as it is long past time for me to plant my dark greens, we slaved away in the garden to get it ready for planting.

I think the worst part of this early prep was trenching the entire garden.  As I mentioned before, our backyard elevation is beneath the surrounding properties so we get a steady flow and pooling of water whenever it rains.  Which happens a lot in the Spring.  After some bad flooding last year, we decided to dig a ditch around the entire garden and split it in the middle, basically creating raised garden beds and protecting our veggies from unwanted water.  Mucking around in the wet clay, armed with nothing but shovels, we slowly heaved the heavy dirt to allow water to properly drain. I took a giant brownie break after we finished :)

Here's a shot of our chives.  They are growing strong!  I recently used some to top my mashed cauliflower.  First time eating something from the garden in 2015 woot woot!  Anyway, we had to put a metal cage over them because my fat cat likes to lay on top of them.  She also has been trying to use the herb boxes as a litter box.  Not cool.

We planted onion slips this year just to see what happens.  Considering they are in straight up clay, we don't have high hopes, but it's a fun experiment!

This little guy is from last year!  We planted onions on a whim last year and then forgot about them so they stayed in the garden all winter.  Surprisingly they were growing this Spring, so we transplanted them so they are with the rest of our onions and scallions.

Here's a shot of our onion, scallion, beet, and spinach patch.  Again, we aren't expecting much out of the beets because our soil is so hard, however I happen to LOVE beet greens so I'm fine just eating the tops :)  I tried growing spinach two years ago and all that happened was it bolted and grew flowers - not leaves.  As leaves are the point of growing spinach, I was discouraged and didn't grow it last year.  I have since researched and learned that spinach really hates the heat (I had planted it mid-may last time), so I am hoping that by planting it early Spring, I can harvest it before the heat of summer hits.

Ahh - my kale, collard, and chard patches.  Arguably the best part of the garden!  I love my dark leafy greens.  I super extended all these patches this year and have high hopes for all these veggies.  Just a quick tip; kale and collards like to be spaced out with a large diameter between each one so I always find it best to plant them in individual circles while swiss chard doesn't grow quite as big to you can run giant strips of it, leaving space between each strip but not as much room between each plant.

Alright, now for an important thing to remember when planting your garden: if you grew your own seedlings, make sure you let them acclimate to the sun before planting them!!  That means leaving them outside for a few hours a day a week or two before permiantly putting them in the ground.  I was lazy with my kale seedlings, as you can see by the white (and very dead) kale plant on the far left.  Poor little guys fried in the sun!  The middle kale plant was one that came back from last year, so it's doing great, as is the hybrid on the far right.  My aunt sent me three types of kale that I had never heard of, one autumn hybrid, one snowdrop hybrid, and one mistletoe hybrid.  Somehow they are doing great despite me not letting them adjust to the sun.  I'm not complaining.  Overall, I only lost 10 or so plants which when  you have a patch of around 100 is not really a big deal.  Actually I seeded most of my kale so I will simply pull some of the sprouts that I would usually get rid of to leave only one plant per circle and transplant them to the ones that need it.  Easy peasy.

Cabbage anyone?  This year I planted my cabbages much closer together than last year because despite cabbage being a large plant, mine didn't grow near the size I thought they would.  I really think the hard clay had something to do with the baseball sized heads I got last year, however they tasted fine.  To adjust this year I'm going to grow more in the same amount of space.  Hopefully I wind up with a decent amount of cabbage when all is added up.

I leave you today with a very random box of onions.  Why?  I don't actually know, ask my dad.  This is his doing.  I find it hilarious and love how he planted them in a Starbucks box.  Because I often think of onions and coffee?  Anyway, my dad ordered way to many onion slips to plant them all in the garden so I guess he got creative with finding places to put them.  Like an empty Starbucks pod box on the table of our deck :)  I love this stuff.

Later this week we will be planting our flower boxes, and possibly planting a few squash plants and sunflowers.  It all depends on the weather, but so far the extended forecast looks promising and I'm itching to get more in the ground!

Until next time, happy digging in the dirt.

~Margaret